BOULDER – University of Colorado head coach Gary Barnett met with several football beat writers at the Dal Ward Athletic Center Friday afternoon and spoke about his recent reinstatement. The following quotes are excerpts from the session.

ON BEING REINSTATED – “I am not as far behind as you might think because Brian (Cabral) and our coaches and the players operated at a pretty high level (this spring). I don’t have a lot of backed issues that need to be done, so I can pretty much focus on the things ahead of me."

"Of course, the first thing is going to have to be hiring a secondary coach; that’s No. 1 at this point in time. I have got 780 e-mails that I’ve got to respond to and letters that I want to do."

I didn’t get a chance to meet with any of our players at all, so I am trying to catch some of those guys right now. Next week most of them will be back for summer school and summer workouts are starting, so I’ll try to get with them one-on-one as much as I can, and for sure a team meeting one of these mornings.”

ON THE UNIVERSITY’S RESTRUCTURING – “I don’t know if I can predict (its affects) right now. It is a little premature. I don’t have any way to look at it as something that is necessarily tying our hands or creating a situation that is unworkable. I just don’t know what to expect. My responsibilities still come down to the same things, no matter who I report to or who gets to know about it or who gets to go through it. It is recruiting, it is playing the game, it is getting your guys to make sure they graduate and it’s educating them on how to do the right thing. The bottom line is that is my whole job. It may be more paperwork, or it may be that more people are privileged to see the things that you do, but the bottom line is that all these things are my responsibility and I have to find a way to do them.

“I don’t think (this ordeal) is over. I think that’d be a huge mistake to make a statement that it is over, because it is ongoing. I think the only thing that’s over is that my suspension is over. Now I need to go back and look at the changes that have been decided on and see how it affects us and how best to go about doing our business within those changes. The particular segment that we are in right now is right at the end of recruiting and right in the middle of some critical evaluation times with kids (in summer camps). So we have to make sure that we get as many people in here as we can that we are evaluating. During this period of time we meet a lot of parents and families that come through in the next 60 days to check out the campus and the coaches. So, we have to decide how we’re going to recruit and (face) the things that need to be addressed with the parents and players between now and the season is critical.”

ON AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDENT-ATHLETES – “I think this school and this community is a hard place for African-American student-athletes to feel like they are comfortable. I think that within the university and within the community it has become a very difficult place for them. I think that will be an issue. There won’t be anything we can do about other coaches (using that against CU in recruiting); that is just the dirty part of the business. I think that on our end the only thing we can control is that our players see that we are making efforts to make this a better place for them. I think there are definitely things we can do within the university and I definitely think there are things we can do within the community to do our part. We are going to need a lot of help.

“This is an issue we have to address now. I am going to call on the black community. I am going to call on former players who’ve gone through it. I’m going to call on the parents of black players who are here in our program and the black players that are here right now and have made it and are doing okay. There is no question – they don’t have the same quality of life that a white athlete has or a white student. I am going to harp on it with the university. If they are going to put us under student affairs, then they are going to hear it. If they are going to integrate us into the campus, well part of that is to understand (to) let us integrate some other people into this campus as well. This is something that I’m going to raise a stink about with our university. We have never had more than 440 African-American students on the campus every year. Maybe 500 one year, so it’s always an issue to those kids. But there isn’t anyone better than dealing with it than us, because we have one quarter of all the black student males that we’ve recruited to this campus and graduated, and found ways for them to live here acceptably.”

ON HIS LEAVE OF ABSENCE – “What I did was not so much ask myself (what to do) but ask others their perception on things that I could have done better. I took these four months to learn; I learned something every single day. Otherwise that would have been a waste of my life. I took the chance to try to learn something as often as I could. There were moments that my faith wandered a little bit as to whether or not what I felt the right to do would be done. You can’t hear and read all the things that were out there for four months without wondering. I don’t think anybody gave me much of a chance to survive it. I did have an enormous amount of faith that reasonableness – and what I felt would be reasonable and hopefully some degree of just and hopefully the right thing – would be done. I did have that kind of faith all along. E-mails, e-mails, e-mails, e-mails and e-mails from everybody, a couple articles that I read, the phone calls from peers, notes, our players parents standing up (all got him through this). To have their parents stand up and go to bat for you, that is as rewarding as it gets and the former players. That’s as rewarding as it get. I’ve said this to a couple people: it’s like going to your own funeral, but this time you get to thank them. The support was incredible and the Buff community was amazing. My family and I couldn’t have got through this with out all of them.

