Tyrone Willingham Team Quotations

My first focus was to have a guy I felt very comfortable with as our leader of our football team. I've always said I don't care if he throws end over end or can run around mountains, as long as he can lead our football team to victories.

He works hard every day, he studies and prepares himself as well as any of our starters. There is no question he has a strong desire to be a part of what's going on. But he is a team player and he places that above self. And that, to me, is very special. That's what really makes the core of a good football team when you have guys who put team before self.

That is something that every Pac-10 team should start with, whether you are the last-place team or the first-place team. That's why you are in the conference ù to get to that pinnacle. We'd like to be one of those teams, so this is an important game. And by its place on the schedule, if you can win it, then you are sitting there alone for a little while.

Any time that you can have that me-against-the-world attitude and sometimes when you travel that's the attitude that you develop, because you're on the plane and it's just you and your teammates, you walk into the stadium, and there's not a lot of help around what you're creating really is a focus. And any time you can get your team really to focus on that game your chances go up that things go well for you. That's whether home or away, but usually at home there are more distractions.

It's not just this loss. This football team has suffered a lot of losses. At some point, we've got to break that trend. It's not just about losing games. It's about the mindset that accompanies that. We've got to break it.

This is a very, very good football team. That is a football team that understands how to win. When they have an opportunity, they know how to take advantage of it.

Years ago, when I was (at Stanford), you had maybe one or two teams -- at one time I was part of one of those teams -- you didn't have to worry about, ... Now it's not that way in the conference. A lot of the teams that were once at the bottom kind of have their games together and are making their way to the top.