Everything Brent Key Said At His Tuesday Press Conference Ahead of Georgia Tech's Matchup With Colorado

Georgia Tech vs Colorado is getting closer.

The Yellow Jackets and the Buffaloes are set to meet for the first time ever on Friday night and after speaking to the media on Sunday, Georgia Tech head coach Brent Key talked again on Tuesday. Here is everything that he had to say:

Opening Statement...

"As we get started here, I do want to take a second and talk about Coach Ross. You know, just got sent an article this morning from USA Today, I believe it was that talked about him in his battle that he's having right now with cancer. You know, it's been a tough time for him and his family and his wife as well has gone through it. And just to let Coach Ross know that everyone here has him and his family in their prayers. It's someone that's been on our mind a lot as a program here the last really week as we've been preparing for this football game, knowing the outcome of the 1990 season. Really the first time these two teams meeting again since then.

So what a great coach, great man, the stories I hear about how he ran the program and built the program and then went on to the NFL and had his success there. It's an honor to sit in the same seat that he set in, and you look at the coaches that came out from underneath him and really his coaching tree, a lot of outstanding coaches and a lot of coaches that really impacted me in my life that came from underneath Coach Ross.

So I just want Coach to know that everyone here at Georgia Tech is thinking about him, and he'll be with us as we go to play this game on Friday. So I also started to reflect a little bit about the times and how things have changed since 1990 until now in college football, from split national champions to then the BCS and then play -offs and now where we are today and then just all the things that have happened, whether it be from the coaching side, the player side, the amount of coaches on the field coaching now to how recruiting has changed and with rev share now and just different things.

But it just reminds you that college football is always changing and where we're at now is not where it's gonna be in 15 years. So that's what makes it exciting, that's what makes it fun and we're excited to kick off the season this Friday night. So you got a quality opponent, we're going to play. Again, it's first game of the season, so you focus on yourself and what you have to do, how you have to go out and execute, put a plan together, and then, as we say all the time, you're only as good as your base calls. And then it's up to us to go in and play the way we're supposed to play and make adjustments as coaches and put our players in position to be able to go execute."

1. On if he has talked to any members of the 1990 team about this game...

"No, not about the game. I mean, I've talked a bunch of them. Not really since training camp started, I didn't really talk to anybody. Talked to our coaches and my wife when I get home at night. Harper in the morning when I see her, she had her first soccer practice yesterday. She's really talented, really talented. So I was pretty excited to see that, to see the videos of that coming in. But I have, and I've got a lot of really close friends from those teams. And we've talked a lot. I'm sure we'll talk here in the next couple of days or I might see some of them out there what not but you know really had doesn't have any impact on this game but I know it means it means a lot for them."

2. On Colorado's Offense...

"Obviously they have a lot of pieces now but very different you know we don't know exactly what they'll be and that's how we've got to be able to play our base defensive calls and you know and how we rallied at the football, how we diagnosed. And it always starts with getting the call, getting aligned, proper alignments, getting the right stance, eyes in the right spots, reading the right keys, then being able to go and once the ball snapped, be able to play with discipline and play your responsibility out and play 100 miles an hour.

So look, they have two quarterbacks there that we both know about, and we're preparing for both of them. Whether both of them play in the game, or they could go with one the whole time out. We don't know that. We can't predict that. So those things we can't really affect or do anything about, we're not going to. So we'll see on Friday, but we're expecting them to be a dynamic offense. That's not going to change. Coaches are the same, coordinators are the same that are calling the plays, so they got two really talented quarterbacks. One of them had a lot of production at the college level and one of them had a tremendous amount of production at the high school level. It was a big year, been there in the system for a while. So big offensive line, we talked about that the other day. So it's gonna be important for us to be able to get out and do those things and all those things that happened before the snap, and then be able to go play hard during the snap, execute."

3. On national spotlight games for his program...

"Yeah, well, anytime you have your program in the national spotlight, it's a good thing. And the more of those we can play, the better. We want to play as many of those as possible and hopefully every team we play this year has had a really good record up into the time we play them and us and we are in a spotlight. But that's part of building a program too, is putting your program in that spotlight and teaching your staff and your players and organization how to deal with the spotlight, to deal with that and to deal with expectations and all those things."

