PonyFans.com: Now that you have had a chance to look back on the 2012 season, your first with Garrett Gilbert at the helm of the SMU offense, how would you evaluate his first season with you, with head coach June Jones, with his new teammates and new offense?

SMU QBs coach Dan Morrison: He’s such a mature young man that you’re really dealing with someone that knows how to get better — you don’t have to teach him how to get better. He truly is a senior in college, what you would hope a senior in college would be like. He has a maturity about him, he has a presence about him. He’s learning the offense. When he came in last year, he was only really starting to pick it up in training camp, because he arrived here so late. You go through the first couple of games, and you’re still trying to put all the pieces together in that kind of line of fire.

Quarterbacks coach Dan Morrison said that improved confidence and understanding of the offense allowed Garrett Gilbert to show significant improvement over the course of his first season running the SMU offense (photo by SMU athletics).

So it was about halfway through the year, almost to the game — you started to see the ball come out quicker, the eyes … the eyes are always the indicator — how fast kids see things, and how fast they can react to things. You know they’re beginning to pick up the offense when the decision to be made … if there’s hesitancy in it, they’re still learning. And that’s very normal. Then you started to see that he was seeing things quicker.

But then, we started to see … he was taking off and going places when he had to scramble around. He was deceptive. He was faster than he appeared, and he’s very, very strong, especially from the hips down. That’s when a few things started to get put into the offense that cater to his ability to take off and go. Because that’s always problematic for defenses, if you have a quarterback that can not only slide around the pocket and escape things, but can also take off, and take off and cause you problems. He took off a couple of times (out of necessity), and then by design, he started to take off. The main running play he had averaged 12 yards a carry, and that’s through six games, so that’s an indicator that he’s pretty good at that.

Down in the weight room, like I said, he’s very physically strong from the hips down, which shows itself in how he runs. He runs through things, he pulls his leg through tackles. He does things that you try to teach running backs to do, to pull your legs through tackles, and he does those kinds of things naturally, without ever having been taught or told to do them — he just does it.

You can see people kind of misjudge the (pursuit) angles on him, which is an indicator that he’s faster than he looks. That’s always an indicator, when good secondary players and linebackers are misjudging the angles on him. There are some pretty good players who misjudged their angles on him last year. If they’re not, it’s something deceptive that’s going on, or he’s quicker than he looks like he’s running. He’s the only quarterback I’ve ever seen in all the years I’ve been doing this that ran a quarterback draw for … about 74 yards for a touchdown. That just doesn’t happen.

So I think as the season went along, his confidence started to build, and he was seeing things better in the throwing game, and he has built on that in the spring, and he’ll continue to build on that in the summer. He’s doing real well, and he has a nice knack of being able to … one of the criteria you look forward to in a quarterback is their ability to slide around in the pocket and keep your eyes down the field and make plays down the field. It would be nice if you’re playing seven-on-seven and you can just stand back there and throw, but the reality of football is that you’re going to have to slide up, slide over, slide around … it just happens — somebody beats somebody around the edge (and applies pressure). It just happens sometimes. So he has that unique ability.

He has so many things going for him. His physical stature, when you actually see him … most people that see him, that haven’t seen him, are surprised at how big he is, how imposing he is. He has a presence, and because he’s seeing things faster … your arm looks faster because you’re getting rid of the ball quicker. So he’s doing all those things. The one thing that he’s also very good at, because it’s one of those things that has just happened and made him this way, is that when he arrived here, and he and were talking about … in the last six years, he had been under five different offenses and coordinators. We were the fifth system for him in six years, so … he is so accustomed to adjusting and doing new things. It’s not a big deal for him. He has done very well with that, and we’re hoping that he has a great year, because he deserves it as a young man. He’s a great kid, and this would be a wonderful thing, for him to finish his college career out and just light it up all over the place.

PonyFans.com: Gilbert arrived at SMU with such an impressive résumé — he was a high school All-America, won a national player of the year award, went to Texas with a lot of hype as one of the top recruits in the country and was given the keys to the (offense) there, and came to SMU with expectations from some that he could be something of an overnight savior. Whether those expectations were fair or not, was there anything about the way he handles such attention and expectations that surprised you?

