Takeaways: Wells reflects on first day of spring practice
Texas Tech football began its first day of spring practices Sunday afternoon. Following practice, head coach Matt Wells spoke with the media to reflect on the spring session starting.
Matt Wells
- Wells started off saying the energy level was high today. “These guys came out ready to practice. They were enthused. I thought they moved around really good. Ton of stuff to work on ton of stuff, attention to detail, alignment, stance, putting the ball in the correct hand and ball security, those kinds of things.”
- Although it was only day one of spring practice, Wells said Alan Bowman threw the ball good. “For a brand new offense that’s only had a few weeks to meet, he had a decent handle.”
- Octavious Morgan is still out.
- On getting back to actually spending time with the players on the practice field, “There’s a lot of parts to a job, there’s a lot of parts to being a head coach and then the transition and recruiting to boosters, donors, speaking engagements, meetings, offseason workouts and then this is going, this is practice one, this is what we live for to get out here with our guys and the players and really see them for the first time and they’re still learning a lot of their names but you’re getting to coach them for the very first time.”
- For Wells, he said the biggest thing in these early practices is stance, effort and ball security among other things. “You don’t want to see repeat mistakes. That’s what you don’t want to see. You want to see correction and then improvement.”
- Wells said he prefers to have practices three days a week. “Right now, this spring, with all the new installation on both sides of the ball and in special teams, I like having a day in between practices to be able to watch the tape, install for the next day and try to have a little bit better preparation.”
- For this first week of practice, Wells is looking for whether his players can transition from the meeting room to practice and emphasized it is more so what can be done next practice as opposed to looking at an entire week.
- When asked what words of motivation he gave to his players to start practice, Wells said this, “If I have to inspire them to practice in spring ball we’ve got issues. I don’t think there’s going to be any motivation needed this first week. They’re eager to impress, we are eager to coach ‘em.”
- Regarding McLane Carter, Wells said he would like to see him back the last two weeks of spring practice as he had surgery for his ankle.
- Wells said Xavier Martin wanted to play quarterback, so the coaches moved him back to quarterback. “Took about five seconds. Every kid in the program, whichever they want to start at, we’ll start at and that may be not where they finish at but that’s certainly where we’ll let them start.”
- When asked how he was affected by Jovan Bouknight and Joe Lorig leaving the program, Wells said it does not affect him one bit as a head coach. “I hired Joel Filani in 24 hours, and I hired Mark Tommerdahl in three hours.”