OPENING STATEMENT

COACH DYKES: Yeah, I just want to say, again, thank you to the media for being here and supporting this bowl game and the College Football Playoff. It's been a great week for us. The hospitality from the Fiesta Bowl has been outstanding. I want to thank Vrbo for their support of this bowl game. We couldn't do it without corporate sponsorship, so just want to thank them personally for what they've meant to this bowl game. It's great to be in Phoenix. It's obviously a destination city. It's a beautiful time of year to be here. Our players have had a great experience. The hotel situation has been outstanding. I think what makes this bowl game special, though, is the care and support that we receive from the Fiesta Bowl and the volunteers have just been incredible and have gone above and beyond taking care of our players and me personally. I just want to say thank you to the Fiesta Bowl. It's just been outstanding. From our perspective, from a TCU perspective, we're very excited to be here; to have a chance to compete against the winningest college football program in history, the Michigan Wolverines. Our guys are very excited about the challenge and we've had a great three weeks of preparation leading up to this game on Saturday. Our guys are well prepared. I believe that we have had really quality practices. We've been able to accomplish all the goals that we wanted to from a bowl preparation standpoint. It's always a great opportunity, especially first year in your program. We get 15 extra practices for some of our young players, and that has been critical to their development. We've had an opportunity to see some young guys really improve over the last three weeks. Our team, I think, is really playing our best football. We had an outstanding practice the day before yesterday, which was a Wednesday practice for us. Yesterday was a little bit lighter and shorter of a run-through. Today will be a walk-through for us, and then another run-through in preparation for the game on Saturday. Our goal is to get our team there as fast and fresh as we possibly can. At the same time, with a very physical mentality. So I think we've hopefully accomplished those goals, and look forward to getting to the game on Saturday.

Q. Coach, you just mentioned Michigan's history as the winningest college football program. How do you view this matchup, given your guys' history? You guys in the past, left out of the initial Big 12; had to go through multiple conferences to get to this point. I'm curious, what your appreciation is for TCU being on this stage against that program, given their history?

COACH DYKES: The great thing about our situation here is that I think, in a lot of ways, TCU -- obviously before I was there, really before any of these players were there -- it's always been a fight for credibility. You go back and look at the old days of the Southwest Conference, and TCU was kind of an also-ran for a number of years, really, for probably three decades. Just had a hard time kind of breaking through. Ended up in a couple of different conferences, and had to kind of battle and pull themselves up by the bootstraps and go to work. I think it took a lot of hard work and dedication from a lot of people -- from a fan base, from a donor support perspective, a lot of vision from an athletic director standpoint. Chris Del Conte had a vision of what he wanted TCU to look like. I think our athletic director Jeremiah Donati has done a great job of taking Chris' vision and taking it another level. I'm really blessed and fortunate. I believe that between Chancellor [Victor] Boschini and Jeremiah, that we have the best support team in college football. I really do believe that. They both have a clear understanding of how important intercollegiate athletics is, and specifically college football, to the university and to the student experience. So we've got great leadership. We've got tremendous support from our alumni and donors. We have a talent-rich area to recruit to. It hasn't been easy. It's been a process to get to this point. We think that every time we get on a big stage like this, this is an opportunity for us to create a bigger brand and create more credibility, which is always important. That's the thing that you have to have, and you have to establish, is credibility. When you're playing against, as I said earlier, the winningest program in college football history, then that gives you credibility if you go out and beat them. That's certainly important to our program as we move forward and continue to take the next steps. We want to be a team that hopefully in the future isn't picked seventh in our conference. That's the goal is to have preseason respect. We know that's earned, certainly not given. We don't want it to be given. But it all begins there, where we go out and play well and people respect us. And we do it consistently and the program continues to become more and more relevant. And that's our goal. We hope to some day look up and somebody says, hey, look, in the last decade, TCU is the winningest program in college football or in the top five. That's kind of the goal for us moving forward. We certainly think that's something we can accomplish.

Q. Can you speak to the health of your team having this time off, especially for Quentin Johnston and Johnny Hodges? And then your defense. 3-3-5 going up against Michigan and that matchup, please.

