Jim Tressel Quotes on Games (6 Quotes)

What we philosophically want to do is schedule games that are of great interest to our fans. Maybe the best pro of these games is it's something our players will remember for a lifetime. They'll cherish these memories.

We're anxious to get into Big Ten play. I think the Big Ten is going to be a very, very tough conference this year. As you look at everybody from side to side and throughout the conference, they've had some tough ball games, they've had some great wins. I just think it's going to be a very strong league, and we start out with an awfully strong one with the university of Iowa. They're a physical football team. They have dropped a game, but they didn't have their quarterback that day. They're just an outstanding team as they've shown over the years, and we have to be ready to compete.

A lot of the games I've watched over the years, the unnoticed things are that 3rd-and-7 play where there's bracket coverage and everyone was tied up, and that quarterback ran for a first down and changed the momentum of the game. So we don't discount the importance of that, but you have to do things in progression. I just think Troy needs to be a little bit better from his progression standpoint.

Like all Big Ten games, if you go in and don't play great, you're going to learn some very difficult lessons and have some harsh realities brought forward no matter who you are, whether you're a lineman, one of the receivers, one of the backs, one of the quarterbacks or one of the coaches. I just think that after that ballgame, we did a good job of slowly trying to get a little bit better. I don't know that it was anything instantaneous. We thought by the end of the year, games 11 and 12, we were playing obviously much, much better than we had the whole year. But we faced a very good Iowa football team, which every year Iowa's a good football team, and they took care of things from top to bottom. It was certainly a learning thing. Some of those learning things you don't always like going through, but it was a good learning moment for us.

Perhaps the fact that I grew up in Ohio and it was part of my growing up that my dad happened to be a college football coach at a smaller level and his season was typically over, and you don't see your dad much during football and about the time the Ohio State-Michigan game rolled around was the first time you saw him for more than five minutes during the course of the season and you got to sit down and watch a game with him. You can talk about that in all the households in Ohio State and Michigan. It's one of those special things that people enjoy together. Do I intimately understand how privileged we are to be a part of it Perhaps, but I think it's a little unfair to say that John or anyone else doesn't comprehend. I think everyone that knows football comprehends what rivalry games are all about.

I think legacies are shaped everyday, ... Shaped in your film preparation, shaped in how you take care of everything that is your responsibility, and then of course every practice, and then of course it's magnified in the games because the majority of the people, that's what they see in your life -- what you do on Saturday and what you do on television and so forth. I hope that his focus is on day-to-day preparation and his performance play-to-play, and we'll let those legacy discussions happen long after he's gone.