Red Raider Gridiron: Wallerstedt Says Not to Believe Rumors; Adjusting to a New Defensive Coordinator

Wallerstedt Says Not to Believe Rumors. Sports Illustrated guys, Thayer Evans and Pete Thamel, write a bit about Matt Wallerstedt in their national notebook article and they had this bit about the resignation of Wallerstedt:

But in a text message to The Inside Read last Friday, Wallerstedt wrote, "All good! Don't believe all the rumors!! My statement yesterday says why I resigned and that's the truth!!"

In a Texas Tech news release, the school stated that Wallerstedt resigned for "personal reasons."

Yesterday, head coach Kliff Kingsbury didn't address Wallerstedt's resignation at all.  Just to catch everyone up, the initial reports were that Wallerstedt was under the influence of a controlled substance and then the article was revised to "unknown" substance on campus.  Later in the day, Wallerstedt officially resigned for personal reasons.  This isn't my area of law, but if those things weren't true, then Wallerstedt would have a claim against ESPN for libel, but if there is some truth to it, then there's no claim at all.  Of course, waging a lawsuit against ESPN isn't fun, heck any sort of lawsuit isn't fun and that in itself is a deterrent a lot of times.

Adjusting to a New Defensive Coordinator. We'll get into the quotes and stuff later today from MeestahRogers (definitely not DoubleTFaithful), but we'll get into a few quotes from yesterday's press conference.  LAJ's Don Williams writes about the change:

Kingsbury downplayed the degree to which the in-season change hurts or distracts his team.

"I don't think it does," he said. "I mean, it's not like we were playing very well on any side of the ball at that point anyway. I don't think it hurt at all. I think our guys did a good job of refocusing."

Tech defensive players have had plenty of practice at adapting to new coordinators. Tech will open Big 12 play with a different defensive coordinator for the sixth year in a row. The Red Raiders had spoken all off-season and preseason about the benefit of having a defensive coordinator in place two years in a row, but it didn't last.

Eguavoen said he considers the switch to Smith "a minor change" compared to the others because Smith has already been on staff and the Red Raiders are still in the same scheme.

"I mean, he's been making a few changes, just by the way we line up," Eguavoen said. "It's really just us as players. We've got to tackle. We've got to fit gaps.

A lot of the similar things that have been said previously, especially the idea that we really shouldn't expect a lot of change in scheme or personnel, which we all know is realistic, but we like to think that changing something, well, anything, would be a start in the right direction.

Oh, and Kingsbury's somewhat brutal honesty to open up that quote.  Yeah.

And from the Dallas News' Chuck Carlton wrote about the change at defense and LB Sam Eguavoen said that the approach of the defense is different (and I'd be hesitant to read too much into Eguavoen's quotes as how Wallerstedt approached players or didn't approach players, he's just talking about Smith):

"I don't want to say friendly environment, but it's less stress, less screaming," Eguavoen said. "I mean, he comes to you like a man, not as a child or something."

Via the Daily Toreador, Eguavoen thinks the defense will be faster:

"We will be faster. I think (Smith's scheme) is a little less in the game plan now, so we will be looking less to the sideline. We'll know what to do next," he said. "It'll be more on the fly stuff. It's less thinking and you have a base plan in your head."

Notebook. There's a notebook of things from LAJ Williams as someone asked about Jarrett Stidham with Kingsbury and Oklahoma State quarterback Daxx Garman, who Kingsbury recruited while at Houston.

Miscellaneous. If you need a national perspective on things, I've got you covered: Sports Illustrated (as linked above), Sports on Earth, Grantland and FoxSports . . . there were some initial reports yesterday about how Oklahoma QB Baker Mayfield had received clearance from the NCAA to be eligible immediately, but that apparently isn't true.  Just to clarify a couple of things, from what I understand, even if the NCAA gives their clearance, the Big 12 still doesn't have to grant the waiver.  Plus, Oklahoma recently passed on giving Mayfield a scholarship earlier in the year, initially saying that they didn't have any, and then granting a scholarship to a walk-on . . . FoxSports David Ubben has his best and worst of the Big 12 . . . Tulsa World writes about how this is a real opportunity to get the Oklahoma State ground game going . . . from NewsOK, OSU thinks highly of RB Desmond Roland . . . the DMN with five things to know about Oklahoma State . . . #