“All the players that I’ve had have come to my defense. And that’s all that’s been really important to me – my family, the people that I’ve worked with and the kids I’ve coached. When things like that happen, you just have to say that what is important are these kids, their parents and my family.”

ON IF THE MEDIA FRENZY WILL CONTINUE – “I am prepared for that; I am prepared for that. That makes someone doing my job particularly tough on them because that’s a constant pounding. It’s not a big pounding, but after you do it for enough days you get a pretty big bruise and you can get an injury. I am prepared for that. I know it is going to happen. Four months ago I would have told you that I couldn’t survive it. I would have said, ‘I can’t take that.’ But I have learned through this process that none of that stuff is terminal.”

ON CU’S RECRUITING DISADVANTAGE – “We have been at a disadvantage here for awhile. When you compare resources that this university compares with the other universities we compete with and that our fans want us to compete with, we are not even close, we’re not even in the same ballpark. How we’ve done it, I don’t even know. We never have had a competitive advantage. I don’t care what anybody says. We have come from behind in this process for years and years. It is not anything new to us. Do these (new) rules put us at a disadvantage? We’ll, I don’t know if we know yet. And if it does, then so be it. It’s the way it is. It doesn’t make any difference. Did I say those things to the administration? No, because it wouldn’t have even made a difference. There wouldn’t be much they could do about it.

“I really think that we will be hurt more in-state than out of state. Our coaches have had a lot of really positive responses from high school coaches out there no matter where we go, and in-state as well. It is always a little harder to recruit in-state than out of state just because there is more information disseminated and most of it is negative that gets picked up. The kids in Texas know less about what’s going on and the kids in California than the kids here in Colorado. So in some ways it is easier for us to go out of the state. We may have to do more nation-wide recruiting. One of the things we found at Northwestern was that some of the parameters that we had cost us more money and we had to go farther and meet more people in order to get the ones that have a big enough pool. We will go where the numbers are. Probably the Midwest I’d imagine, as we’d think it through. I will initiate the conversation about all of this (controversy). A lot of the time (parents) think they are embarrassing and tough questions to ask. I’ll go right in with them.

“We really have been well received by the coaches out there and we have been better received by the recruits than you would think. But it’s just too early to see right now.”

ON COLLEGE FOOTBALL’S ALLEGED RECRUIT FAVORITISM – “When you go to extremes and you fly them in on private planes, you take them to restaurants they are never going to go to and you use all sorts of things, then you have a bigger de-recruiting process to go through. Those of us who don’t do that stuff and don’t play those games and take them to places they are going to go to when they’re students here" we don’t spend excessively, we don’t fly them in on expensive planes, we have never done any of those things that people think we do for that reason because we don’t want kids to have any surprises once they get here (to play). We want them to know they are going to be just like everybody else, but it’s going to be harder for them because of the demands that are going to be on them. They are held to higher academic standards, even though it’s made to look like just the opposite and that they’re given privileges. They are held to higher behavioral standards than the normal student. We have tried to make an effort here not to have any surprises in their lives so we don’t have to have separation between recruiting and de-recruiting, so when they get here they say this is exactly how I thought it would be and there aren’t any surprises. That part has never come out and no one has ever understood it because it’s on the news side and everything is blown up to the extreme. Those of you who know what college sports are like have a different feel for this. But, that never really came out in the process. But, that’s not a surprise for me nor is it a disappointment for me.”

ON HIRING A SECONDARY COACH – “I’d like to do it before (summer) camps start. At this point in time because there is no practice, I don’t necessarily have to stick to that, but I’d like to do it by the time our camps start in the next 10 days.”

ON SEEING THE NEW 4-3 DEFENSE THIS SPRING – “I thought it was much simpler and I thought the kids could just play and not get bound up mentally. But I also saw a more experienced team playing. I saw guys who weren’t ready to play last year come out and play well.”