Sept. 8, 2015

Head Ball Coach Steve Spurrier

Opening Statement
Kentucky — I think Mark Stoops has done an excellent job there. They are very close to being a winning team and very easily could be this year. They beat Louisiana-Lafayette last week, scored a lot of points, 40-33; we have to be ready to play very well. Hopefully we can make a lot of improvement. That is probably what we need to worry about. See if we can line up, get the ball snapped, eliminate some careless penalties – try to look like a pretty good team when we go out here on Saturday night.

(We are) looking forward to a big home crowd, our first home game of the season. A lot of our players have never played here, so it will be a wonderful experience.

Health
I think a lot of the guys are getting back healthy. I believe Connor Mitch is scheduled to practice today. Terry Googer, Deebo Samuel going to practice a bit from what our athletic trainer Clint Haggard is telling us. Most of the guys are pretty healthy. The only serious injury occurred in practice again when one of the d-lineman fell into Cody Waldrop’s leg and cracked a bone right above his ankle. He will be out for some time.

On whether he scripts plays
No we haven’t done that, but we will have a play ready this week. What happened (last week) we went out there — and North Carolina wasn’t out there yet — so our guys just stood around and waited. The clock was running down, we were trying to yell over on the sideline. I don’t think anyone could hear us, for such a small crowd it seemed to be loud in there. We waited and got a delay of game on the opening play of the season. Hopefully we will have a couple of plays ready to go this week.

On calling a game
Everybody has a game plan and you stay flexible and go from there. You try to find what’s working what’s not working.

I think most coaches adjust according to the score, according to how you are doing and so forth. That little sweep around right end seemed to work pretty well, the one Shon Carson scored on. We started running it over and over, it was also a key play that Brandon Wilds ran 10 or 12 yards to help run out the clock there at the end of the game. Most coaches always try to do it over and over until the other team stops it.

On design of offense last week with running backs with Carson being fresh for the 4th quarter
I think it just worked out that way. Shon had several good runs; of course Brandon came in at the end and had several good ones also. David (Williams) struggled a bit, dropped a couple of passes that he normally catches. He is a good back. Kentucky has given up some rush yards. We have to try to mix it up just like we tried to do last week. Hopefully our pass game will be a lot better than last week. We are working on it; we will work on it today.

On last year’s game at Kentucky
Hopefully the whole scenario, we didn’t tackle very well, we didn’t get lined up as quickly as we would hope — again we had some injuries that hit us through the course of last year, a lot of guys we thought would play the whole game were not finishing games — but we played well at times, we really did, obviously we didn’t play well at end of games. I wished we (could run) out the clock when we had one touchdown lead but we didn’t, we had to punt. That happened in three games. Some other times, we ran the clock out. As you guys have noticed, almost every one of them, you run out the clock you are probably going to lose. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. Last week we were fortunate to make two first downs. That is just where we are right now. We are trying to get better. We need to improve on offense, and defense. We gave up some yards but we were tremendous in the red zone. You can’t depend on that happening every week. That is just sort of the type of team we are right now. Winning by three or four touchdowns, I don’t know if that is in our DNA right now.

I’ve always believed last year’s game with whomever you played is history. Every game stands on its own merit. We got beat last year, we got beat several times last year in a similar way and we are trying to prevent it from happening this year.