COACH DYKES: We played 11 straight weeks. That was a challenge for us. We had an open date after Week 2 leading into the SMU game, and then played all the way through conference play without an open date. So it certainly wasn't ideal scheduling. In the Big 12, we don't have the good fortune to play an out-of-conference game like the SEC does in Week 10 or Week 11. We're not going to catch the Citadel in Week 10. We caught Texas. So that's just kind of the way our league is designed. So you've got to be on your best, week in and week out. And it takes a toll on your team. It really does. It's difficult to get through that gauntlet of nine consecutive conference games against quality opponents. And we were beat up. Look, we went into the Baylor game coming off that Texas win. We go play Baylor in Waco and we had had 15-plus guys that had the flu that were sick that week. We knew going in that was going to be a tester for us. That was going to be a very difficult ball game to win, especially given the history of TCU-Baylor. We knew they were going to catch an exciting team and we did, and we were fortunate to win the game. You have to win those kinds of games to be in the position we're in right now. So we've had a chance to heal up. Specifically, Quentin [Johnston] had probably played most of the season, half the season banged up. He's had a chance to get healthy. I think it's the first time he's been 100% probably since mid-season. So we're excited about that to see what that looks like. I think he'll play well Saturday. He's excited and looking forward to the challenge. Johnny [Hodges] had a little bit of a hamstring injury, and I think he's starting to come around as well. So I anticipate both of these guys playing; being close to full speed for sure. The second part of the question was defense, the 3-3-5. Look, it's interesting. If you take a look at the evolution of the 3-3-5, it really started out as a defense designed to stop spread teams. Well, Michigan is not really a spread team, okay? And so we're going to see a little bit different look from these guys. I think when you look at the 3-3-5, the idea was to get more speed on the field, get more defensive backs on the field. Really started out as a third-down defense, third and long. People started to run it. All of a sudden, it kind of started to be the en vogue thing we started to see on third and long. Well, then, some teams started to run it every down. And I can remember as a play caller going, okay, this is going to be a lot of fun playing against this defense. We're going to get in 12 personnel. We're going to run the ball. And all of a sudden, it was a little bit more difficult maybe than I thought it was going to be. Because what happens is, you've got layers to that defense, and there's a lot of guys in the second and third level. There's eight players. There's a lot of different guys who can get involved in run fits. What happens now is you don't really know where they're coming from. In a traditional defense, where you know where everybody is, you have these linemen, they stay on tracks. Somebody shows up and they block him. They have a pretty good idea of who they're going to block, based on your alignment. I think in a 3-3-5, you've got a little bit more flexibility in where guys are going to come from, and who's going to show up, and where they're coming from. I think it gives the defense some advantages, because it catches the offense a little bit off-guard; makes those guys a little bit uncomfortable. As I said earlier, I'm really confident in Joe Gillespie, our defensive coordinator. I think he's one of the brightest coaches in college football. He's done a tremendous job of taking this defense, molding it into an every-down defense, and then also being able to stop the run. I think you go back and look at our game against Texas, Bijan Robinson is one of the premier running backs in the country. I believe they ran the ball 22 times for 29 yards in that game. So we've played against teams that are good running the ball. Michigan will be a different challenge. I do believe we're probably facing the best offensive line in college football. I think that group is really, really good. They've got a good collection of individual players, but I think they play very well together as a group. So it will be a big challenge for us, but again, I think we'll have some tricks up our sleeves.

Q. There might be a misconception people still thinking there's a lot of air raids, a lot of people throwing the ball over the fielder. But how do you think the Big 12 has prepared you guys for the physicality Michigan is going to present for you?

COACH DYKES: I do think there's still a little bit of a perception of the Big 12 the way it was a decade ago. When I went to Texas Tech in 2000, the league was an I-formation, 21-personnel league in 2000. By about 2004, it was a 10-personnel air raid league. Everybody in the league was running some kind of variation of the air raid, throwing the ball around. Wasn't a lot of great defenses in the league at that time. I think, like everything else, the league in some ways has completely evolved. You go and look at it now and you've got a completely different style of play across the board. I do believe that there still is that perception that nobody in the league plays defense. I don't think that's the case at all. You start to look around the Big 12, and there's a lot of run-based offenses, and a lot of offenses are really good up front, and a lot of offenses built on 12 and 21 personnel. So you have to be able to defend everything in the league. I think that's one of the great things about the Big 12 is there is a lot of variety in schemes, whether it's offensively or defensively. A lot of teams running some cutting-edge things. The pendulum has swung back from kind of the 4-wide all the time back to playing with tight ends and fullbacks and that kind of thing. I think the league, in a lot of ways, is kind of ahead of the curve.

Q. What will Max Duggan's legacy be in the trajectory of this program when he's done here?

COACH DYKES: I think when you look at Max, it's always hard to predict what somebody's legacy is going to be, but I think that you do look at Max and I think it's going to be similar to Andy Dalton in a lot of ways. I think you look at Andy and his time at TCU, he kind of put TCU on the map. Took them to a Rose Bowl. Became one of the guys you think about when you think of TCU football. Certainly, Max is going to be on that Mount Rushmore of TCU guys. He certainly deserves to be. Here we are in the College Football Playoff. I think nobody anticipated any of us being here. I don't think anybody really was betting on Max Duggan to be a runner-up for the Heisman trophy. So I think there's been a lot of things that have occurred this year that were beyond people's expectations, and I think that's what Max is good at. I think he's really good at exceeding expectations. When you go back and look at what he's been through as a football player here, from coaching changes to heart surgery through all the ups and downs, I think people will look back at him, and as I said earlier, he will be on the Mount Rushmore of TCU football and he certainly deserves to be.

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