Jimmy Lake Quote Compendium

“We should be contending for the Pac-12 championship every single year,” Lake said last week. “Every single year, we should be contending for the Pac-12 championship and going to a big bowl game. That’s fair. Anything less than that is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable. We should be challenging in late November for the Pac-12 championship and positioning ourselves to go to a big bowl game.”

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“I think we’re there right now. We’re already there. We’ve won two of the last five Pac-12 championships,” Lake said. “One of them, we went to the College Football Playoff. The other, we won the Pac-12 championship, and we weren’t invited. Every single year, we’re trying to contend for the Pac-12 championship, and then we’re trying to get to that big bowl game. Unfortunately, the way it’s set up right now, we have no control over who gets in that final four. We’ve just got to go try to win our games, win the Pac-12 championship, and see if the subjectivity of the voters sways in our favor.”

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"All right, football is back. We are extremely excited. The whole building is buzzing. Our game week for 2021 … it’s been a normal offseason, a normal spring football, a normal training camp. We built a lot of chemistry throughout training camp. I thought it was a very successful training camp. We got better in all three phases. I thought players took the next step in their game on both sides of the ball. But now it’s time to sharpen up the last details and get ready for our opening opponent this weekend. But we’re excited to go out there in front of our fans and not play in front of cardboard cutouts and actually feel the energy and feel the juice from the greatest fans in the country."

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(On the team's strength) “The first thing is our offensive line. We are extremely veteran, talented and deep — very deep — on our offensive line. I would say that is a definite strength of ours. I’ll leave it right there.”

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“With our offensive line we have everybody back from last year, for one, and we also have guys back from the year before who have a lot of starting experience for us. Then we’ve added pieces to our offensive line as well, and they’ve been able to come in here and learn what we do and learn from some veteran guys. I think the talent we have in that room … some of our backups and even backup backup guys could start for a lot of places. So it is a pleasure to have so much depth at that position, which I think is the most critical position on a football team and is by far my favorite position.”

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(On Fan presence) "Our staff, our players, we cannot wait for that moment to hear their cheers and go out there and make plays for them and play smart football and get them out of their seats cheering for the Dawgs. We’re all excited about it."

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(On the offense) "We are light years away from where we were last year. We have a quarterback that’s got starts under his belt, he knows what it feels like, we have an install now that is, we have installs on top of installs, three, four, five plays ahead now, not just the beginning play that we all just have to learn. A complete offseason, spring football, a complete training camp, we never missed a practice due to anything like we did last year in 2020. There’s no pauses, no nothing. We’ve always got to get better. We’re not going to be perfect. We’ve always got to get better. But, we are light years away from where we were last year.”

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(On Dylan Morris) “He is a way better football player. I just keep saying it. Now he’s started four college football games, where last year he had never played football ever in a college football atmosphere. He just went through a whole offseason that was regular for the first time. 2020 was not regular, as we all know. He has taken his game to new heights. I don’t want to put a metric on it. But I know you guys saw it. All the open practices that we had open, you guys saw his progression. He makes the throws. In turn, what you guys don’t see is he gets us in good plays. We call a bad play into a front that we don’t want to go into, or a coverage or blitz, he gets us out of that play and gets us into a really successful play. Turns into a touchdown. Turns into a 20-yard gain. Those are the things you can’t see obviously from the naked eye. But what you guys did see was an accurate thrower. A quarterback making really good decisions and getting it to the open player and not forcing it. So, he’s a way better player — and he should be — from 2020 to 2021.”

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(On winning big/NY6/CFP games) “I mean, that’s what we work for every single day. I don’t want to just sit up here and talk about it. We got to go do it. We feel like we’ve got schematics in all three phases that are going to help us. We feel we’ve recruited and have players here that’re going to help us win the Pac-12 Championship, first, and then go to that big bowl game and win that game. So, we feel we are on that right track. But guess what? We have to go do it. So, I don’t want to sit up here and talk about it. We need to go show it. Five months from now that’s what we’re doing.”

(please add others I missed, there are dozens of them)