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Texas Tech football coach Kliff Kingsbury was on The Ticket yesterday and if you have 30 minutes, it's worth your time. It's probably the most at ease that I can recall Kingsbury being, somewhat let his guard down in a good way. He joked and laughed. Oh, and the hosts also referenced a certain interview about Kingsbury's top five rap songs. I contributed pretty much contributed nothing to that interview, it was all Travis, but I very proudly came up with that question.
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As far as the photo with Mike Tyson, Kingsbury pretty much said that he had enough dranks to ask Tyson if he would take a photo and that Tyson was great about taking the photo:
Kingsbury: "Under Armour actually invites all their coaches out to the Preakness every year, and we were there and I know (Tom) Brady going back to the Patriot days and they had a photo booth and we were taking pictures and we're basically like, the most epic picture of all-time if we're not scared to go ask Iron Mike (Tyson) to take one. And so after a few more cocktails, somebody worked up the courage to go get him and was great. I was scared to death of him, and I'm not usually star struck, but that's the guy. That's the guy. And he couldn't have been more gracious and nice and it was awesome."
So from all appearances, that was pretty much the extent of the interaction with Tyson.
Kingsbury talked about a ton of things, from his dad, to the time period from being part of the New England Superbowl team to landing in Houston, where he mentioned that he played in NFL Europe and his stint in Cologne was life-changing. And as you might expect, Kingsbury was asked about Johnny Manziel and again, I'm a proponent of Kingsbury milking this relationship as long as possible because players identify Kingsbury and Manziel as being the reason for Manziel's start to his success. In fact Jarrett Stidham recently compared his mobility to Manziel's mobility. It's totally cool to embrace Manziel:
Kingsbury: "A ton ... that's part of it. In this profession, I had Case Keenum, whose the NCAA all-time record holder in every passing category there ever was and they probably won't be broken, so going back to that team and then we fall into Texas A&M, who has, I think, five first-round draft picks in that offense so far in two years - and so to be able to coach (Manziel), he's the best college football player I've ever seen, and so that's a huge part of the reason I was able to get this job."
From an offensive coordinator standpoint, it was also pretty interesting in that Kingsbury acknowledges that some offensive coordinators that don't want to let players just do their thing, will have a hard time with Manziel, but there were times during a game, Manziel would throw a 50 yard bomb, even if there was no indication that the resulting touchdown was part of any sort of play, but you just start high-fiving and move on.
For me, this segued into an earlier part of the interview where Kingsbury said that his style isn't to reinforce the negative, but try to reinforce the positive. For example, if the quarterback throws behind a receiver, there's no point to tell the quarterback to not do that because they know where they should have thrown the ball.
Again, if you have the time, take a listen. It's close to 30 minutes and it's quite enjoyable.
Just in case anyone is wondering, it's Kliff Timothy Kingsbury.
