At Tuesday’s press conference, head coach Ron Zook said his team held a players-only meeting last week. It was the first time his players had held such a meeting in his coaching career.

Zook said that he and his coaching staff had been pushing the team hard as of late, which may have been cause for the meeting, but he was not certain.

“At first I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but I really think it’s good,” Zook said. “When we got back from the Rose Bowl, we should be a better team, but we have to make sure that (the players) understand how we got here. So we’ve pushed pretty hard.”

Although Zook didn’t go into specifics as to what may have caused the meeting or what went on at it, he touched on some of the same points later.

“I think it’s because the coaches were on them about (how) we have to continue to improve,” Zook said. “We were pushing (the players) pretty hard.”

Junior linebacker Brit Miller briefly spoke about the matter Tuesday, saying that it was nothing negative, it was just an exercise to build camaraderie.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Miller said. “It wasn’t anything negative at all. It was just something that we do as players, and it was necessary, something that we needed at the time.”