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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 25, 1983)
0056 iv ( ; ‘.I . t ; •_ »;«< Texas A&M The Battalion Sports January 25, 1983 Page 11 bediscussfi meeting fel igressCaJ \!so,anieet.i where maiiB d in helpij; | in hisbidfel ope for the future Kubiak sees success ahead for Aggies by Joe Tindel Jr. ^ , £ i Battalion Staff flu 1979 a scrappy young meetingi quarterback from Houston St. le inieroitspius High School joined the ranks of an Aggie football team er e le (1 j ( in [transition. Having set the tieetiiic school passing record, Garv Kubiak seemed a logical :hiice to break in the airborn he '< ittlck. il interested pBut change was slow. With a ing team-fl se egg in his passing yards contatt lL; 0 Lmn in 1979, Kubiak looked 'i:i-151i forward to a year off— being redshirted — and a chance to ;:mber\ v »vork on things, to havetliesBut the beginning of confer ence play his sophomore year oringaC * avv him c N a T 1,ed to d ) u y a S a ^ s Q t Houston. No year off. Only 322 d Thursc> ar( ‘ s P assin S- Conferee, , 1 he numbers tell the story of he next two years. 1 he ramihar- tylof Kubiak’s name rose as nany times as his passing stats. ! He did become that transition 1 blOMABL — y, e an[ j a newcomer ntest ant ia|ied Jackie Sherrill, p.m. in 12, Hwith 1,808 yards by air his uinor year, 1,948 this past fall mualtrip ml smash performances in the Feb. 9. F ilue-Gray game and Hula Bowl, iubiak has proven he’s worthy o be watched by the pros, iINFERS fl^nd Tuesday after the Hula tcussediniP 0 "!- his last college game, <ubiak sat down and reflected mmis career at Texas A&M and M-.Spriii,> a y e f orecas t f' or Sherrill’s In g at trogram. Q. You’ve been around a few earn crises over the past four sionofst tears. There were some disci- beheldiin ilmary problems during your Building iophomore season and your lead coach was under fire your n cs will he UI, i or year. And there were the H| I nunire tears that the team supposedly lad the talent but fell short. How can you have gone nigh all that without it tes ting your enthusiasm for the Gary Kubiak, who passed for over 4,000 yards as an Aggie quarterback during the past three seasons, lets a pass fly in a game during his junior season. A. I think every program has controversy. I think A&M gets pinpointed because of the great institution that it is. A&M ex pects a lot out of their athletics just like they do their students or anybody else, so when things go wrong, it really gets a lot of attention. Things have been tough the last four years, but it’s never been any problem for me be cause I love A&M and I always will. Whether we were 0-8, and I stepped on the field the next Saturday for number nine, I was ready to compete. I don’t look back at the negative stuff. The only things that enter my mind are the positive things, and there were many of them. I’ll continue to support A&M, and I know they’re headed in the right direction. Next to a of litCKcl ving than ill interparts, hose colleague! j icteristicsofl cting exteBl he patienOf > with lie del n ter views' dates. ) denying^ :1 to minin| celt said, ssal of feat*] id by ash™ lismissal.W l themselves| possessing * 5 to be a 51*1 ie denier ij las a r to stress] ipact. i Mon- O 00 first should! couple of schools, probably the most stable situation in college football right now is right here at A&M, with Coach Sherrill, the staff he’s assembled and the di rection they’re heading. Q. You had to be really thril led last winter to hear that Coach Sherrill was coming to Texas A&M. Did he meet your expectations of him? A. I think as far as us as a football team, he definitely met every bit of ours. Now if you talk to anybody who just looks at our record, sure, they say ‘Well, what happened? Y’all had Coach Sherrill. Why didn’t you win?’ I think if we were expected to be a 12-0 football team this year, they never would have brought him down here. We had a lot of holes to fill, we had a lot of young people play ing and when you lose two start ing backs and a tight end in tne first ball game, it makes it kind of tough. But that’s an excuse, and everybody has them, so you can’t really go with that. With the direction that Coach Sherrill is heading and the posi tive aspects surrounding the program right now, once he gets the guys to think positive ... things will start to go their way. I think that’s been one of the biggest problems around here. Once things got going bad ev erybody thought negative, and whenever a game got tight it seemed like everything went against us. I think that’ll come from a guy like Coach Sherrill installing confidence and get ting a positive feeling in all these guys. Things will start to go their way. You take a school like Penn State and people like that. They stay up there for a long period of time. I think that’s the direction MSG that Coach Sherrill’s heading, and I wish I could be a part of it. I think it’ll happen within the next couple of years. He’s (Sherrill) not going to press himself. He’s going to go with the plan he has set. He’s not going to get in any hurry to turn around and try to win it all this year by disrupting the type of plan he has for this program. Q. There was a period of transition for you between your sophomore and junior years when you almost immediately changed from a relatively jit tery back-up to a solid starter who took charge on the field. How did you gain your confi dence so quickly, and when was the turning point? A. Now that I look back, when I came here as a freshman, I had really good three-a-days and two-a-days and got a chance to play against Penn State early. I think it was the third game of the season. We went down there, and I started and had a lot of confidence. I felt like that was my chance. I broke my arm on the first play. I was down at that point, but I hadn’t given up or anything. My sophomore year, they told me they wanted to redshirt me, and Gary Kubiak didn’t prepare for a football season because I felt like I was going to sit out. I wasn’t ready to play my sopho more year and ... after the Hous ton game I think I was putting the blame on other people, but I was more disappointed in my self. I went home, and I almost gave up football, to be truthful. I got a call from (quarterback) coach (Greg) Davis, and he asked me, ‘Are you coming back?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t See Kubiak page 13 “I don’t look back at the negative stuff. The only things that enter my mind are the positive things.” “With the direction that Coach Sherrill is heading and the positive aspects surrounding the program right now ... things will start to go their way.” ENDOWED LECTURE SERIES announces danC'l at 6 :3# e. m GENERAL COMMITTEE INTERVIEWS for NATO AND THE WESTERN ALLIANCE Featuring Former Heads of State: Gerald Ford Edward Heath Helmut Schmidt Sign up: Jan. 26-28 Interviews: Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 Applications available in MSC Room #216 at Secretaries’ Island