SAN DIEGO, CA – With 2025 officially in the books and the New Year here, head coaches from both Holiday Bowl teams took to the podium on Thursday to preview Friday’s matchup. After a fun week balancing work and play, including visits to the USS Makin Island and SeaWorld, both programs are shifting their focus to the game. See what Arizona head coach Brent Brennan and SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee had to say ahead of the 46th annual Trust & Will Holiday Bowl.
Brent Brennan:
Brennan on the week in San Diego and the Holiday Bowl’s hospitality:
“I want to thank everybody involved with the Trust & Will Holiday Bowl. The Sports San Diego red coats have been amazing. The treatment of our football program, our staff, and everybody has been absolutely first-class. We’ve had a great experience here, and we’re obviously excited to get to the game. Now we’re in game mode with a little more than 24 hours out, and we shift gears and really start to focus on that part of it.
We’ve had a couple of great practices. We appreciate the University of San Diego and San Diego State for opening up their facilities to our football program to get the work done to prepare for the game. This has been an awesome week for Arizona football. We’ve had a great time. We’ve had great practice. We’re excited to be here, and we really appreciate all the hard work that Sports San Diego President Mark Neville and his whole team put into this process.”
Brennan on Arizona quarterback Noah Fifita:
“Noah Fifita is a really special young man. He’s obviously a great football player. We’re incredibly proud of him. He’s the first first-team all-conference quarterback we’ve had at Arizona in 50 years, and his play speaks for itself. He’s also incredibly loyal. I’m sure Coach Lashlee is dealing with this, where the free world and college football have been chasing guys like this quarterback of ours, and those players have chosen to stay. They’re loyal. They love their university. Noah Fifita loves the University of Arizona. He loves Tucson. He’s heavily involved in the community, and he loves our program, our coaching staff, and the teammates that he gets to go to war with every week. I think that’s really special – a young man makes an unselfish decision, but one that’s fundamentally based on who he is as a person and on his character, which is unique in today’s game.”
Brennan on preparing for SMU’s aggressive, turnover-focused defense:
“If you’re watching bowl games anywhere right now, turnovers and takeaways are dominating the landscape, and that comes down to executing at a high level. That’s the Redline for us. We talk about it all the time, and when I watch SMU play, I think their defensive front is fantastic. All those guys are just active in the backfield. They’re big and physical, TFLs and sacks, and it’s a super impressive group. Then they have playmakers in the back end, especially Ahmaad Moses. He’s a really good football player. Holy smokes. If you’re watching college football right now, teams that can take care of the football in these bowl games and play clean have a chance to get the results they want.”
Brennan on keeping Arizona focused after not playing for over a month:
“With a month off, you’re really trying to focus on the process. It sounds simple and sounds cliché, but it’s not. It’s that time that’s between playing, which also gives you a really great chance. That’s one of the huge values of a bowl game – to get some other guys a chance, to get meaningful reps and get coached, and to get some competition out there. That part of it has been fun. How do you keep the practice environment enthusiastic and energized when you have all these practice opportunities with the game so far away? That’s a challenge.”
Brennan on the possibility of this team becoming the fifth team in program history to win 10 games:
“It’s obviously been a really special year for us. It starts with the alignment we’ve had with our athletic administration, our president, and the university. That flows all the way down to our coaching staff and our team. We have a great group of young men, a team that was really committed to staying together and coming back with so many of our players.”
Brennan on keeping the Polynesian Pipeline strong at Arizona:
“For Coach Tomey, the Polynesian Pipeline for him didn’t start at the University of Arizona. It started for him when he was at University of Hawaii, and he was the first head football coach to go over and recruit American Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, [and] Australia, obviously with also a lot of Polynesian players in the state of Hawaii. So then when he came over, those relationships, when he came to be the head coach at U of A, after 10 years in Hawaii, those relationships stayed strong. And as you know, in the Polynesian culture, relationships are incredibly important.
