Jim McElwain was in Bristol on Tuesday, participating in the SEC Coaches annual “Car Wash.” McElwain had a six-hour day planned out at the headquarter of the Worldwide Leader including a live hit on SportsCenter, a taped interview with College Football Live (to be shown later this week), and appearances on the Paul Finebaum Show and Highly Questionable with Dan Le Batard. McElwain was also interviewed across the ESPN family of radio networks.
Here are the highlights and rundown of what Mac had to say on Tuesday.
On the arrests of Tyrie Cleveland and Rick Wells
“We have freedom of choice. The thing we don’t have is freedom of consequence based on our actions. Our guys know that they’re going to be dealt with. That’s the way we handle things, that’s the way I handle things and I think our track record shows that. And yet, it’s not about that as much as [it is] about the education of what you learned from your actins. That’s the thing as a teacher, as a coach, the thing you go through every single day is trying to help all these young men learn from past historical data and that’s where we’re at. These guys will be dealt with and it will be taken care of.”
On educating players on current events, the current climate around the country
“We bring in, the mental conditioning coaches we have within our organization is talking about current world issues and where exactly it’s at and how to deal with some of those. There’s a lot of landmines out there. It goes back to, again, the education and weekly, daily, information you can give these guys to make better choices in all the things that they do.”
On Gators quarterbacks
“I love our quarterback room. Our quarterback room is something that people don’t think about, but the individual position rooms, sometimes, and how they can affect everybody in the organization. Obviously the greatest affect you can have is in that quarterback room.”
“It isn’t that that guy has to make all the plays. Successful quarterbacks, no matter where they’ve played and what they do, the other 10 around them play better because they’re in the huddle. That to me is the key and we’ve got a couple guys that I feel really comfortable with.”
On replacing defensive starters from 2015
“It was a joy coaching those guys. To see how they really invested in not only themselves but more so the Gators as we went on, that was something that was really powerful. I talked to our team quite a bit, it isn’t about replacing that position and being that player but about the other people around elevating their play that are coming back until those different spots get filled. We’ve got some great leadership on that side of the ball. We’ve got some great players coming back. Depth is going to be something that we’ve gotta constantly work on.”