Oct. 27, 2012
Recap | Final Stats | Notes | Photo Gallery
Head Coach Todd Graham
On the game overall…
“We battled as a team. I was proud of the guys. We played good enough offensively today to win. But when we scored, I thought our offense put us in a position to win, and we didn’t get it done defensively. It came down to one drive and play, and we didn’t play very well. We missed a lot of tackles today. Obviously we didn’t get it done, but I’m really proud of our guys and how hard they played. It was a heck of a ball game and you have to give them a lot of credit. It had a lot to do with mental mistakes and missed assignments, and we have a lot of people getting hurt, and that’s part of football. You have to have guys prepared to go in there. But the mistakes we were making were ones we haven’t made, and they were in critical times. We learned a valuable lesson today, and I’m disappointed for our fans. It was 1:33, and all you have to do is hold them. We just didn’t show up and play defensively today. You can’t win football games playing defense like that.”
On the special teams specifically…
“You win together, you lose together, and special teams wise we’ve gotten better and better. [Jon] Mora made all of the field goals, and he put us in a position to win.”
On the defensive alignment…
“We couldn’t get lined up. We’re down to our third and fourth team defensive linemen, and we have guys all over the place trying to get in and out of the fronts. That’s just guys that haven’t played, and it was very disruptive, but that’s what we wanted to go to in the second half. We were able to contain them run wise. It’s our job as coaches to get them to do what they’re supposed to do.”
On the seniors on the squad…
“It’s disheartening. I’m in the locker room, and I’m thinking about Cam Marshall, Brandon Magee and those seniors that are laying it on the line. Obviously Vi [Teofilo] was in place of [Andrew] Sampson. Davon Coleman, I’m proud of. He goes in and replaces Will [Sutton] and he’s biting through an injury too. We have a lot of warriors on this team, and I’m very proud to be their coach. I’m proud of the character.”
On the penalties…
“UCLA is averaging seven to nine penalties a game, and they had 77 yards in penalties. If we could go zero, that’s 77 more yards for us, and we didn’t do that. Obviously we got the late penalty on our coaching staff before the half. Four penalties is not a lot, but it was four more than we needed to get.”
On moving forward to next week versus Oregon State…
“No doubt, our guys have character. There’s no doubt about it. We had so many plays left out on the field. But we are a young team, and we’re going to battle back. We’re not giving up on nothing. We have to go to Corvallis and we have to win. I believe in this team, I believe in these guys, and I believe in how they’re going to finish and what they’re going to do. We’re facing a lot of adversity, and some of it defensively has a lot to do with injuries. But that’s what’s great about the game of football. It’s not about one player, it’s not about one guy; it’s about a team. I am proud of how our guys battled back to try and win this game.”
Cornerback Deveron Carr
On UCLA’s offense…
“They were successful in getting off a couple passes off against us. The only way to solve that is to get the troops rallied up. We need preparation, focus, and discipline in the meeting room. We need to come out on Tuesday and practice hard.”
On being prepared for UCLA’s offense…
“I feel like they put a lot of wrinkles in. We practiced certain things that they did not run at all and it put us in an adverse situation. At the same time I feel like we work hard and we should be able to handle that. We have to work hard and come together as a team. It’s about staying focused and it’s about staying disciplined. Everyone needs to do their job and do what we’re coached to do.”
Cornerback Osahon Irabor
On being prepared for UCLA’s offense…
“I think we were familiar with the offense but I agree with Deveron that they threw in a couple wrinkles. We made some critical errors on defense that we hadn’t been doing all year. It really cost us at the end. One or two big plays will catch up to you at the end of the game. Giving up the big plays and touchdowns that we hadn’t been giving up all year put us in that tough situation at the end of the game.”
On how the loss of Will Sutton and Junior Onyeali affected the pass rush…
“We can’t really worry about the secondary because we are too busy worrying about the speedsters on the outside but we have a lot of confidence in the guys we put out there. Everyone works hard all week so we had a lot of faith in our d-line going into this game. I think they did a good job today but we definitely miss Will Sutton. There’s no question about that.”
On the tough loss…
“It’s a tough one to swallow but we have to stick together as a team. We can’t listen to people on the outside talking about what’s going on with us. We have to stay together as a family. We have to move on to the next game. That’s all we can really do.”
