Football Press Conference Quotes
Sept. 7, 2010
Coach Long|Coach Torbush|S. Johnson|Agostinho|Quigley|Terry|Thorson
Weekly Press Conference
Kansas Football
Sept. 7, 2010 – Lawrence, Kan.
Head Coach Turner Gill
Opening Statements:
“Good afternoon. I want to start off with some positive things that we took out of this game. Obviously I think the first thing that jumps out is our defense. When you hold someone to six points in a ball game, that’s outstanding, it doesn’t matter who the opponent is. We held them to 168 total yards, 15 percent on third-down conversions, and 3.1 yards per play. On special teams, I thought the area where we stood out was kickoff returns. I think we averaged about 42-43 yards per return. Kickoffs were excellent. We put the ball deep and put the ball close to the sideline. Offensively, the only thing that I can say is a positive is that we got a chance to know where we’re at. You really don’t know anything until you go play a football game. I think the positive is we know where we’re at and how we need to move forward. I know our staff is going to be the ones to help us move this program forward. They’ve coached over 123 NFL players. We have experience. We have guys who have been through the ups and downs. That’s why I feel very, very good about our staff and moving forward.
On Georgia Tech:
“We’re well aware that they’re an outstanding opponent. Their record speaks for itself. (GT Coach) Paul Johnson has done a tremendous job there and he’s done a tremendous job wherever he has been. They run that spread option, everybody tunes into that triple option. That’s just one play that they run. It’s more of a multiple type of offensive scheme that they run. They’ve got a whole lot of different things that they do out of it. We have to be very disciplined. We have to make sure that our guys are in-tune with their particular assignments. Coach Torbush played against them last year, so there is some familiarity with them. Vic Sheely, having been involved at Air Force, knowing a little bit more about that kind of offense, also gives us experience defending that. Their quarterback is a key guy in their offense. He is an outstanding player with excellent size and good speed and he can run their offense to precision. Defensively, they’ve made an adjustment. They’re running a 3-4 scheme. There’s going to be a little different look than what we were practicing with for NDSU. The keys to the game–first of all, we’ve got to score a touchdown. We’ve got to score and we’ve got to score often. We’ve got to be extremely efficient. You’re only going to have so many possessions on offense just because of their running attack, you’re going to have less time on the clock. We definitely need to limit their big plays on offense. I think we have to come out of there with a +2 turnover margin. If we don’t do that, it could be a very tough situation for us. We are here to improve and we are here to put us in a situation where we can win football games.”
Injury Updates:
“Tyrone Sellers will be out 3-4 weeks, he has a leg injury. Deshaun Sands has a leg injury and is very questionable for this football game.”
Freshman safety Keeston Terry
On his first collegiate game:
“I enjoyed it a lot. It was good getting a chance to play, especially moving from the offensive side to the defense.”
On how he felt during the game:
“I didn’t feel overwhelmed, I knew when we game planned for NDSU, I didn’t think they had too difficult of an offense to prepare for. I felt confident in what I was learning and I was ready to go.”
On blocking out the loss:
“In reality, we want to win every game. This game didn’t mean too much, it was our home opener so we wanted to win it. Down the road, it’s not really going to matter. We’ve got more non-conference games and conference games coming up.”
Junior linebacker Steven Johnson
On how the team has handled the loss:
“It was a little difficult coming off that loss. But right now, I feel like there’s extra fire in all of us. We want to be able to show what we can do and prove that all of our hard work will pay off. We have a big challenge coming up, but I feel like we can do it together.”
On playing a top 25 team:
“With us losing this week, a lot of people may have jumped off the boat. If we get a win this week, a lot of people will probably jump back on. We try not to worry about that, we try to worry about ourselves. But at the same time, we can get people excited about the season again with a win.”
Freshman defensive end Keba Agostinho
On how he felt during the game:
“It was pretty good. I had to get the rust off. I feel like now that the first game is under my belt, it should make the rest of the season a little bit easier.”
On playing defensive end instead of defensive tackle:
“Personally, I like playing end better. But, if they need me to play tackle, as long as I’m playing, then I’m happy with it.”
Senior cornerback Chris Harris
On overcoming the loss:
“We’ve definitely been trying to stay cool and just look at it as one game. We’ve been really focused as a group and we’re going to do everything we can to get better this week.”
On the defense’s play against NDSU:
“We played pretty well on defense. We’ve got to carry it on this weekend. We’ve got a very big task and we’ve got to stay very disciplined on defense. If we keep it up, I think we’ll be fine.”
On facing GT’s offense:
“You have to beat GT by being disciplined. Everybody is going to have a responsibility. A linebacker might have the quarterback this time. Somebody might be watching the pitch. You’ve got to stay disciplined, you can’t try to be the hero. You have to stay focused on your job.”
Senior offensive lineman Brad Thorson
On what was most disappointing about the offense on Saturday:
“We just had a lot of missed execution by guys on different plays. We never seemed to piece it together as a whole group. It’s not a problem that we have really seen during camp. It is something that came up that kind of shocked and confused us all. It’s a reminder of the amount of focus we need going into game day. It wasn’t a consistent bad effort or bad play by anybody, it was just guys could not seem to play together as 11 guys on offense.”
On if he attributed the new offense to not feeling comfortable running plays:
I think our coaches have put us in the right position. They’ve given us time to scrimmage. We’ve been running this offense for 45 practices now and we need to feel comfortable with it. As players, we feel like we let our coaching staff down. Coach long is going to put us in the right position with play calls and it is up to us to execute.”
On what the quarterbacks need to do to improve:
“I think as an offense line we focus on protecting the quarterback and giving the running backs an opportunity to run the ball. Either of those guys needs to feel comfortable being in the pocket. We need to give them (the quarterbacks) the opportunity to throw the ball and prove what they can do. Both of those guys (Kale Pick and Jordan Webb) prepare very well. Kale and Jordan want that job. That competition is going to help us get better throughout the season. I think they’re both doing an excellent job. I don’t put any of this on how they prepared or how they’ve gone go about their business. They’re young guys. Quarterbacks are an integral part of the offense and when they’re asked to do stuff I think they’re going to compete well.”
