The second-year coach of the Weber State Wildcats knows what he wants to do with the football program in Ogden, Utah, and he also knows it won’t happen overnight. But if and when it does, look out.
“Every team I’ve ever coached from the time I started has always been a tough, hard-nosed football team,” McBride said. “When people line up (against us) they know they’re gonna have to pay a price to play (us).”
“They’re not exactly what I expect to put on the field at this point,” McBride added. “What I expect is to be tough, hard nosed, no give up, keep going after ‘em.
“That football team that takes care of the fundamental part of the game and doesn’t do things to beat itself,” he went on. “And then when the fourth quarter comes around you learn how to finish.”
McBride, who spent the previous 13 of his 40 years of coaching experience as head coach at the University of Utah just down the road, is a no-nonsense guy who doesn’t choose to make excuses. It shows when he talks about his team’s current showing of 1-2 in the Big Sky Conference and 2-4 overall.
“We haven’t played well enough to win,” McBride said candidly during a phone interview. “We’ve played well enough on defense but not on offense, so with our inability to do things efficiently offensively it’s cost us a lot.
“We turn the ball over too much,” McBride continued. “We give up too many sacks. We do things the good teams don’t do. We’re still trying to find ourselves as a football team.”
McBride calls that search “a process.”
The veteran mentor also had no desire to use injuries as an excuse. The Wildcats, like the Montana Grizzlies, lost a star running back in Zach Hall who, like UM’s Lex Hilliard, went down with a preseason Achilles tendon injury. Hall rushed for nearly 900 yards for WSU in 2005. There have been other losses as well.
“You never worry about what you don’t have,” McBride said of the injuries. “You just worry about what you do have, so there are no excuses here. We’ve gotta continue to move forward for the things that I believe in and the things I want from them and keep asking them for the same things every day until you get what you want from them.”
So does McBride hate this Weber team? Not in the least.
“These kids have a good attitude towards what they’re going,” McBride boasted. “I don’t have any problem with them as far as what their daily habits are. They’re not an attitude-problem group of guys.
“We just need to do a better job of coaching them and they need to do a better job of playing,” McBride said. “The future here is down in the young classes and we kind of knew that. It’s not gonna be something that’s gonna happen overnight here. We’re not all of a sudden gonna be the top dog.”
McBride said he’s pleased with the recruits he and his assistants have landed so far and now it’s a matter of bring them along “the right way.” He said he expects the Wildcats to be a “tough bunch to deal with” in the near future.
As a veteran guy who has coached at all levels in the college ranks since he started as an assistant at his alma mater, San Jose State, McBride said he’s impressed with the level of play in the Big Sky Conference, especially this season on the defensive side of things.
What McBride likes about Montana is the team’s balance.
“They’re very solid,” McBride said of the Grizzlies. “They’re not going to do anything to beat themselves. They’re gonna create something in the kicking game to help ‘em win a game. They’re gonna create something on offense to help ‘em win a game. They’re gonna create a quarterback sack to win a game.
“They’ve got some play makers on both sides of the ball and in the kicking game that give them opportunities to win games,” he added.
McBride has seen changes in the college game - both good and bad - over his lengthy career. While he wouldn’t say it was totally one way or the other, he mentioned the impact of technology on the sport.
“The information about what goes on within a program is now available to everybody,” McBride said. “There’s more access to everything than ever … from the talk radio shows to the press to this, to that.
“Everybody knows your business,” he said, “so there are no secrets out there.”
McBride said in some ways the players are of a different makeup than they were earlier in his career. But he also said he sees some of the same problems today that he saw 40 years ago.
“Just different faces and different names,” McBride said. “For me this has been a great profession. Obviously I’ve had my highs and my lows. You’ve gotta works through the lows to get to the highs.”
The two big things McBride has learned over the years are patience and holding on to your beliefs.
“Don’t detour from what you believe in,” he said, “and just stay after what you’re trying to get done. Don’t let what people say or what people do influence what you’re doing and don’t lose sight of what you want to get done.”
The Griz and Weber State kick it off at 1:05 Saturday in Ogden.
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