Gunny Hartman said:

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deemus said:

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Gunny Hartman said:

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deemus said:

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trey3216 said:

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SATXBear said:

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Gunny Hartman said:

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Steely Dan said:

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Whiskey or bourbon?

GMC or Chevy?

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Well GMC is just a Chevy with frills and a commensurately higher price tag. Now if we were to have the Chevy versus Ford discussion well then everybody knows that Chevy would destroy that.

The term whiskey is so wide open anymore it's damn near impossible to define unless you're referring to a sour mash from Tennessee. Same issue with corn mash bourbon from Kentucky. But I'm personally not convinced that some of the best "whiskey" around doesn't come from a little distillery in Waco Texas.

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A friend of mine who knows Whiskey says Waco's brew is competing with Irish whiskeys and is getting international awards now.

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They were about 3-4 years ago, and they were competing with Single malt scotch

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I bought a bottle of Baby Blue. Its a little different, not a huge fan, but I would never compare it to single malt scotch. I'll take Glenlivit 18 for the win.

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He wasn't referring to Baby Blue. He was referring to the Balcones 1 Texas single malt. That's the one that they took over to London that kicked every scotch's ass.

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I dont think I even saw that one on the shelf. I'll have to try that one.

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It's luxurious. Very very luxurious.

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Quote:

