 Erik Ainge Combine Interview Tennessee quarterback Erik Ainge may have helped his cause with a last minute scoring drive in the Senior Bowl but only time will tell if he has done enough to move up on draft boards. Ainge talked with the media at the NFL Combine about a number of topics. On the senior bowl Go back and watch the film and ultimately what they'll go back to make their final judgment on. Definitely think it helped. On his fourth-quarter wins Winning football games. That's why we all play is to win, not to throw for a bunch of yards and lose. Nobody likes to do that. I think winning football ultimately is the most important and I'm definitely as qualified as anybody in that respect. On playing basketball My dad and my uncle [Danny Ainge]. Obviously I'm from a big basketball family. I figure there's less 6-6 quarterbacks than there are shooting guards with average hops and OK defense. I can still shoot it though. More on basketball Going into my senior year of high school, I played AAU ball all over the country and had to guard Sebastian Telfair and had to played against Al Jefferson and couldn't guard some of the guys that were
at the elite level, and that's when I decided to play football or baseball. I ended up choosing football. Where are you working out at and what are you doing? API in Pensascola, Fla. Lifting eating and running. Just about everything you could do anywhere. All the same stuff anywhere you go. You go somewhere that's all you doing no distractions and kind of your job for a few weeks. It's been fun. On what he attributes his streaks without interceptions to Decision-making. I think comes from good coaching. I think it comes from having good guys around me. You've got to have time to throw the football. You can know where to it's got to go, but you've still got to have time to get it off. It's intelligence that comes from coaching and being functional and being able to listen to sit in meetings and listen to what Coach [David Cutcliffe] or whoever has to say and taking it out to the practice and be functional with it on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday so that by the time you play the game, 90 percent of the stuff they do, you've already seen before. Every team always has something different and they might confuse you, but when you get confused on those few plays, you just make a good decision and don't turn it over and all the other ones you've seen before,
so you've just got to go play. On being at the Combine The one thing you don't get to do at the combine is play football. You get to do everything, but you still don't get to play. That's why the senior bowl is good. That's why stuff like that is good. That's why when you go out there, some guys look good in drills and they can't play in the game to save their lives. Some guys look terrible in drills and they're great. It's not the only factor, so I think kind of knowing that and not having the attitude that it doesn't matter, but the attitude that it's another piece of the puzzle helps guys get through this weekend and do well on Sunday. On getting an opportunity There's a lot that goes into it. You've got to have good teammates, good coaches. You've got to mesh well. There's a lot of good players that don't end up being good They have to play too soon or they end up playing too late. There's a little bit of luck that goes into it, I think, but if you have all that, it's how good do you want to be. Are you going to be the first guy in and the last guy to leave? Everybody can throw the comeback and the dig and the take off and the post. everybody can do that or they wouldn't be here. They all have the physical tools, but if you're going to be great, you've got to do the
little things, and that's what I intend to do. On playing in Senior Bowl
It's fun to play with the guys you've played against. Half the guys here, it seems like I've played against before either in a bowl game or in the SEC. You get to play with those guys and it was a lot of fun. You know if you win or lose, it's not really that big a deal, but you know when you're
out there on the field, you realize we're all competitive and we want to win just as much as any other time we're playing football. It was important to us when we were out there, and as soon as the game was over we realized it really didn't matter that much. But when we were on the field and playing, it was really important.
On Mike Martz coaching him
He gave me a really good taste of what it's going to be like to go somewhere and have a whole offense thrown at you and fundamental that they want you to change and things what they want you to do, and not baby you and say here's what I want, here's the playbook, go. If you're a rookie, you don't get the
luxury of going in there of already knowing the offense and having played before, like all of us did in college. You're a rookie again, just like when you were a freshman and a freshman in high school. You've just got to go in there and be the first guy there and the last guy to leave and try to do all the little things and do it right. On what scouts are saying to him They don't critique much. They don't really tell you what they like and what they don't like that much right now. I'm sure as they get more into the process and closer to the draft you get, they'll tell you. I'm sure one of the things. I need to keep working on is drops just a profile of what it looks like. We
didn't take seven-step drops at Tennessee. It's not that I can't do it, I just haven't done much of it. So just taking more seven-step drops and making sure I look the same as all the other guys. What he improved on I think I made the most improvement. I threw a lot more touchdowns, red zone decision making. I threw 10 interceptions and only had one game where I threw more than one. Until the Kentucky game,m the last regular season game of aof the year, the most I ever threw in a game was one. I didn't have a game where I threw three picks, or four picks and lost the game for us. I think decision making in general and just playing football. Who were your heroes growing up? All those guys that are retired in the last five years, Brett Favre was still playing. When I was in the back yard I was Brett Favre somebody else might have been Dan Marino. Those are the guys we all watched and looked up to. Does that mean you're going to be like them, no, but it's just kind of another piece to it. Who he takes after as quarterback Probably the person I watched the most that helped my game was Peyton [Manning], just because we had the same college coach same offense is so similar. Not in-season, but I'll go in the off-season. I'll watch what the does at line of scrimmage and his thought process. We went to no huddle offense this year and a lot of what I got was from Coach Cutcliffe and lot of what he got was from Peyton. Favorite NBA team? I'm a hugh Celtics fan
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