Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Joe Pa talks Austin Scott...Sort of

After the April 1 incident downtown, you called it an embarrassment and took several steps to address it. Are you disappointed that some players didn't heed your message?

"Well, which players are you talking about?

Well, there were several incidents, such as the violation by Austin Scott ‑‑

"Austin Scott was a different situation. I was disappointed but, what else are you talking about?"

The four underage drinking citations in the last month to six weeks?

"Well, I'd like to know anyone in this room when they were in college weren't sitting around at parties and underage drinking wasn't going on.

"I'm not condoning it or anything like that. But you know, you always have got to be a little bit careful in evaluating what kids do in relationship to what their obligation is to their football team and themselves.

"I'm not sure who the kids you're talking about are, but there are a couple of kids out there, and I'm in the process of trying to find out who it was, but all of them are kids who aren't going to play this year.

"So I think there's a little bit different obligation on their part to what they have to do as far as I use the word "obligation" to what they have to contribute to the football team. No, I think we're okay. "

What is Austin Scott's status right now, and were there a couple of your players involved in a fight over the weekend?

"Austin Scott right now is still not…will not participate this week. I'm not sure exactly where you're coming from on the second part, except I've been alerted that there might have been a couple football players involved in a fight. To what extent, to what degree, what happened, I'm not quite sure yet. And until I find out what's going on, I think I'd be better off just not getting into that."

You had the fight earlier this year‑‑

"What about Wisconsin?

"You know, we're fine. Let me handle the football team, and as soon as I know enough to make some decisions, I'll make them and that will be it.

" But you guys want to nit-pick ‑‑ forget about where I think you're coming from, but I just don't think it's appropriate right now. I told you what I said. We may have some kids that may have stepped out of line; to what degree, I don't know. Seriously or not seriously; to what effect how what they have done is going to affect how I'm going to react, I don't know, period.

"Now we've got a football game to play, supposedly. And I was hoping somebody would say: 'Are you pleased with the way your football team played last week?' because I was. Our kids played hard. When I was here last week: 'How is your team going to be, are they going to hang on; morale;' you guys have all given me that stuff, are they going to snap back and all.

"We went ahead and played a good football game, alright? Went out and played a good football game. Maybe made a couple of mistakes later in the game but went out and played a good football team. You want to talk about that? Let's talk about that. You want to talk about Wisconsin? Hey, I thought this was a press conference to discuss our football game. "

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