I think that was one of the things that I had the good fortune of working for Coach Tomey for six years, going to the U of A and five at San Jose State. And that was something that was such a part of our program that became a part of our program when I took over San Jose State also. Then it was easy for me to continue that here when I became the head coach at the University of Arizona. I really believe that the Polynesian culture just brings an incredible amount of family, Ohana connection, as well as really talented football players. So that was one of the things that I learned from him as a young coach. He taught me the best way to improve your football team is to improve your Polynesian population, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Brennan on the future of bowl games and the opportunity playing in one means for Arizona:
“I mentioned a little bit earlier in just the opportunity for your program to continue to develop, to continue to grow. And I think you know, when we look at this thing, that just the college football season, so much of it for us is about momentum. It’s either about us growing, or it’s about us winning, and finding ways to play winning football and getting those extra practices is an incredible opportunity for that. I also think it’s awesome for a team that, you know, the idea that the elimination or some sort of bowls not being part of college football anymore, I think it deprives people of great stuff to watch on TV over the holiday.
Like, I mean, who’s not watching bowl games right now? Stop it. Everyone is. I am, you know what I mean? And so I think college football is such a big game in this country. I think that the bowl games and the CFP, and however those things continue to work out, I’m hopeful and optimistic the bowl games, and especially the Trust and Will Holiday Bowl, continue to be a huge part of the college football landscape.”
Rhett Lashlee:
Lashlee on the week in San Diego and the Holiday Bowl’s hospitality:
“I want to thank everybody at the Trust & Will Holiday Bowl and all the Sports San Diego red coats. It’s been a great week for our guys, and I said this a few weeks ago at our press conference – this is a big-time bowl experience, a big-time bowl game, and an opportunity for our program that we haven’t had in a long time. We’re really excited to be here. We had a great week. Our guys have had a blast. Happy New Year to everyone, and like Coach Brennan said, we’re looking forward to sharing the field with a great team tomorrow night. It will be a great crowd, close to a sellout, and should be a lot of fun to ring in the New Year for both our programs.”
Lashlee on SMU quarterback Kevin Jennings:
“Kevin is returning for next year for a senior year. It’s three straight years that, in this new era of college football, he’s had plenty of opportunities to go somewhere else. Honestly, he’s always been pretty steadfast that he wants to be a Mustang. Kevin is from Dallas. He grew up in Dallas, he won a state championship at South Oak High School in Dallas. He came to SMU, and much like what Coach Brennan was saying with Noah Fifita, he’s just a really loyal young man.
Kevin sees the value of not only the degree that he’s already earned at SMU, but just the legacy that he’s able to build, staying in Dallas, being a hometown kid, winning championships in high school, winning championships now at SMU, taking us into the ACC, going to the playoffs, all those things. If he’s healthy for four or five games in the next year, he’ll have just about every passing record in the history of SMU. He’s been an incredible ambassador for our school, for our program, and there’s no one else we’d rather have leading us, and not just being a leader of our team, but being the face of our program.”
Lashlee on keeping SMU focused after a month off:
“Bowl games have a life of their own. A lot of times, they’re disconnected from the season because it’s been a month since we last played. Obviously, they don’t have any bearing on next season, so it’s kind of a standalone game. That’s why I think you see penalties, turnovers, a lot of things that you see maybe in the first or second games of the season, because you haven’t played in a month. You don’t get into that rhythm, a routine of playing. When you get out of that, rhythm is a challenge, and not to mention, you have holiday time, you have transfer portal, you have all these other factors that kids have to deal with.”
Lashlee on Arizona’s defense:
“We don’t have enough time to go over what stands out. I think we’re third in the country in turnovers, at least, coming into bowl season; they are first or second. They turn you over, they have an elite pass defense. They are in the top five in just about every category. No one can throw for over 300 yards on them the entire season. It’s pretty impressive. They play extremely hard. They know who they are, identity-wise, their scheme. You see what incredible turnaround they made from year one to year two, and they were great on offense both seasons, but the defense was the big differentiator.”
Lashlee on the opportunity for SMU to play together one final time:
“It’s one last opportunity to be together. These guys set out five months ago and have done a lot since then. It’s one last opportunity for our seniors to play college football for this team, which, in about 36 hours, will never be the same again, ever. The 2025 Mustangs get one more opportunity to try to end the season the right way and with a good feeling.
From a program standpoint, we haven’t won a bowl game since 2012. We haven’t won a bowl game of the caliber of the Trust & Will Holiday Bowl, which is, to me, an elite, prestigious bowl. We’re still in the stage of trying to build our program back on the Power Four stage on the national stage, where year in and year out, we’re in the Top 25, competing for the ACC, and competing for the playoffs. Part of that is beating really good football teams in bowl games, and we just haven’t done that in a long time.”