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You're seated forward.

You're so tense all of a sudden. It, let me, it's fine. Yes.

It's a really nice office you have here, by the way. We're in the closing room right now.

We are. Yeah. Yes. And we have closed a sit down with you. It's tough to come by. I want to ask you many, many things. But the first thing I want to ask is one of the last images people had last year is that playoff game. Yeah. And you guys can't do anything offensively. Right. But it kind of caps what was a really, really sort of an arrival type season. Like I felt like Texas Tech arrived on the scene nationally for a lot of people last year. Right. All right. But that's probably not the way you felt in that moment. So as you're headed home from that playoff game, from that Orange Bowl defeat to Oregon, where is your mind immediately about like, here's what we got to do? Here's where we are. Here's where we need to get. Yeah, that's 100%. Like, it goes straight to what we got to do. I mean, I thought Oregon was a great football team. I love Dan Lennie. Like he's one of my favorite guys. After the game, you see us talking and I literally said, man, you once congratulations, but I said you have a big voice in this sport you need to continue to use it because

people respect you and I I really believe that but you know after the game was going back

and going you know where did we fall short where could they take advantage of us why did

we not why were we not successful in offense we felt going good going in game good. We knew it was going to be a war. We knew how good they were on defense. But, you know, we, we just couldn't move the ball. And what we did, we couldn't finish, you know. And so it all goes back to, I think, one, how could we get better on the offensive line? Who could we get bring back? And then schematically, what could we do better? So when you evaluate your roster, in the old days, it feels like you had to look two, three years down the road. Right. And there's a kind of a portion of that you can still do, but there's also such an immediacy that you can act upon now with the way

the transfer portal works so you guys have notably done it several times right when you guys like

reconvene and you're you're looking at your roster like how much different maybe is that from the

way it used to be where you're kind of trying to evaluate here's where we think our offensive lines headed two or three years down the road here are the freshmen we have in the

pipeline versus kind of the way it is now is we got to need it left guard right let's go get a left

guard how different is that than the way it used to be yeah it's a i mean a hundred percent

it's a lot different from the same point that you can go get somebody

right now that is ready to play, you know, that has played college football, that has put that on tape

and played at a high level.

So that's a big difference.

I think one thing with us, and there's a lot of programs like this, but having James

Blanchard is my GM, he's able to constantly look at the roster.

And is this guy coming back?

Is he gone?

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