Oct. 23, 2007
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Opening Statement
“Briefly about last week’s game, looking back it was right there near the top of some of the poorest offensive game’s that I’ve coached. Certainly our fans probably had a right to boo. It just didn’t appear that our guys (cared) to tell the truth. They were jumping offsides, dropping the ball here and there and couldn’t hit guys that were open. It was embarrassing for our offense, and I coach the offense. Shoot, I’ve apologized every year for a bad play and probably ought to again. I don’t know what we could’ve done differently. We had a pretty good game plan. It was pretty embarrassing to take those five-yard penalties going backwards time and time again.”
“What we do now is we try to regroup a little bit. We’re 6-2. We’re not mad at the fans, by the way. They sort of had a right to boo kind of by the way it happened. They were just getting run over. It just appeared like a lackadaisical effort on the part of our offense. Our defense I thought played very well. They hung in there and gave us a chance to win. Even at halftime I thought we could come back and score a couple of touchdowns, but it wasn’t to be.”
“Tennessee is a very good team. They’ve looked very good at times and not so good at times. They’ve lost to three good teams – Florida, Alabama and California. They clobbered Georgia when they came in. They’re a team that’s always pretty good. They have outstanding players at just about all the positions and are well coached. Hopefully we can get a close, tight game and find a way to win. We’re not an explosive offensive team. Our defense has played very well and hopefully we can run the ball better and get into a low scoring game Saturday night.”
On offensive execution
“Of course it’s frustrating to call a play that looks pretty good, have Kenny McKinley run a beautiful corner route and the ball is five-yards under-thrown. Sometimes protection breaks out. But anyway, it is what it is.”
On goals
“We have a lot of goals this year. Winning the SEC isn’t our only goal. I hope everyone knows that. This is not the best team we’re ever going to have here. Our big recruiting class was last year. We’re still in the building process. We’re not in the final stages. We have Andy Boyd, Cory Boyd and Web Brown. Those are the three seniors that play on offense. Defensively, Casper Brinkley, Brandon Isaac and Chris Hampton are the seniors that play quite a bit defensively. This is not our final best team ever. I hope everyone understands that.”
“We’re not quite there yet. We didn’t profess to be there, but we thought that we would play a lot better offensively than we have this year. It hasn’t happened. Anyway, we’re 6-2 and sort of understand what we can do and what we can’t do now. Are we still going to try some different players? Yeah, I’ll continue to try new players if I think they can play better than the guys who’ve been out there.”
On pressure to perform
“There’s no pressure on us. We need to relax and go play. The only pressure on us is to play smart and play with effort. We didn’t do that close on offense last week. That was the most embarrassing part of the game.”
On false starts
“The false starts was probably one of the worst parts of the whole game. Every team has one every now and then. We haven’t had many all year until the other day. It seemed like four of the five offensive linemen took their turns getting one. That was embarrassing. That’s history now and hopefully we can learn from it and try not to repeat it.”
On lack of a “mobile” quarterback
“It hurts a little bit. It hurts when you’re quarterback can’t run out there too much. Blake played a lot better last year in not being a mobile quarterback. It’s not just that. Blocking is not all that super. Kenny McKinley is about the only wide receiver that has done a lot. Maybe we haven’t thrown enough passes to the other guys either. We can’t get a lot of them off.”
On building the program
“We’re sill building a football program. We’re still in our third year. Sometimes your third year is your worst year. These guys are doing pretty well here so far…We’ve got plenty of good players here. I think that’s why Jasper Brinkley wanted to come back next year. Hopefully he can see that we do return most of our guys and hopefully we can get stronger and faster and play better.”
On playing Tennessee, Arkansas and Florida to conclude SEC play
“Two years ago we beat these three teams. We beat Tennessee, Arkansas and Florida somehow. We were underdogs in about every game so it worked out. We believe we have a chance. We have to “one game at a time” it, get some breaks and not beat ourselves and play with a lot more effort and smarts than we did last week.”
On punting more this year
“We can take care of the ball a lot better. If we have to punt six or seven times, that’s where we are. We’ve brought the punt back into play this year, that’s for sure. We’ve had 42 already and had 30 last year.”
On learning from the Vanderbilt game
“We have to get that out of our system. It’s history. It was a lousy offensive game. We have to get our confidence back and get ready to play Tennessee.”