Morrison: Well, I think what he has learned to do — and I think this is partly because he’s a young man whose dad was a quarterback — is that he has learned … I say that in the past tense, but he has hard to learn, and I don’t know if it’s natural for any kid … he has learned how to deflect some of that and be at ease with it. When you’re a freshman in college, that’s a very difficult thing to do. You can tell a kid that, tell a kid he needs to do that, but for him to actually do it, it’s very difficult.

Expectations are very unusual nowadays. They rise so rapidly that you can almost never reach them, and you have to come to grips with that, as a player, that whatever you walk into, the minute you start to have some success, you can never outrun the expectations that are going to be around you from that point on. We have had other quarterbacks who have had to experience that. I’m not sure why it accelerates so quickly nowadays. I don’t know if it’s just all the instant media, or whatever it is, but it’s in fans — it’s ingrained in them. You can never do enough. It’s too bad, because these are 18-, 19-, 20-year-old kids. But they do have to learn, and I mean in a genuine, sincere way, so it’s genuine inside, that they’re comfortable inside with what they’re going to do, that they can deflect what’s around them, they can be polite to be around those people and do all those things. But at the same time, they have to deflect everything around them, because you can’t get too focused on it, or it will distract you from what you have to do on the field. That’s why, as quarterbacks, we compete like crazy with each other — every one of them wants to play — but we also support each other completely. You have to understand that most people don’t understand what you do, and you have to be able to deflect the attention in a lot of ways, because like I said, you’re never able to chase down the expectations that people have. That’s an unfortunate aspect of what they have to learn, but the good ones are the mature ones, if they stay long enough. They have to learn that, and they understand that.

PonyFans.com: Last season wasn’t the first time you took on a quarterback who had started his career elsewhere and then played for you. You got to work with Colt Brennan at Hawaii, where he enjoyed a lot of success playing for you. How were he and Garrett different as students learning your system, and how was the teaching process different for you?

Morrison: Not a whole lot different. People will probably forget that it took Colt a full year to really master this thing. His sophomore year, which was his first year with us, we had a losing season. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was a 5-7, 4-8 kind of season [actually 5-7]. It was his next year that a couple of pieces fell into place, one of which was the fact that he and all of his receivers stayed the same, for the most part. There were a couple of changes on the outside, but the two slots and he stayed the same for three years — they got to know each other really well. They all started to understand the offense, they started to see it really well, they started to see it the same way. They took off, but the first time Colt played in games, he split time with another quarterback, by halves — one played the first half, one played the second half (for) the first two games. So he didn’t have instant success. Nick Rolovich, when he arrived, coming from a junior college, struggled a little bit, and Timmy (Chang) took his place. Then Timmy got hurt the next year, and Nick was ready, and he … his last three games that he played were probably the most prolific in the history of college football. I don’t know if any quarterback has done what he did in his last three games [Rolovich completed 89 if 151 passes for 1,548 yards and 20 touchdown passes in the final three games of the 2001 season] … ever.

But it took him a while, it took him over a year to really be a master of it. They have to get to a point where they’re not really thinking about it, where the offense is so ingrained inside them (that) it actually becomes a part of them, and they respond to it accordingly, and it just instinctively goes.

They (Gilbert and Brennan) are a little different personalities, but they both have that “I know I can do that” … They’re very confident, and of course they’re very blessed with skills. I think the only difference that Colt and Garrett will experience is that Colt did have a receiving corps that was always the same for three years, for the most part — like I said, there were a couple of tweaks outside, but for the most part, they were always the same, and that’s one thing Garrett won’t have.

PonyFans.com: Garrett’s numbers — yards, completion percentage, etc. — went up and down at times during the season, highlighted by his performance against Memphis in which he completed 71.4 percent of his passes and registered a QB efficiency rating of 165.58. Based on what he did and also on what you and Coach Jones asked him to do from one week to the next, would you say that game was his best performance of the season?

