What did you notice as an outside observer of this program before officially taking over as head coach?
“Going back to somebody I just respect, and I’m so proud for him to be the new head coach at Louisiana Tech, but what I saw was a guy that inspired a football team,” McGuire said. “Everybody I talked to said when Sonny Cumbie became that guy, it automatically flipped the energy in the program.
“I named Sonny my OC after spending two weeks watching him interact with the players and it inspired me. I think that’s what you have to do. You have to come in and breathe life into a program, and I think that’s what he did. Seeing him do that fired me up. I saw a passionate team that really played hard for each other.
“I thought the Iowa State game was just incredible how hard they played. I knew the next game would be tough because we had already played Oklahoma State, and I knew how good they were on defense. This team never gave up though and defensively that was probably one of our better games of the entire year.
“We have a really good core group, and they want to be good. This is a unique situation, and we’re a team that has a lot to work with.”
You’ve had the opportunity to sit down and meet with all the current players on the roster. What did you learn from those meetings?
“Well, I knew a lot of them just from the standpoint of being in college the last three years,” McGuire said. “Myles Price, I had a great relationship with him, and Caleb Rogers, another great relationship.
“I tell every kid, ‘I’m not asking for a chance. I’m just asking for you to be open minded and let me show you who I am and what we’re going to do.’ If you do that, I think at the end of the day we’ll all be in a good spot, so that’s kind of been the message.
“The guys have been great. We’ve got a healthy team, we’ve got a good team, and I think they really care about each other. You can see that in the conversations, and I think we can do some special things in the coming years.”
What were you looking for and what did you see from watching the players in the Liberty Bowl and the bowl practices?
“Body language when things are going good and things are going bad,” McGuire noted. “The tempo of practice is really big to me. There are things I’ve done in practice as a head coach that I’ve changed.
“Being with coach Rhule and coach Aranda and watching practice I’ve seen changes I would make. There’s going to be some give and take there, but I always want to make sure that there’s a lot of energy in practice. How we decide to get to that moment will be a collective effort, and I want the players to have a say. One thing they’ll hear is ‘when we go, we go.’
“As much as you want to have fun, football is a very physical, grinding game, so there’re times to strain and grind, and that’s not the time to dance and all that stuff. It’s a time to get serious, and we’ve got the figure out that balance. There’s going to be some things they’re probably not used to, and there’s going to be some things that I’ll explain why we do it this way.
“Then there’s going to be some things that I’ll be able to modify and adjust for them, so we can come to a good balance but when we go, we go. When it’s time to work and put in the work, then we’ve got to be willing to do that. That will be the single-minded effort for what we have going on.”
How much thought have you given to the social media aspect of recruiting and the coordinated efforts that go into the presentation of it all?
“Well, you know Matt (Dowdy) and his team have done an incredible job,” McGuire noted. “We’re still going to hire a football specific graphics designer to shoot video and work social media. They had that but they don’t have that right now, so Matt and his team have done a great job.
“The content that went out on signing day and what’s been going out since I’ve got here, that’s the wave of what’s going on and everything is content driven through social media. Quick videos, the graphics they see every day and what the players are listening to and watching on their phones, you better keep up with it and be pumping it out.
“Making sure our brand is out there 24/7. I’m not even sure when I first got on Twitter, but we were pumping out content at Cedar Hill and did it as much as possible. It helps in recruiting, but it also helps with the current team.
“One thing, and I don’t know if it was being done before, but it’s being done now is saying happy birthday to our players. When we get our whole staff in here, they’ll get a happy birthday graphic too. People love that, hearing their name and seeing their name, so we’ve got to be ahead of the game and do that every chance we can to make future recruits and current teammates feel special.”
What is your philosophy on the transfer portal?
“This is just me; I know you can go around the nation and find people succeeding in different ways, but I want to build this team to where we are building it with high school football players,” McGuire said. “If we have to go outside of that it’s because we have a need.
“One thing we have to understand is, I know we all want to win right now, but if you really want to win and want to sustain winning, which is one of the harder things to do, then you have to build a culture. It’s harder to build a culture when your team is predominantly made up of one-year transfers or guys that are bouncing around for whatever reason, so we want to build with guys at the high school level.
“The grad transfers to me are totally different because they are grown men. They have finished their degree whether it’s been three or four years, so they have a totally different mindset for why they are coming to Texas Tech. Maybe they’ve come to play a different brand of football or a different level of football. For a grad transfer, I don’t care where they’re from because they are grown men.
“We had one grad transfer of the three but the other two are Texas guys. One went up North and wants to come back home to Texas. The other one it didn’t exactly work out where he was at, but they’re Texas guys, so they kind of understand the culture. Football in Texas is a little different, and I want guys that come from programs who understand that in Texas, football is a way of life. Getting those guys in here is important.
“If it’s a kid that’s not from Texas, we may look for guys we’ve had previous relationships with through recruiting or maybe a coach recruited a kid at a different place. Maybe he’s from somewhere else, but if he can come in and fit into our culture then those are guys that we want to be a part of this team.”
Outside of Rick Flair and the Von Erich’s... Did you have any other favorite wrestlers going up?
“You know I loved the energy of the Ultimate Warrior,” McGuire said. “He’s on the top of the rope just shaking it. I’ve used that Gif before.
“I’ll watch almost any documentary that comes out about wrestling. Growing up, all my granddads and even my great grandads, it was like a Friday night deal when I would stay with them. I would be with one of my grandparents and sit in there and watch it with them. We just grew up on it.”
