Opening statement:
“Well, very frustrating. We got a disappointed locker room. A few positive notes: I think it really hurts these guys that put in a lot of work since last January to where we are today. Not just the last week of preparation for these guys, but they put in a lot to invest in the season. Two opportunities are behind us, obviously 10 are guaranteed in front of us. We’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ve been in this business long enough; before you can win, you have to stop from losing.
“For me as a head coach, I’ve got to obviously do a much better job of emphasizing the things that we self-inflicted today. I could go through offensively, defensively, and certain phases of the game, just nonsense things that we’ve got to clean up to have a couple of those penalties back. But we did some things to overcome it. I think a critical point in the game, it felt like it was right there for us to push it over the edge. (Brian) Hightower claimed up and down that he caught that pass in the back of the end zone, and obviously that went to replay. I think that was not just a mental play for our kids, but Brian was just animated that he caught that. A game isn’t made out of woulda, coulda, shoulda. You have to overcome those moments.
“I think the part that was positive, we are paper-thin at certain positions. Julian Pearl wasn’t available for the game, but we moved Isaiah Adams out to left tackle. Jordyn Slaughter went in there, and I know we rushed for some good numbers. We weren’t able to rush in the most critical moment down there in the red area to come away with a score. I think from a health standpoint, I think we came out a little bit good. Obviously Taz (Nicholson) couldn’t be out there at the beginning of that last phase. He’d been nursing himself through a little bit of a soft tissue. We didn’t know if we would have him this week, but he found a way to make it go.
“I think for the most part we came out pretty healthy, but it’s going to be a big, big week ahead of us. We have a long drive back home. We have to hydrate. It’s been a long game here today, obviously one that we have to make sure that we recover from tomorrow. Tomorrow, we’ll hopefully learn a lot about our players on how they recover and get themselves ready for Sunday practice and Virginia on the backside.”
On his mindset moving forward:
“We can only take a step forward from here. We can’t really live on this loss. It’s tough, losing by three points , but we’re going to learn from it.”
On the offensive line:
“They worked their butts off every single day, and I wasn’t worried when they went in there. Julian Pearl’s going to be back and ready and healthy soon, so there’s a lot that we can learn from this game.”
On learning from the loss:
“The close losses hurt the most. I think just film, getting back to practice, studying our next opponent, and we have to move on from this loss. We will digest it today and tomorrow, but after that, we’ve got Virginia next at home so we’ll have the home field advantage. We have to fix our mistakes before we can win a game.”
On learning from the loss:
“We got to take the loss in now and then forget about it tomorrow after going through film. These are never easy, but we got to stop ourselves from losing these games.”
On if the team gained momentum from the defense’s performance:
“One-hundred percent, but obviously it wasn’t enough to push forward.”