Morrison: I think so. But you sometimes judge a quarterback more on … there are some intangible things going on, as well, in their growth, and you start to see that. I started to see him, as we got into the bowl game … he was seeing and doing some things there that showed that his growth was really beginning to take shape. Sometimes this is just because of how we view things from week to week, but sometimes we don’t see a game as his best game, as much as we see from Point A to Point B, their steady rise. You could see the improvement, sometimes in the numbers and sometimes in the intangibles that we see. Maybe that’s just us, in here (coaches’ offices), working with him on a daily basis. We’re seeing the daily climb, more than the statistical peaks and valleys within the climb. We’re more interest in “Where is it headed? Where is it going? Is it consistently getting better?” Consistency and productivity are the two things that are really important to us — being a productive quarterback and then getting it into some sense of consistency. That’s what we started to see over the last six games, and into the bowl game. He was getting more consistent, he was getting more productive. He was beginning to get it. That’s how I look at it, because you’re always going to have a little bit of up and down, but you always want it to rise, and you always want to make sure that the valleys are briefer and briefer as you go along, and the peaks are longer and longer.

PonyFans.com: In what area of his game did you see Garrett make the most progress over the course of the season, from when you first started working with him in August through the win in the Hawaii Bowl?

Morrison: With quarterbacks, two of the most important things we talk about are making good decisions and making good throws, and in those two areas, he kept getting better and better throughout the season. The intangibles certainly were getting better — you could see it in his eyes … his eyes’ demeanor started to change, and that was one thing I was looking for — but he was making better decisions, which means he was understanding it better and he was making better throws. So they’re all tied together. You really can break all the complexity of the best quarterbacks down to the simple common denominators: making good decisions and good throws, and it’s our responsibility to help them. How do you make good decisions? How do you make good throws?

Some need more teaching in that area than others do, but he didn’t need a lot of teaching in that area. He just needed to know “what it is you need from me.” He has kind of grown up in that environment — and again, I think being a son of a quarterback, he understands that better than most, that really what it comes down to most is those two things. The game is extraordinarily complex, fast and crazy, but it comes to those two things: good decisions and good throws.

Morrison said he sees some similarities in the development of Garrett Gilbert and former Hawaii quarterback Colt Brennan (photo by SMU athletics).

PonyFans.com: As you look forward to his senior year, what progress do you most want to see from him in 2013? Is it simply a matter of continuing the progress he started showing in the second half of last season?

Morrison: Exactly. It’s simply that. He has matured into his own style of leadership, he’s very well respected and regarded by his teammates and coaches, he works as hard as anybody does — he does all those things you would like him to do. You just want to see that continue, you want to see it keep moving in the direction you want it to move in. You know that there are challenges ahead in the schedule, and that doesn’t phase him, and that’s exactly what you want to see. It’s: “That’s fine, and we’ll go play.”

That’s what he wants to do: just get out and go play. I think right now, I think right now, he’s just getting to the point that Colt got to, particularly with the two slot receivers in Hawaii. There’s a lot of communication going on amongst them — it’s not coaches telling them, a lot of times, what to do. Summertime is actually great for them, because we (coaches) can’t be out there. So they’re out there by themselves, and when they come by and visit, they’re talking about their communications, their discussions. They’re really interesting to hear, and I just listen to what they’re talking about. They’re talking about, “if this takes place, I’m going to do this and do that.” They’re beginning to communicate, and that’s when it started to get really good in Hawaii, because the communication was more amongst them than it was amongst us. Our job was, in part, to continue to permit that discussion and encourage it, and visit with (the players) about “what did you see? What did you see?” Because they’re the ones that are playing the game. They’re the ones who have to be on the same page with each other. So the more we can encourage that kind of dialog,

PonyFans.com: Gilbert threw 15 interceptions last season — five of which came against TCU. What do you remember about his reaction to that performance, and his demeanor in practice and in the film room after that?

Morrison: His reaction, being young — and when I say “being young,” I don’t mean age-wise … I mean young in this offense — is, a lot of times, contingent upon our reactions. We make a real conscious effort of not walking in on Monday morning and blasting him for those things, because we know the end result of that is probably bringing on more interceptions if you do that. What I know is — and this is something that’s really easy for June and me, because we’re both naturally this way — we’re going to take a game like that and we’re going to talk about “what did you see? How do you get better on this one?” It’s going to be that demeanor, because we know the players will react to our demeanor. So once he starts to realize that we’re “OK, let’s go,” then he is “OK, let’s go.”

There are some kids … you can teach to what they do wrong, and there are some kids you have to teach to what they do right. We tend to err on the side of teaching to what they do right, and build on that, as opposed to always teaching to what they do wrong. So a lot of my demeanor is going to be “that’s a great throw … that’s a good decision … that’s how it has got to look” … as opposed to “what the heck were you thinking?”

He reacted very well, but we also keep a very close eye on that. We’re very careful. We do that with everybody, too — it’s not just Garrett. We’ll be the same way with Neal (Burcham), with Connor (Preston), with Garrett (Krstich) after practice. We were that way with J.J. (McDermott) and with Kyle (Padron) and with Bo (Levi Mitchell), too. We teach a particular style that is productive. But that’s just us. I can walk in another place and have a (coach) who is very different than I am, and he can be very successful, too.

I think it’s because it’s naturally us that it works. When I used to watch Coach (Mike) Cavanaugh when he was at Hawaii, he would get so mad, and he would be dropping words that I had never heard of before. But he could get away with it because he was genuine. That’s who he was. He cared like heck about the kids. The kids knew he cared like heck about them. He had a great sense of humor off the field, but on the field, he was after them. Now, if I did that, they’d look at me like I was crazy, because that’s not me. But it was him, and you have got to be who you are. That’s how we were with him, and that’s why I think he reacted the way he did.

PonyFans.com: Did that performance and his ensuing response tell you anything about his personality that helped you when coaching him later in the season?

Morrison: It’s more that you confirm things. He always appeared, even early on, as someone who wanted to do things right. He pays attention to details, and there are some that don’t. He wanted to get it exactly right, and when you started to see how he responded to that, you see his growing maturity and his growing confidence in what he’s doing. So you know, deep down, he has all that. It might have been rattled a little bit at the University of Texas, but it certainly was there, and it didn’t take much to bring it out. So he was fine, and he knew … there are some kids you want to guide to get that “want” to get a little bit to get better, but with some kids, it’s already built in, so with those guys, you’re only there to kind of help it along — you try not to get in the way of it.

PonyFans.com: A lot was made last year about Garrett’s running ability in the second half of last season. He finished the season with 346 rushing yards, and had 342 — including a season-high 111 against Tulsa — in the last five games of the season. How much of the increased focus on Gilbert running the ball was a result of the defenses that were lining up against you, and how much was the result of improvement you saw in Gilbert or in the offense on the whole?

Morrison: It was more him. There has always been a certain hesitancy to put quarterbacks in harm’s way too often. In this offense, they are the centerpiece and you want to be smarter than to put them, too often, in harm’s way, (because) there’s a lot of very fast, big, violent characters out there that love to go after quarterbacks. So you want to be careful with that.

But it was really, as he was starting to scramble, his ability to slide, his ability to run in a way that indicated that he knew how to protect himself … and he was pretty good at it (running). So it kind of evolved into … not anything different we were seeing in defenses as it was something that he was indicating to us that he’s pretty good at this. So it kind of evolved into that, but even then, we’re still a little careful. We didn’t run him a whole lot, but sometimes that’s even better, because you kind of forget about him for a second, and you start seeing “Zach Line … Zach Line … Zach Line” … and then all of a sudden, there (Gilbert) is. You talk to defensive coordinators, and they’ll say that’s a nightmare, if you’ve got that guy back there that can do that once in a while, and you don’t know when he’s going to do it, that can be very problematic for defenses.