4. On the defensive end position and who is standing out...

"Yeah, Amontrae Bradford, that's a guy who played on special teams last year a lot. Jordan Boyd, same thing, got it all banged up in springtime. He's had a really good camp. Andre Fuller is a true freshman, just, you know, he was playing high school ball this time last year. He's had a, he talked about freshmen that plays freshmen don't act like freshmen. And he acts like a 35 year old man and play carries himself. But you know, we laugh about it, but at the same time, we can't forget. He has the same, you know, issues that all the freshmen that he's still 18 years old. And we have to be right, we have to understand that, but he's very mature his age, and that's the reason he's going to be able to get play."

5. On Colorado's Defense...

"Well I mean if you say it in the word mindful of it's more that means we're being reactive and we don't want to be reactive of anything we do you know last year they led the country I think in snaps of cover one and cover two which is really a rarity I think third in one of them but it's really a rarity playing those two types of things so you know they're they're all in taking away the run or taking away the pass and they do a good job of disguising things.

They've got physical players. They've got size, very pro -style defense. The defensive ends, they're going to set the edge, keep contain, obviously, when you watch film and see who we are offensively and what we've done, that this is going to be big things they've been working on and coaching. And we know that there's going to be an extra in the box majority of the time. So you got to have a way to affect that, or I think I said before, I'm in my plans to throw about 75 times in the game, but you take what the defense gives you.

You have to, and you got to be able to go out and execute. At the end of the day, we put our players in position for the last four weeks to have the confidence to go out and play. And I told them right after practice today that there's no reason anybody should be getting up tight. No one should be say anything more than they said, you know, five days ago or anything. I mean, we try to do everything we can to elevate practice to put, you know, put every day of them in a position that the game's not that big when they get to it."

6. On him and Deion Sanders taking over their programs around the same time...

"Yeah, I mean, obviously, I don't know the inside out of anything that's taking place there. So, I've seen what I've seen on tape of them. Film, I don't know the inner workings or anything that takes place there. Matter of fact though, for any time you take over a program in the build and the difference is now than it used to be with the acquisition or retention of personnel and being able to get collection of new guys in and we've talked about that before that, you know, no one year is indicative of the next and you have to put those guys in a position to go out and play cohesive football and play together and obviously they have done a really good job of that and they made a lot of improvements from year one to year two and I do see some similarities in things and I have a lot of respect for him and his staff from what they have done there."

7. On A.J. Hoffler and Brayden Manley...

"We're expecting to play five, six guys at that spot. We've got good depth there. There's going to be a lot of guys rolling in. They are a big physical offensive line. Whether it's protection or whether it's a run game, I mean, they're going to-- you've got 330, 340, 350 -pound guys. So that's what we're expecting. We're expecting them to try to wear us down and we've got to play as hard as we can for those spurts that we're in there and but we've got guys you know five or six guys before we're really capable but those two guys have done a really good job adjusting you know fitting into the scheme they were both here in the springtime. So you know no different than a freshman or any other newcomer they've learned what to do how we do things. Now it's time to turn the lights on and let us all go see them go play."

8. On the seniors and upperclassmen...

"Gosh, I could talk about that for a long time, because the past several years we've done leadership based on, we'd have guys in different classes that didn't really matter. We'd have 10, 12, 14 guys on leadership, and maybe the decision this year that our leadership was our seniors. There are 27 of them. Anytime you have 27 seniors, it's a good thing, especially when a lot of these guys have been in the program for a while.

But what we've seen is that guys that people might think should be leaders that just naturally aren't, or in some gut looks, some people don't want to be. And that's perfectly fine. I'd rather know that than try to put a square peg in a round hole, right? And there's a lot of guys that want to be that might not naturally be, okay? Or there's one year left and maybe they've made mistakes in the past couple of years, right? So when you have a collection of seniors, it helps all of them elevate themselves, all right? And you've got the guys, like Haynes, where in the past, was it two years ago? I think a lot of times people just looked at him as being the leader, or looked at him to make a play when you needed to play in a game. And that's a lot of pressure on a young person. That's a lot of pressure to be the quarterback, to be the leader, to be the playmaker, right?

Now, that's what their job is, but at the same time, the shared burden of that helps a lot. And to have a lot of guys on the team that collectively can lead now, it takes a little bit of that burden."

9. On how they plan on handling the altitude...

"Yeah, we've got things in place. We've got a lot of things in place. It was great to have Coach Gailey here last week, someone that coached 10 years up there in Colorado and then and then NFL had to travel to Denver a lot of times. So he was a good resource for things. But we and I, I mean, I've reached out to a lot of people, played there before. I've played, well, not in Boulder, played out that way before, and a lot of people have. So I've 100 % believed in the plan we have in place."