Jan. 14, 2005

USC Athletic Director Mike Garrett

Opening Remarks
I've been waiting 20 years to finally really put men's basketball on the map on our campus. As you know, we finally got the means to begin construction on the Galen Events Center and the only thing that we need to make it complete is a great coach. We think we found one. I should say we know we found a great coach. After all the work and all the background we did, we came up with Tim Floyd.

Let me tell you this, we're excited about him. He's from New Orleans and he's going to come to L.A. and start learning a little about L.A. We know how big we are and how overwhelming it can be, but he will hit the ground running and do a great job.

We think, we know that Tim Floyd is the person we need. (The media) have been asking me about him for the last 2-3 weeks and now I can do introduce him without any reservation. He is the coach that will lead us to the success we're looking for in basketball.

New USC Men's Basketball Coach Tim Floyd

Opening Remarks
Thank you and I do appreciate the opportunity (Mike Garrett), Daryl Gross and Dr. Sample have given me to be a part of the Trojan Family.

Let me go ahead and break the ice because I know all of you are going to ask me how it feels to be the second choice behind Rick Majerus. Well, I fully understand why Rick Majerus was the first choice. He's a phenomenal, phenomenal basketball coach. I'll say this... I've thought about it and I've had to deal with my own ego, and to put it into perspective, I don't think I was my wife's first choice either! You're laughing, but I'm checking some of you guys out and I doubt you were your wife's first choice either (laugh). But I can live with it.

I've only been somebody's first choice twice - that was in Chicago and New Orleans and those didn't work out. Going back to Idaho, I think I was the fifth choice there. I took over a program that had finished last in the Big Sky Conference three straight years. There were 4-5 assistants that turned it down and Don Haskins, my old boss and my mentor at Texas-El Paso who I worked with for nine years, got me that job. I was the fifth choice at Iowa State behind guys like Majerus and Stu Jackson, but it also worked out there. I can live with it and I am truly excited to be here at USC.

This is a school that has always had a mystique with me. Growing up, I remember Bob Boyd's old basketball teams. As a kid, I remember seeing 25-2, 25-3 and wondering why I could not see that team in the NCAA Tournament. Those days you only had one team in the Tournament. I remember Coach Dedeaux's baseball teams, John McKay's great football teams and watching those games on Saturday afternoon. It's a school that is one of the great academic institutions in the country. It's a school that has produced high caliber people in every walk of life. When I was talking to Bob Boyd, he said that every dentist you're going to meet in Southern California is a USC alum. Coach Boyd loved this school. When I talked to him two weeks ago, he told me that this was something I should do without hesitation. And that is a great reason why we're here.

When I took my first head coaching job at the University of Idaho, Don Haskins gave me one piece of advice. He told me that when you hire assistant coaches, don't hire the guys that are slick. Those guys are just salesmen. They are the guys with six watches and nine gold chains. Hire guys that are basketball coaches. At that time, he only respected about 4-5 men in the country who he thought could really coach and one of those men was Bob Boyd. Bob was at Mississippi State and I hired three of his assistant coaches (Larry Estachy, Kermit Davis, John Brady) after he retired at Mississippi State.

This school is a school that Digger Phelps viewed as one of the top 10 basketball jobs in the country. I think that, that is something that can absolutely be the case here. I have never gone into a job that has this fertile of a recruiting area. The problem with that is that everybody in the country comes in here to recruit. I do know that through the years some of the local kids have left because maybe the facility was not up to par. It will be exciting to go out and maybe show the pictures of our new building and tell them that in their freshman seasons, the year 2006, we will be in a state-of-the-art building that will not take a back seat to anybody in this country.

This is a great time for me to get back into college. I probably would have done it after I left the Chicago Bulls, but Iooked at our record in Chicago and was still a little ticked off and wanted to show that I could coach. I had a second opportunity with the New Orleans Hornets and we were able to get them to the playoffs but things didn't work out there. So this is the right time for me to get back into college and this is where I plan on making my home. This will be my last college and/or pro job. My last job, period.

I want to congratulate Coach Pete Carroll and his football staff. I know a member of his staff - Carl Smith. People have told me wonderful things about Pete. What they've done here is second-to-none. I always thought it would be harder to build a national-level football program, than a basketball program because in basketball you really only need five key guys. But they have done it and I intend to meet with Coach Carroll. One of the first things I'm going to do is look at that football roster and see where those players have come from. I want to find basketball players at those high schools that maybe grew up idolizing some of our former players and maybe I can start to try and find a couple of big guys. We don't have any big guys coming back next year.

There are four guys returning on scholarship. I have had a chance to watch this team on film. I like all four players and I intend to sit down and talk with them on Monday. I'm going to continue to take a backseat to Jim Saia. I don't know Jim, but I know people that know Jim and I hear terrific things about him. I do not think it would be appropriate of me to come in now and start coaching this basketball team. Teams are built on beliefs systems and they have had an opportunity to sell their belief system to this team all year long. I wish them the very, very best. I want to talk to the seniors as well, but I have a lot of work to do in the next 2-3 months. I've got four scholarship players and I want to meet with this staff and find out who they have been recruiting. I will go out and try to find some additional players. As far as that goes, I am going to use Arizona as the measuring stick. I'm not just going to take a player this year because he is available if I don't think he can play for the University of Arizona. I do know that 85-90 percent of the top prospects have signed early, but I do not want to sell this program short and get in the business of taking a player and then running him off a year from now. The players we'll bring in will be long-term players.

