Tom O’Brien talked about his first N.C. State team Monday at the 2007 ACC Kickoff in Pinehurst shortly after the media picked his team to finish sixth in the ACC’s Atlantic Division. He said he’s not too concerned with the prediction, though.

“I never gave it any credence [wherever] we were picked,” O’Brien said. “So as I said a long time ago, if you guys knew what you were doing, you’d be doing something else.”

He announced the transfer of two players, another who withdrew from school in the spring and three freshmen who didn’t qualify academically.

But more than the personnel losses, O’Brien said his team is focused on overall improvement.

“Any time you’re 3-9, you’ve got a lot of work to do. I think those kids were embarrassed that they were 3-9. They want to be a much better football team,” O’Brien said. “And they’ve worked extremely hard. And now it’s up to us to coach them up and get them in the right spots so they can win.”

Senior defensive tackle DeMario Pressley said Sunday before the predictions were released that he doesn’t mind being doubted.

“That’s fine. We can be the underdogs, but I know that we are working very hard,” Pressley said. “And we are beginning to eliminate all of the penalties, stuff like that. We are going to be great this year.”

As for how high the bar should be set for the program, O’Brien said his team is aiming high.

“We can win a conference title,” O’Brien said. “And if you can do that, then I think you have a chance of winning it all.”

Even though State hasn’t won an ACC championship since 1979, O’Brien said that won’t change his goals.

“That’s where we’re going to go,” O’Brien said. “We’ve got to get there.”

He also said he’s not looked back a lot on what the team did before he got to State. O’Brien noted that’s not what is important in how he’ll coach the team.

“We didn’t make a lot of judgments off what they did in the past. We went out there on our own,” O’Brien said. “There’s a lot of ways to skin cats in coaching this game, and we’re coaching probably quite a lot of positions differently than they were coached in the past.”

As for how the team might produce some of the changes to get more wins, senior receiver Darrell Blackman said the offense is changing its philosophy. He said the team had been stuck in an offense designed for Philip Rivers, who could read defenses very well and knew the offense better than the coaches.

“We needed to change the concept of the offense so we could move the ball like we wanted to,” Blackman said. “But that just wasn’t happening.”

Blackman said there’s been a new coaching approach as well, a change from the long-winded talks of former coach Chuck Amato to the concise O’Brien, who Blackman called a “man of few words.”

“With coach O’Brien, the talking doesn’t really do much; it’s just talking; it’s just words,” Blackman said. “Words can’t win a football game for you. Words can’t win a championship for you.”

Meanwhile, the team still hasn’t named a starting quarterback for the upcoming season, with Daniel Evans, Harrison Beck and Justin Burke all in the mix. Blackman said the quarterbacks were getting pretty evenly split repetitions in summer drills.

O’Brien said he’s hoping someone will do well enough to earn the job soon.

“We’ll name it [the starter] before the first game. If we can do it sooner, we’ll do it sooner. But there’s no real set timetable, but it’s got to be done by then,” O’Brien said. “So hopefully someone will separate themselves from the pack right now.”

And he also said not to expect a dual-quarterback system from his team.

“You’d like to have one guy,” O’Brien said. “If you have two quarterbacks, you don’t have any.”