MARCUS ARROYO: Perfect click bait. I said there you go, buddy. There you go.
Q. As a coach, obviously you want your players to be confident, and this is a really confident team they have right now based on what you all have done.
MARCUS ARROYO: No. I mean, that's where the rest of the world deals with that. We all say we want someone who's confident. So you can't be mad when you have one that is. That's the bottom line. I don't get into the weeds of it all. We got a quarterback who believes he's really, really good, believes he's one of the best in the country, if not the best in the country, believes he's going to play on Sundays, believes in everything he does.
It's when the microphone was in front of him that he had a chance to let everybody know that, and that's okay. He tells us that all the time. We already knew that. It's not a surprise to us. It just makes for good conversation topics now.
Candidly, I think at the end of the day, if that's fire for them, I bet Quinn says the same thing, hopefully, because those are the quarterbacks that are in this position. Most of the time they have this uncanny belief in themselves all the time. I mean, the best players in the NFL that we've coached or been around, they all feel the exact same way. And so I love the fact that we've got a guy who believes he is the best quarterback in the country.
I think that's going to make him, first off, really, really awesome as a human in whatever he does, because he's going to overcome a lot of things that happen in life to all of us. It's going to make him succeed with his family and his friends and his kids and his job, because there's going to be hardships and you're going to have to really believe in yourself, and then football secondary.
Football, right now to me, he's the best freshman quarterback in the country, hands down. I mean he's the only freshman here, I think.
I have no qualms with it. It is what it is. That's bulletin board stuff. Great. You deal with it. You deal with the shots that are fired and go deal with it, but at the end of the day you can't say you want that and then all of a sudden reel it back as a coach and go, hey, don't do that. I'm not doing that. I don't believe in that. I don't moonwalk.
Q. Sam was mentioning earlier --
MARCUS ARROYO: He was highly recommended and probably one of the best guys I've been around work force in my 20 years in regards to his role and what he does. One of the first guys I'll hire again.
Q. He ran the personnel plant in Vegas a few years ago. That's how I got to know him. Sam was mentioning when he was going through the transfer process that you guys sat for five, six hours when he came to campus. What do you remember from that day and what was that process like, trying to understand what makes him tick.
MARCUS ARROYO: Yeah, that was the first quarterback we brought in that we identified we wanted. With that transfer process in January when I got there, as you can imagine, whatever it is, three weeks from now, it's going to be right at the end. And so I prepared my tail off, everything I had.
I just got there, I was still living in boxes in the hotel and I said, hey, this is the kid we want. So I put together a whole deal for us in regards to development. I broke down every one of his plays from high school to college, any tape I had, every throw, every mechanical deal, every read, every progression, every concept and asked him about everything I could get out of him to identify his kind of functional intelligence of football and how he ticks.
And then I wasn't going to let him leave without telling him about me, what I believed in, quarterback position, our experience, my coaching tree, here's why we do it, here's the guys who are doing it; here's the extent to what we do it; here's how we do it, here's when we do it; what are your thoughts here. And all of a sudden I look up and it's five hours with me and him and his dad, and I think we were late for dinner. We missed the lunch. But it was that point where I knew I had a kid in front of me that was special in regards to being able to -- his wantingness to who he wanted to be, what he was looking for and where he wanted to go, and we were a perfect match because it was like, all right --
There was at some point I'm like, all right, I'm not letting him go, because he had like two more visits set up. I'm like, I'm just going to make him miss all the flights. (Laughs). And so, I was like, dude, I don't want this guy to get out of here.
So I think I flew back out there like the next -- like two days later I flew back to East Lansing where his parents were at. He wasn't even there. I went to go meet his parents and sit down more and have dinner, and we just really hit it off, man.
Q. When you broke down all that tape from high school, what was it that attracted you most to him?
MARCUS ARROYO: Well, just the film, I mean without having to get to know him, was obviously his traits. I mean his ball placement, his decision making. There was very few -- I think it was 30 reps at Michigan State or something crazy. There was very few, but there was enough. There was enough for me to see some game film where -- it's kind of hard to put into words. As a quarterback you can kind of see some things where you're like, all right, tell me about that.
And when I was able to tell him that, he could see I recognized something that was kind of like, wait, how would you know that? So that's when we kind of hit it off. Like he's like, you saw that? And I'm like, yeah, that's why I want to know about it.
He's like, you want to know about that? I said, yeah, tell me about that. Tell me about the way you got up right there. Tell me about this TV copy of you on the sideline talking to the coach. Tell me about there was a time on a celebration I think on one clip I had, and I was just talking about the way he celebrated or the way he got with his team or the way he reacted to something. I'm like, tell me about this reaction. He was like, what do you mean about the reaction? There was things like that where that I think were important for him to know I'm watching more than the slant.
But ball placement, ability to extend plays. He had really good stats in high school for decision making. That's the one thing I think is really, really important is taking care of the football, and he does that here.
But I think there's more. You can coach that as well. Was it coaching? Was it you? Was it innate? So there was a lot of things I was able to cross off in regards to critical skills and positional skills that I thought were really attractive, that I thought I could work with.
Q. The development part piece, I know you probably worked a lot with guys, what was it that kind of portends what you laid out to him to sell him on the development, because obviously he wants to go to the NFL?
MARCUS ARROYO: I don't know. He probably better ask him what I sold him on, but I went through the coaching tree with the guys I've been around, going all the way back to, shoot, being a ball boy running around and being a kid growing up at Sierra College with Bill Walsh and watching Joe Montana and Steve Young. To playing the position, to having an NFL guy as a coach, to moving on being with coach.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports