Division 1 Athletics Quotes

I mean there's a hell of a difference between the Big Ten and the ACC when it comes to quality football.

I go to a wrestling match, and I love it. But at a wrestling match, on every level - that includes Division I - you go into an empty and cold gym, you roll out a mat, and you set 10 chairs up on each side. That's a dual meet, and it's very hard to act like it's a big event.

Even at North Dakota State, football is a big deal.

The ACC is a great league.

I would say from top to bottom, the SEC is strongest. Every now and then, another conference is going to have a great number one team. But week in and week out, having to play a really tough schedule that's preparing you for the post­season, there's no better conference than the SEC.

I was a 52-year-old coach. But people don't realize I had 25 years as a head coach. Most coaches my age only had a few years as head coach. I had six years at Miami of Ohio, eight years at Northwestern, 11 at Notre Dame.

The Big Five is a competition played in the University of Pennsylvania's Palestra among five Philadelphia-area Division I schools: Saint Joseph's, La Salle, Penn, Temple, and Villanova. 'The Big Five' was immensely popular, and rivalries quickly grew to intense proportions.

I loved the idea of playing quarterback on Friday Night Lights in high school, that whole experience. I wanted to be a Division I quarterback, that became my goal growing up, other than being a professional hockey player.

A Division I college wrestling team has so many guys at such a high level it'd be like having every single guy in the gym being a top 10 UFC guy, and that's who you're competing against every single day. Most everyone has been wrestling since they were 5 years old. It's been their dream to wrestle in college. There's such a high level of intensity.

It takes a very tough man to play defensive line at any level of football, but to be able to do it on a Division 1 level, or a professional level, it takes that intensity, that aggression, and you have to be tough.

I think people who grow up in one particular environment, like the Alabama-Auburn game, they don't ever get the same appreciation for the Ohio State-Michigan game or the Michigan State-Notre Dame game or the Michigan-Michigan State game, the Browns and the Steelers.

I was set to go to Oregon to play college baseball and football.

At the end of the day, I grew up wanting to play in the SEC.

I think early in my development as a quarterback, before I ever got a Division I college offer or anything, my brother was in the spotlight, first-round draft pick. People expected me to be him, but I was underdeveloped, undersized, unrecruited... so it was tough at that point.

I think, between me and Chris Brown, if you combined our games, you'd get, like, a real Division I basketball player.

You see a lot of smaller-school guys go to the NFL and have success: Carson Wentz, Derek Carr for example.

I think they need to expand the playoff system. I think the minimum should be 16 teams, but they could easily go with more than that... in other words, I want to see more football. Everybody from rec league softball on down can figure out how to put together a tournament and yet Division I can't.

I was going from Furman to the University of Georgia. I transferred to play football.

I was recruited at Alabama and at Auburn to play basketball.

Even when I was being recruited here to the University of Virginia, a lot of people in my own community didn't think I was Division I football material because I played at a small private school.

Arkansas is very intriguing to me because it is the only show in the state. Obviously, without a professional team and to have the only Division I football team playing at the level that it's at, it kind of draws unified support throughout the whole state. When you've got that, it's something special.

I love my country, and the mental and physical demands of the Navy SEALs was what I had been training for my whole life growing up in Montana. There's a reason Montana produces more SEALs than any other state. As a collegiate athlete, I enjoyed the mental and physical challenges Division I football presented. When a recruiter first told me about the Navy SEALs, I knew it was the right fit.

I still carry it with me that I'm a I-AA guy and I had to go down to the minor leagues in college football and prove who I was.