Trent Miles - Georgia State Head Coach
Opening Statement…
“We can’t turn the ball over the way we turned it over. Give all the credit to Oregon, they did a great job, but when you’re playing a team of their caliber and you hand the ball over on a silver platter, it doesn’t help your cause.
Our kids did a great job of fighting back and we were in a position in the fourth quarter where we have a guy running wide open to the end zone and we overthrow him and come back on the next play and instead of it being a 12-point game, it jumps up to be a 26-point game.
With turnovers, we work on them every day, we talk about them every day, we do a circuit drill every day to protect the football and then we come here and we give up two touchdowns on turnovers. Those 14 points that we gave up on turnovers with the interception return and the fumble return didn’t help our cause as we were already fighting uphill there in the fourth quarter. We have to take care of the football.
We came into this game with the expectation that we were going to win and again, Oregon has great talent and a great program, but our kids are talented too. The big difference today was all the turnovers”
On the interception return on the first offensive series…
“We don’t ever talk about the worst-case scenario, but it definitely wasn’t the best case. What happens with that is you put yourself in a hole. It’s tough enough when you’re playing on the road and you’re playing in a hostile environment and you’re playing against a team that competed for the national championship last year. Our expectation is to perform well enough to win and it’s hard when you basically give them a 7-0 head start. It makes it an uphill battle the rest of the way and you’re playing catch-up from there on and it’s very difficult to play catch-up on offense with the way that they control the ball and eat up the clock and move it.”
Positive takeaways from the game…
“I take a lot of positives away from this game. When we execute, we belong with anybody. It doesn’t matter who you are. When we execute, we have the ability and talent and that hasn’t always been our case. We just have to put it all together. Our kids do a good job of tackling. We’ll miss some sometimes, but some of that is the kid that you’re trying to tackle. That kid’s on scholarship too and pretty dog-gone good. It’s hard to sit here and say the defense did a decent job when it reads 61 points for the other team on the board but they did when you look at the position that the defense was put in by the offense. The first three touchdowns, maybe four, came on a very, very short field. No one is without blame or error. We all did things today that we wish we would have done better but there are a lot of positives. The way you saw our offense perform when they clicked. Our offense can go and move the ball and throw it around and we weren’t able to run like we did last week, but we had some spurts. We put ourselves in a position to be within striking distance in the fourth quarter on a team that played for the national championship last year and that says a lot about the kids.
Nick Arbuckle – Quarterback, Senior
On the offense’s ability to move the ball down the field today…
“I felt that we had a really good game plan…The coaches put us in a really good position to get open and be able to make plays. Our receivers were able to come out and execute. We spent a ton of time in film. The receivers and I were in the film room until 11 p.m. on Wednesday and I think 10:30 or 11 o’clock on Thursday. We knew the kind of looks we were going to get, and we knew who was going to get open on what plays, how to run the routes, how to get open. When it came down to game time, it was all about executing. I felt really comfortable in the pocket and with what the receivers were seeing. It showed on the field that we were able to go out there and make plays. If we eliminate the turnovers that we had earlier in the game and continue to make plays in those series, who knows what the score would have been in that fourth quarter.”
On how disheartening his turnovers were…
“They were incredibly disheartening. It was the talk all week for our offense about not putting our defense in a bad situation. Not only about not turning the ball over, but being able to consistently get first downs and keeping our defense rested on the sidelines so they would be able to come out and perform well. Our defense performed really well. Considering the situations we put them in offensively, our defense really shined. The 61 points on the scoreboard aren’t really indicative of the performance our defense had. We take away the 14 points that our offense literally gave them off turnovers, and maybe we put up some points on those drives, then you’re looking at maybe 42-47 in the fourth quarter with us having a chance to come down and win in the last series. Those turnovers really hurt us…Being able to take away those turnovers is a huge part of what we need to be able to do as an offense.”
On the positive things he can take from this game…
“There are no moral victories. We’re really pissed off that we didn’t get the victory, because it’s what we expected to come in and do. Every hour we spent in the film room, we got more and more excited because we saw how our game plan was going to work. We saw in the film study that we were going to make plays. We knew we were going to come out here and make those plays. We knew as long as we didn’t turn the ball over that we could win the game. It’s incredibly upsetting that we didn’t, but what we can take out of it is that we did so many things well. When we executed, all 11 of us, we were unstoppable against a defense that was very, very good. We were able to move the ball on them. When we came out in that second half, I think we scored in our first three series. Those kinds of things we can take from it. This is a great time to have our bye week. We’re going to spend this whole bye week looking at ourselves, fixing things that we did wrong. I’m going to take the quarterbacks and the receivers. We’re not going to turn on that Liberty film until mid-week. We’re going to spend that first few days all about us. Fixing us, fixing the mistakes we’ve made this game, fixing the mistakes we made the last two games. Too many turnovers, too many missed assignments. If we can take care of that stuff, like Coach Miles said, we can win every other game on our schedule if we can fix ourselves, fix those mistakes this bye week. We should come out of this bye week going into Liberty as a whole new team.”