Did you get a fair shake in the NBA?
Well, you know what you're getting into and you're just grateful to have an opportunity when you're getting into the NBA. I am grateful that Chicago gave me a chance to see what it's like. We would of loved to have coached Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and all those guys, but they were gone about a month after we took the job. With the Hornets, things get down to expectations. We have a team that was picked fourth or fifth and we finished fourth or fifth and then lost Jamal Mashburn, who was one of the top 15 players in the league. We went to the playoffs and they felt we should have won the East, which meant we should have won the NBA championship. I'm used to expectations, I'm not afraid of them. I'm sure that Mike Garrett and Dr. Sample have expectations as well. They have that new building going up and they are not planning on not winning some basketball games. We already have spoken and I know he is planning on graduating players and I'm fine with that. As far as a fair shake, there have been 80 coaches released in the last four years, so I am in good company.

You have been on both sides. What appeals to you about coming back to college?
You know what appeals to me is the college setting. I grew up on a college campus. My father was a head basketball coach for 14 years at the University of Southern Mississippi in two different stints (1949 to 1954 and 61 to 70). My wife, Beverly, grew up in a college setting as well. Her father was a vice president for 30 years at Louisiana Tech so we feel comfortable around a college campus. I miss the corny stuff about college athletics. My last year at Iowa State, I had a guard (J.C. Holloway), a little guard from Kansas. He knocked on my door one night and told me he had a question to ask me. He told me he was thinking about getting married and wanted to know if I thought it would be okay. I can assure that Will Perdue and Charles Oakley weren't asking me that with the Chicago Bulls (crowd laughing). I had another guy who knocked on the door and had an article from his hometown newspaper in Beaumont, Mississippi, and wanted to share the article with me. That's fun stuff and those are the things you remember. You feel like you can impact a young person. I also miss the practice. You don't practice a lot in the NBA. You practice about two out of 12 days. I miss the preparation for games, two or three days before a game.

There were reports about you having second thoughts...can you talk about that?
No there were no second thoughts at all. I talked to Mike and (former senior associate athletic director) Daryl (Gross) and within five minutes of the first conversation with them, I told them I wanted the job. We went through a period with the holidays and bowl game that we both decided to take a step back. After the holidays, we had contracts to work out both with USC and the New Orleans Hornets. I might add there were things that were overblown and overstated (about the Hornets), but they were magnificent to us in those negotiations. I think Mike would attest to what I just said. I have always viewed USC as one of those special places. I am so excited about getting into an area with this much talent. I can tell you that we are going to work really hard with the high school coaches that I have always viewed as being terrific. These are guys that work hard and are serious about it. I do think recruiting is about relationships. A great deal of that has changed in the last few years.

Are your former recruiting contacts still in place?
Well, I hope a lot of those guys haven't been fired by now, but that happens in our business. One of the great things about some of the places that I have been is that there wasn't a lot of talent in those areas. We had to think nationally in terms of our recruiting. I spent a great deal of time out there while I was at UTEP. We had eight or nine players from here while I was there. We are going to have to look everywhere, but we are certainly going to start in our backyard. I kept a lot of those guys on my mailing list when I was in the NBA just because there is always that chance that you might get fired.

Have you set boundaries with this year's team?
I'm going to meet with the players. I would like to meet with the coaching staff and talk to everyone individually. The returning players...I want to find out more about them. I want to meet with the academic counselors. I would like to meet with the compliance people right off the bat because NCAA rules do change week-to-week and I'm sure they have changed in the last six years. I have had an opportunity to watch the team play. I intend on continually to watch them play. I will probably watch a game somewhere along the way, but I don't want to be a distraction to this team at all and I'm not going to offer any suggestions. I'm going to critique...it sure beats being critiqued and try to encourage more than anything else.

What brought you to the conclusion that this is your last job?
I don't want to move anymore. We have been all over this country. Our daughter lives in the area. I'm not interested in moving again. This is it.

You mentioned Arizona as the standard for recruiting, how much is UCLA the standard for long-term success in basketball?
I think you look at what's going on right now and the team to beat right now is Arizona. In my opinion, that is the team that everyone should be concerned with over the course of the last ten years. They have been playing at a high national level on a consistent basis, turning out NBA players. They have been doing a lot of their work here in southern California. It makes a lot of sense for a young man who is thinking about the next four years of his life as opposed to leaving our area to build a relationship with the Trojan family, which is so strong. Those are the type of things that we are going to sell and try to do. They will be our staff's measuring stick and I consider Lute (Olson) a guy to look at with great respect. There are a lot of coaches in this league who are terrific basketball coaches, but Lute got that program turned around by being a recruiting coach. I intend to do the same thing here.

Do you understand that you will have to sell yourself to the current players?
About me leaving? No, that's not going to happen.

How far away is this program?
I'm not going to take any short cuts. That doesn't mean that we might not have to take a junior college player somewhere along the way, but what I'm saying is that I'm not going to go out here and use our full complement of scholarships next year and just be mediocre. We might have to take a step back next year before we move forward the following year. Next year, we have four scholarship guys coming back. We don't have a guy in the program who is a power forward or a center coming back next year. That's difficult. Last time I checked, those guys are kind of important. There is going to be a lot of traffic on those kind of players. If we can't get them, we might play very small next year. We are going to bring in the kind of people that I think can help us beat Arizona.