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You might not believe, but there was a time when I wore No. 98. I was a little bit bigger in this area, a little bit less in some other areas. I was in a little bit better shape back then, but I'm so blessed to be here. It's been a crazy couple days.
The hardest part was I got a phone call yesterday from my wife, and I'm sitting in the office, I'm trying to start recruiting, trying to start watching these fantastic football players. I'm trying to say goodbye to Temple, and she emphatically told me that we had to go downtown and go clothes shopping. I tried on about 12 green blazers and five green ties because I plan on wearing green for a while. So it's been a wonderful time, so thank you.
On behalf of my wife Julie, my son Bryant, my mother Gloria, my father Denny, my two little girls Vivie and Leona who are banished back to the hotel because they couldn't handle this, we are truly honored to stand here with you and for me to stand here as the head coach at Baylor. I promise to take care of this program that belongs to so many of you, and I'm so grateful that you guys would entrust me with this tremendous team and tremendous group of young men.
I want to thank Dr. Garland for his leadership. I want to thank Mack Rhoades, who was first-class and his team in every way in this process. He's one of the major reasons why I chose to come here. I believe in him. I believe in the men that I met, and I believe in the athletic and leadership at Baylor. There's been a tremendous amount of outpouring of support from Baylor Nation, people that I don't even know, from coaches from other teams, from people in the community, and I'm so grateful, you've made Julie and I feel just so, so welcome. From the athletic department, just to think that today I'm sitting on the phone talking to Grant Taft, one of my idols, to think that next week I'm going to sit down tomorrow or the day after and have a chance to sit down and visit with him, that he blessed me as the head coach is just such an honor for me.
I want to thank Jim Grobe, who took a few minutes to spend some time with me as we were going through this process. What a tremendous man. One of the gentlemen coaches, the guys that we learn from, and I'm so, so grateful for him.
I'm grateful for a chance to meet these young men, to have a chance to coach them, some of whom will graduate and be gone. But they've been through this year. The character that they've showed says a lot about who they are. I just had a chance to meet them. They're pretty cool guys. I don't know what they think about me yet. We'll work on that as time goes on.
I want to thank Coach Briles and his staff for bringing these young men to Baylor. And if you'd allow me, I'd like to thank the people of Philadelphia and the people at Temple. I spent 10 years of my life. I cheated for a small time and went to the NFL and came back, but I spent 10 years of my life there as an assistant and as the head coach. All of the leadership, all the people in the athletic department, the people on campus, the students, the fans, they were such a wonderful part of our lives. All the high school coaches in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and New Jersey who supported us, and finally my players. They'll be my players forever. I love them.
It was one of the hardest things I did yesterday to say goodbye, but I knew that our job was done there, our time was over. Those kids went from 2-10 to 6-6 to the winningest two-year stretch at Temple, and I say that because I know they're watching and they know how proud I am of them. They won a championship on Saturday, but they were, as Mack says, they were champions way before that. They're champions for life, and I look forward to watching them as I know they'll be watching us.
It's always hard when you say -- I know people are saying why Matt Rhule, and people are saying to me, hey, Matt, why Baylor. I had some opportunities. We sat there, my wife and I in a restaurant in New York City, one phone in one hand, one phone in the other. We said, where do we go, what do we do, where are we being called. Where does God want us to be? And we looked at each other over a plate of ponzu shrimp, and figured out right then in our hearts we were called to come to Baylor, so why.
So I don't really know how to say it other than to kind of tell you why I want to be here. I woke up this morning, and we're getting ready to try to load three kids and get on a plane and fly to Waco, and I had like these memories of a time in my life. I was about four years old, and my parents were -- growing up in Pennsylvania, we were living in Kansas City where my dad went to seminary, and I had this memory of us kind of packing the car, and then my next memory is like being in the back of the car like literally all the way in the back, that was before like you had to wear a seatbelt at the time and things weren't quite as safe in those days, and I remember like seeing the Empire State Building. I remember seeing the bridge. I remember seeing the city.
And I remember that night, like sleeping in a two-bedroom apartment in New York City, a beautiful place but not the nicest, not the glamorous, not the highrise, where the person comes up to the door and says, come on in. I'm talking about the place where you buzz yourself in. And I remember sitting there saying, where are we.
But see, my dad was a football coach, and he was a minister. He's a man who spent his life serving others on the football field, in the church, in the youth center that he ran in Times Square in one of the tough neighborhoods in New York City. And he showed me at an early age that we serve God in whatever way we're called to do it, and it doesn't matter where you go. It doesn't matter if you're in Kansas City and when you're called to go to New York City, you go to New York City. And whether my dad or my mom, who has spent her whole life working with women in crisis, doesn't matter if they're in Rwanda, which they go to every year to work at an orphanage, doesn't matter if they're in Philadelphia this year with my team. They told me that serving others and excellence and greatness knows no borders. So when we were called to come here, we came.
Coaching takes you all over the place, and I almost had to write all these things down. Julie and I met at Penn State where I was blessed to play for Coach Paterno, and from Penn State we went to Reading, Albright College. We went to University of Buffalo. There was a lot of snow there. We went to Los Angeles, there's not very much snow there. We went to the hills of western North Carolina. She worked in Atlanta. We went to Philly. We went to the NFL, and then we came back to Philly. See, we've gone wherever we've been called to go, and everywhere we've gone, it's been such a blessing to us in our lives, and I learned that from my parents.
So when the call came to come here, we came. And we came because we have one purpose. I'm here very simply this: To develop and work with these young people. I'm here to coach football, and I'm here to be the best partner that I can for Baylor.
I also came because if you're a high school coach, you want to be around the best. If you're a college coach, you want to be around the best. And I wanted to come to a state, the great state of Texas, where high school football is better than anywhere else in the country. I wanted to come be around the best high school coaches in the country.
See, what people don't understand is that high school coaches all across the country, everywhere, no one does more for young people now than high school coaches. They develop them. They love them. They coach them. They invest their time in them. They pick them up when they're down. They help them when they need help. They're there for them every step of the way, win, lose or draw.
I know that because my dad is a high school football coach. I know that because my uncle is in the Pennsylvania High School Coaches' Hall of Fame. I know that because my cousin is a high school football coach. I saw as I grew up that's what I want to be. I want to work with kids, and I want to win.
No one does that better than the high school coaches here in Texas. They care for their players, and they love football.
