Jay Boulware Speaks, 2/25

You know the drill. Jay Boulware now will share his thoughts about his two areas of emphasis: Special teams and tight ends.

• On the Tigers' coaches: "It's the best coaching staff I've ever been on -- and that includes when I was a (graduate assistant) at Texas."
  
  
• On his first meeting with Gene Chizik, which was a job interview in early 2007: "Coach Chizik and I ended up talking for, gosh, it must have been 10-12 hours just talking ball. It was the best interview I ever had. It was one of those interactive deals where I’m telling him this is what we’re doing, he’s making suggestions and we’re talking things out. At that time I knew if I got offered this job I was going to take it, because I felt like he was going to give me an opportunity to be a better coach because he had suggestions that just made sense. I hadn’t had that in a long time, so I was really looking forward to maybe having the opportunity to work with him."
  
  
• What can two men discuss for 10+ hours?: "Ball, baby. Ball."
  
  
• Care to expand on that?: "It was very important to him to have someone that coach special teams the same way he coaches defense. Someone that does a nice job of having a teaching progression, that can coach every aspect of the game and make sure it’s detailed out and make sure it’s simple where the kids can understand. And he saw that I had that, I guess."
  
  
• Boulware worked for Chizik in 2007 and 2008 at Iowa State.
  
  
• On how guys from a 5-19 Iowa State program got jobs at Auburn: "We brought a lot of great players to Iowa State – we had a really good recruiting class. We played a lot of freshman. I think we had 33 freshman and sophomores in our two-deep, which is unheard of in the Big 12. I definitely believe we were making progress. I believe we got better. I think if you ask the majority of people, they saw a quicker, faster football team in our second year. We were just really young."
  
  
• Boulware believes Auburn's special-teams unit was the SEC's best in 2008. He believes fans and the media fail to assess punt, punt return and kickoff return correctly: "Those three units that I saw, from the information that I gathered, were the best in the conference. And a lot of people don't realize that, because too often times, the media and maybe even fans, you judge how the special teams were based on what you saw the kicker do."
  
  
• On what wasn't good about Auburn's special teams in 08: "The only area I felt like was deficient on this football team in that regards was your kickoff coverage unit. I felt like that could have been much more aggressive, much more physical, had much more of a presence in the games, where people felt like, 'Whoa, wait a minute, these guys are really getting down the field.'"
  
  
• More on his holistic approach to special teams: "If Wes Byrum has a bad year, does that mean we played bad special teams? No, that means Wes Byrum had a bad year. That's what that means. What about the other 10 guys out there that are playing, and so forth and so on. That's my response to that. I think they played very good special teams."
  
  
• On Clinton Durst, the walk-on punter who may or may not have quit ... and may or may not have a scholarship waiting for him: "He's on our football team."