Fall Camp Day 15: Larry Jackson weighs in on conditioning

On how the players have responded and held up…

“Me and my staff were actually pretty excited watching these guys run around. Our whole job depends on how these guys are doing out there and if they are flying around and if they’re broken up. I just want to see guys fly around from the start of camp to the end of camp and we will know that we have done what we are supposed to do.”

On some players getting rest during practice….

“Yeah, sometimes it’s vets, guys we know that have already proven who they are, so we don’t need to see them smash each other in practice. We need them for Saturdays. At the end of the day, all the stuff I do with these guys is to make sure they are ready for Saturday. If a guy feels like he is about to tweak or he’s kind of hurting a little bit, we’ll sit him down and pull him out.”

On players buying in and few questioning him….

“The look now is ‘Where did you come up with this?’ But last year, the guys really kind of struggled because everything was so different. Different coach, different conference. We’re going into some different venues and playing different games, but once we started the workout they had to recognize I’m getting the guys ready for practice, not the game. In our practices, we go so fast. It’s the coaches' job to continue to press what I’ve done over the summer, and then it’s my job to maintain what the guys did over the summer.

"It’s always kind of a balancing act, but the guys have completely bought into what we are doing. So we’re pretty excited about getting going. I’m sure these guys are hitting each other.”

On players grabbing leadership roles…

“Absolutely. One that kind of jumps out at me is Ben Malena. Whenever we let the guys go during the month of May, we are always concerned about, ‘Have they been sitting on the couch for a month or have they been working?’ Ben came back and it looked like I had been training him the whole month of May. Looked like somebody better than me had been training him the whole month of May. He came back, he was ripped up, his mind was right. He was a guy ready to eat. He was a guy ready to lead.

"You’ll hear me say that a lot about teaching the guys how to eat. As a former player, our job was whatever was given to us, we just have to eat it up. That’s what we are trying to teach these guys. No matter what they are given, we just have to eat it up.”

On enjoying the return to College Station, despite the work…

“Yeah, but it’s still personal. I enjoy being here. I’m really excited to be back. Getting to come back and coach at your alma mater, rarely does a coach get to do that. So when you look at how many coaches are all over the country, college coaches everywhere, to have a chance for me to be able to come back to a school that I coached at as an assistant, and then I ventured off a few places and then to have my family take me back and want me to coach all my little brothers again, it’s just so surreal.

"I can’t believe that I get to be here and train these guys every day. So I jump up and I’m so excited to train these players and to go out on the field on Saturdays and run out with these guys and watch these guys do battle out there. It’s a lot of fun.”

On keeping the routine from getting monotonous…

“We do so many different things and then I hire a staff. The guys I have work with me — Price, Jones, Gibson, they are guys who aren’t just like me. Hopefully they are smarter than me. These guys come up with some really crazy stuff. And I’m one of those coaches that takes from anybody and I bite it and run with it. Our guys help me keep it fresh and help make sure we are doing different things and it’s really exciting.”

On the crazier work outs…

“Well the guys will tell you Friday’s work outs are always crazy. We don’t even go outside on Fridays, we stay indoors. Friday is one of the ways I got my nickname. Guys are laying on the turf and trash cans are everywhere. When they use the trash cans I’m smiling.”

On the nickname “Black Death”…

“The players come up with what they come up with. I just want to get them better. And if they think that’s what it turned into, at the end of the day it’s just words because they are still alive.”

On the LSU game scheduled for Thanksgiving in 2014…

“Actually it’s pretty exciting. I have a lot of family members that graduated from LSU. I told them if they want to use my tickets for the game, they can’t wear LSU gear. They have to wear A&M gear. We have some people sitting on their hands during the football games that can’t say anything. To have it be now at Thanksgiving, we can just make it a big family event.”

On the LSU game becoming a rivalry again…

“Absolutely. It could be now that we are in the same conference together. Before, it was a big rivalry and we weren’t even in the same conference. Now we have to play each other every year. I think with the talent that we have and the talent they have, it could be a fun game to watch every year. You just never know who is going to win. It’s always a fun deal to watch.”

On the talent this year compared to his class….

“These guys are way more impressive than we were. I wish I looked like Ricky (Seals-Jones). I realize we are talking about freshmen, but we are talking about the guys we just got here. You look across the board, but I just go down the list and look at the defensive linemen. Each one of those young guys, those guys are going to be so much better.

"Look at a guy like Daeshon Hall. I played end my last year here and in the league, and I wish I was built like him. You guys would just know of me, because I wouldn’t be back here coaching. I’d maybe still be playing. His body is tall and lean and long and I’m just excited to watch him grow as a player and a young man and I want to help him achieve those goals.”

On the freshmen defensive linemen and their preparation…

“Well, these guys show up in a lot better condition than we did when we came out. They have real strength programs that they start early in college. They used to get some mats together with some bars and plates and we’d do some lifting. These guys show up and they look like we did whenever we left. It’s pretty exciting to train these guys and the potential in those bodies.”

On finding the balance between a player like RSJ getting too big and being too small…

“I’ll tell him, the only way he’s going to lose weight is if he stops lifting. The guy’s all muscle. I could easily have him pull his shirt off for you and you’ll be like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ This guy is 18 years old and looks like a grown man. Chest, abs, everywhere, there’s muscles. I just have to make sure that for 70, 80, 90, 100 snaps he can keep rolling. That’s what my job is — to make sure the coaches can call the same plays in the fourth quarter that they called in the first quarter.”

On Johnny Manziel’s offseason commitment…

“Johnny works just like everyone else. As far as Johnny goes, he is here to win football games like the rest of the players. So please help us win, because at the end of the day when he makes a trick play everybody jumps and is all excited about what Johnny’s just done. Again, another person does the same thing. I just want Johnny to go out there and do what he does.”

On the current state of A&M football…

“As a guy that came from the Southwest Conference to watch them go to the Big 12 to the SEC, I’m just so excited to play the SEC and to play in those venues and to have those schools come to play us every year. I wish we would have been able to play in games like that when I was here, because everyone kept saying we were beating little sisters of the poor and we won all the games, but it didn’t help that we were losing the bowl games.

"Now that we play those real teams week in and week out, it validates what’s going on around here and the fact that it was a good move for A&M to go to the SEC. I was really excited and I wasn’t even coaching here yet when they switched to the SEC.”