So as I stand here, I want the coaches and the players that we're going to go out and recruit, the coaches that we're going to visit with to know that we're all about the same thing. If you come to Baylor and you come to play for me, that you're going to get loved and you're going to get developed each and every day because that's hard. That's not easy. Coaches say that but they don't always want to do that. But that's all that we did at Temple. That's all we're going to do at Baylor because that's our purpose, to spend all of our time developing our players.
So now what's next? What's next? What do we have in store? What's our plan?
We're just going to build. I mean, in uncertain times when there's transition, I think you just take your two hands and you just start to build. Each and every year you build a new team. No matter what you did the year before, you start over from scratch and you build. You know it's going to be hard. You know it's not going to be easy. You know it takes time. You know it takes energy. You know there's going to be adversity along the way, but you just keep trying to build, and we're going to try to build in three ways.
Number one, we're going to try to build great men. I'm not a perfect man. I'm just trying to be. I don't know that I'm a great man, but I'm trying to be. And that's what we want for the young people that we're around. We want to lead the way, but we want to develop them. We want to develop them as people. We want to develop their character. We want to help them in their spiritual walk. We want them to be accountable, to have integrity, to be honest, to be someone who can say things that you don't want to say. I just met with the team, I said, hey, tell me what you got to say.
We want to develop them as students. We want them to be proud of the education that they get. We want them to leave feeling like you know what, I came here better than when I left; I can get the job that I want. I had the education that I want. I can have the future that I want.
And then we want to develop them as players. I want them to play pro football. I want them to be the best of the best. We're going to develop them in those three ways. We're going to build men. We're going to build a team.
I want to win. These guys want to win. I want to win. And we're going to do that by building a team. We're going to be the toughest, hardest working, most competitive team in the country because that stands against anything else. Doesn't matter who you're playing, doesn't matter when you're playing, doesn't matter the weather. It doesn't matter what happened. Real teams win when someone is hurt. Real teams win when they're behind. Real teams win on the road. So we're going to build a team that wins, that's tough, that works hard and that's competitive.
We're going to bring the No. 3 ranked defense in the country here. We're going to play great defense, and we're going to have a dynamic offense. Some of the guys started getting a little nervous when I walked in because they saw the Navy game and saw us run it like 72 times. I learned very quickly from Coach Coughlin that you take your great players and you let them be great. So we're going to have a tremendous defense. We're going to have a dynamic offense, and we're going to be a team that doesn't beat itself.
And then finally, at the end of the day, and it's been really, really great for me to talk to some of the Baylor players that are in the NFL who are just out and see how proud they are of those guys and how excited they are for the future. We want to be a team that makes everybody proud, whether you're sitting in the stands, whether you're watching the game, whether you're checking the score on your phone, whether you played here. When you watch us play, I want you to say to yourself, that's my team. They play the way I want them to play. Every game doesn't go your way. But win, lose or draw, I want us all to be proud of the way that our team plays the game.
We want to build great men. We want to build a great team. And then finally, we want to build a great program. See, teams come and go, but great programs are marked by the longevity. They're marked by how many great teams they put back to back.
And there's about six things we want from this program. Number one, we want to win championships. We want to win the Big 12 Championship. We want to win the National Championship. I didn't come here for anything else. We want to win at the highest level because we should.
(Applause.)
But at the same time, with a great program, we want to educate and graduate our players. I take a minute to distinguish between those because you don't come to college just to get a piece of paper. That's part of it. You come to college to get an education. You come to college to learn how to learn. You come to college to study what you want to study. You want to leave here not just saying I did it, but hey, I made the most out of it. I can get the job that I want. I was a part of the campus community. I learned how to learn, and I loved my time. I'm better for having come here. We want to educate and graduate players. We want to represent and respect Baylor. We want to walk down the street. We want everyone to walk down the street in their Baylor gear and just feel so proud about our football team. We want to be a part, not just of the football community but the overall community. We want everyone to be so proud, as you already are, of these young men and everything that they go through to accomplish all the things I'm talking about. We want to impact the community, and Baylor is already known for its commitment to service.
But in every way, we're going to try to make sure that these guys understand that giving is the ultimate form of living, and I can see already that they understand it now. We want to give back to the community. We want to affect the lives of little kids. You know what, you never know when you meet a little kid what he's been through, what he's going through, and sometimes just seeing one of their heroes and their hero actually spending some time with them, man, that can change a kid's life, and when you change a kid's life, you change the world, and that's what these guys and I am proud to be able to do.
Two more now, and I'm a little long-winded. I said my dad was a preacher, so I come by -- my dad is a preacher, my mom is Italian, so I come by it naturally. Sorry, mom.
We want to develop pros. We want our guys to have a chance to go play pro football. And if God didn't bless them with the ability to go play pro football, I want them to be pros in whatever else they choose in their life. See, being a pro isn't about being the fastest. It isn't about just where you get drafted. It's about how long you play. It's about how the team wants you. Are you a guy that maximizes your ability? If you were supposed to be in the NFL for five years, do you stay for eight? Do you know how to take notes? Do you have attention to detail? Can you look a coach in the eye? Do you have to be on your phone while you talk to the coach or can you hold a conversation with him? That is how you maximize your pro career, that is how you maximize your career. That is what we want to get done.
I'm proud of our kids at Temple. We'll have probably two kids go in the first two rounds. Neither one of them had an offer from anyone else. But they spent four years developing themselves every day by competing, by trying to be the best that they could be.
And the last thing is we want to have fun while we do this. A lot of this isn't very fun. A lot of this is -- as I told them, we're going to compete every day. We're going to go out there, we're going to work harder than anybody else in the country. We're going to walk into games we've put more into it than the people we play against. But when you have a chance, you have to have fun.
While winning is fun, you know what's fun? Grinding with your brothers, spending time with the guy next to you in something that's hard, fighting for something that everybody believes in. We want to have fun. Coaches aren't going to just be coaches. We're going to be partners. I told those guys already, my jump shot is ready, my 2K game is ready, my ping-pong game is beyond ready. We're going to have fun and compete in everything that we do.
When all that's done, when you have a program that does all that, you can look at your team, and they're going to win a lot of games and they're going to win championships, but when you see the team walking off the field playing the game as hard as they can possibly play it to the best of their ability, when you see them cross the stage, when you see them out in the community, you can say to yourself, I'm proud of those guys. Those guys are champions.
Sic 'em, Bears.

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