Sept. 16, 2006
Recap | Final Stats | Notes
HEAD COACH George O'Leary
"Before the game, I said play hard, smart and play to win. I thought we did all of that except play smart in certain situations. You have to have people make plays on both sides of the ball in order to win in games like these. We had guys that came up short. I told the players to keep working; I thought they did play hard, they just did not play smart in times."
"I thought the offensive line did a lot better in certain areas. I thought they got soft in some protections. They progressed from where they were last week."
"I thought Jason [Peters] did alright when he did not get tied over his feet. I thought the other kid Phillip Smith did a good job as a true freshman. I was pleased with that. Again, it was a good football game and a tough game to lose when you have opportunities to make plays on both sides of the ball. You have to step up and make them."
"I thought it (the crowd) was great. I thought the fans were outstanding. Obviously it is a game that will have a lot of competition in future years. It is a tough one to lose. We did not make big plays when we had to make them."
SENIOR TAILBACK Jason Peters
"If we were to capitalize and play smart like coach said I am sure it would have been a different outcome. But, you cannot really say if; you cannot live on if. We went out there and made mistakes on offense and defense and they beat us by a touchdown."
"We learned that we can bounce back especially after that loss at Florida. We are not a team that when we lose, we are going to be on a losing streak. We bounce back, they just outscored us today."
SENIOR QUARTERBACK Steven Moffett
"It is a game that you play hard so of course the loss is going to bring you down. Just like we always do, we are going to come back out to practice and try to bounce back. There is going to be a little extra incentive because we are in the conference schedule now."
"Those first two games we were not playing as well as we could or as hard as we could. This game we came out and we played hard the whole game. One thing we learned from this game is we still have it in us that we can play hard for 60 minutes."