Oct. 28, 2014

South Carolina Head Coach Steve Spurrier
Opening Statement
“We have the Tennessee Vols coming into Williams-Brice Saturday night, late game, 7:35, hopefully our fans will sleep late Saturday morning and be able to stay up and scream and yell. We need some support. We need to play better than we’ve been playing and try our best to get a victory against Tennessee. They’re a team that has lost some close ones, 10-9 against Florida, and I think 35-32 against Georgia. They’re 3-5, but they could be a lot better. They played Oklahoma right down to the wire and had a turnover late in that game and last week against Alabama, I think they actually outscored Alabama over the last three quarters. They’re a team that plays a lot of freshmen, sophomores. They’re playing extremely hard. They have a linebacker that leads the nation in tackles or leads the SEC. He is all over the place making tackles. We watched one play and he blitzed on the left side, running back broke a run and he ran him down 40 yards down the field. They have guys flying around, hustling, playing the way you’re supposed to. If we’re going to have a chance this week we have to match their intensity and effort level. We have to fly around and really chase hard, offense, defense, and special teams. We’ll try our best to do that, try to get our guys to make some plays and go from there.

“We lost the game last week. The offense lost. The defense lost. The special teams lost. Us, coaches, lost. We weren’t good enough on one side of the ball or the other. It was the worst red zone offense we’ve had around here in a long time. I can’t remember three times in the red zone not getting any points. As it turned out, that was a big thing that hurt us, but it’s happened, and you try to learn from it and try not to repeat the same mistakes that occurred in the last game so hopefully we can move on. Hopefully we can get our players playing at a very high level of intensity, enthusiasm, and try to have a go at Tennessee here Saturday night.”

On the confidence in the offense
“I don’t know about confidence. I know we got clobbered up at Tennessee last year after we clobbered Arkansas. Our offense didn’t have that good of a game. You thought we had a good game because we got five touchdowns (at Auburn), we had chance to score eight touchdowns. Then if we converted those opportunities, we really would have been good, but we didn’t so we’re moving on and trying to get better.

On what they can do to get better
“There’s a lot of things we can do better; block better, run better, throw better, catch better, all of those kinds of things, stop the other team better. It’s a combination of a little bit of everything. We haven’t finished when we’ve had an opportunity to finish the game.

On if he’s had any other defenses during his career struggle and force his teams’ to outscore opponents
“Sometimes it gets to where you’re really struggling and you have to try and do that, which we tried to do last week, but we didn’t do it very well and that’s the way it worked out. We’re struggling, but then again, we’ve been even or ahead in the fourth quarter in three losses so if the offense had continued playing at a high level, we’d have one or more wins, maybe three more. It’s been a team breakdown late in games even though we’ve broken down a lot earlier in other games also.”

On if going for it on fourth down and trick plays helps give the offense confidence
“That was just what we thought we had to try do to win the game last week and if we had played well in the red zone on a couple plays, it’s little different here or there, it could’ve made a difference, but it didn’t work out. It wasn’t good enough. That was the plan last week, that’s not the plan this week.”

On the upcoming stretch of games
“We have three of the four big games left, they’re all big games, but you think about our rivals in the conference; Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee are the three biggest. Maybe Kentucky is going to be one pretty soon because they beat us this year. Then of course in-state with the Clemson game. We’ll see what we can do. We had some good fortune last year, except we lost to Tennessee and Georgia, but we’re one up with three to play on those four teams.”

On having Pharoh Cooper on the offensive side of the ball
“Pharaoh is a talent, we all know that, and a wonderful young man. You don’t have to worry about him getting full of himself or anything like that. He’s tough. He fights for every yard. He’s not one of the kids that’s runs out of bounds three yards or five yards ahead of the defender…Pharoh is a tough kid, can throw, run, and catch. We’re always trying to find a way to get him more passes.”