Tom Jurich Quotations

Rick has continued to exceed all of my expectations and we look forward to even further heights, particularly with our move into the Big East Conference. I hope we can add Rick for another nine years in 2010.

If we're not going to be on campus, we need to be on the river. That's the place that makes a statement to recruits. Why would you spend a quarter-billion dollars to hide a building?

If anything, our being here really validates how good the move to the Big East was for us. And I know there are better things ahead.

We looked at it very closely. I probably used more due diligence on this hire than anyone I've ever hired before.

I'm all for giving people a second chance, but not on our dime. I wanted to see him go through a year and see his character. So far, he's been much more than I anticipated. I'm very, very pleased with him so far.

I was always trying to share our story with Mike and the members of the Big East, telling them what our vision was and where I wanted us to go, ... That paid some big dividends later, because when the time came to pull the trigger, they already knew a lot about us.

I'm so delighted that Rick has agreed to remain our men's basketball coach for an additional three years. When he first became our coach, I felt that if he could come here and reconstruct our program in six years, it would be a major coup for this institution. Our entire university and community will benefit immensely from his pushing that initial commitment to nine years.

I think he's worked very hard at it. He's grown and matured as a coach dramatically.

We've said it from day one, that if this arena was going to cut into anything at the university then we weren't in favor of it. We reluctantly went downtown to be a team player and to be on the river to go in accordance with the task force and to be a full partner.

We spent many years in the same league with Tulane and Southern Miss and still consider them members of our family, ... Many of our fans visited New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast while we were competing against those schools and have been struck by the images of the devastation in those areas. I hope this can help.

is going to be a wonderful home for us. We couldn't be more pleased.

We were in no position to look at any conference, ... We had to try to be a good citizen within Conference USA. That was a very good fit for us at that point.

We want to win a national championship here, ... Seven years ago, it sounded ridiculous, but now I think it's a legitimate goal.

We wanted anybody down here to be able to come out and have a good time with us.

I think our fans are having fun. I don't want to take anything away from the Liberty Bowl because those people treated us great, but this is a great place. This is great for our fans.

I pretty much had an idea of how I was going to handle it by halftime.

Georgia is one of the benchmark programs in the country. We've made great strides in improving our schedule and adding a home-and-home series with a Georgia will only help improve the quality.

It's all out in front of us now. The sky is the limit.

That's possible. And to win a game like that one, or like this one, there's no telling where that can take you as a program. But it's a process. We want to keep building.

We're very hungry to be the best in the league, ... but I don't think they're going to throw us out if we're not.

We figured the true fans would find out about it.

It's a great opportunity for the program. The great thing about it is to be able to go up against a great program like Virginia Tech. When it comes to football, they are one of the schools I looked at in trying to model our program.