Linebacker Brandon Magee
On the UCLA offense…
“They threw a few different plays out there. They tried to work to the boundary and run some little quick outs with the slot guy because I was in the box playing the A-gap. Also, after the first drive they tried to quick-pace us a little bit and that kind of caught us off guard because we had to run different coverages. Plus, we had some miscues and mis-assignments at that time. “
On the potential comparison with the last year's team…
“Make any comparison you want to. We can’t pay attention to what people say on the outside. We have a tough game against Oregon State coming up and we are focused on that now. Then we play USC, Washington State and Arizona and we have to run the table and really step it up the next few weeks. We are a completely different team. We never stop battling, even in the fourth quarter and third quarter, we were behind and came back and we still battled throughout the whole game.”
On how UCLA quarterback Brett Hundley…
“He played very well. He was moving a lot in the pockets, but we just can’t allow him to scramble on the outside and step up and throw those extra yards and make plays with his feet. He was making some good plays out there and I have to respect that.
On playing more stack defense…
“We felt that we could get some blitzes off especially because they are a big zone-read team. We felt like we could get in there because the lineman splits are a little bit bigger than usual and thought that it would be a little wrinkle for them to see because we have not run it a lot this year.”
Quarterback Taylor Kelly
Going from the ultimate high to the ultimate low...
"I felt we had great momentum and confidence in our team. I had great trust and belief in our defensive to got a stop, but we came up short. They made some big plays for us, but we have to bounce back and get the troops rallied up for Oregon State."
Leaving points out...
"Yes, we did. We went into the red zone a couple times, put up three points, and went three and out or four and out. We were doing big things, protecting the football which was a huge part with under a minute left in the half. So i have to do a better job."
On tempo beginning an issue with no huddle...
"We started getting the tempo going. That was a big key for us, to establish the run game to get that tempo going."
The player that hit him before the half...
"The guy became free, i was trying to throw it at my running backs feet, but the guy hit me. So i was trying to throw him off, but i couldn’t pull it down."
UCLA head coach Jim L. Mora
Opening Statement:
“That was a good win against a good football team. It was a significant win in terms of staying in the race. I was proud of the way that we came back and fought to the end. Unfortunately, we put ourselves in a hole and we have to fin a way, a method, something, to take care of the problems we are having on punt return. That popped up again today. We work on it hard. We have some young men that haven’t done it a lot but that isn’t an excuse. We have to get better there so we don’t put our defense on the field continually in those situations. I though we responded; another opportunity to learn. I just believe the way you only really, truly get better is to find yourself in some adverse situations and fight through them. We did that today on the road in a hostile environment and I am very proud of our guys. I was excited for Ka’imi (Fairbairn) to boot that one through. I thought our offense did an awesome job to put us in the position for him to make that. Brett (Hundley) hung in there and showed great poise down the stretch. So we will enjoy this one here for 24 hours because they keep coming and the next one gets bigger and that is Arizona, 7:30 homecoming. We will learn what we can from this one and just keep trying to get better.”
On the miscommunication at the coin toss:
“Jeff Locke, who I trust implicitly, told me that he went out there and said, ‘We’ll kick.’ And they asked him if he meant deferred and he said yes I mean defer. There was some kind of miscommunication after that. I tried to appeal to the officials but they were following protocol but fortunately we were able to overcome that. Ultimately, that would be my fault not Jeff’s.”
On his teams composure:
“I think it’s a sign that we are maturing as a football team and believing in the systems. There are going to be some games like this where they are just shootouts. We had to kind of mix and max the offensive line there at the end when Simon (Goines) nicked his knee in the middle of the series. We had to shift Jeff Baca out there to right tackle and put Albert Cid there at right guard. That’s a really good front and I know they were missing a couple of tremendous players but it still doesn’t take away from the fact that that is a very good defense. It had some momentum there early in the game.”
On what the win does to his team psychologically:
“I think that it helps you believe in what you are doing. When you go on the road and you find yourself in a tough environment and you don’t come from behind once, but you come from behind twice, you’re down 14 to down two there at the end there is a sense of belief in yourself as a player, in the systems you are installing offensively, defensively and on special teams but only if we don’t gloss over the negatives that still happen in the game..”
On if he had words of wisdom for Ka’imi Fairbairn on the winning field goal kick:
“I just told him, ‘Hey, you’re going to win it for us.’ But you say that all of the time. Ka’imi has been pretty good with his shorter kicks but has struggled a little bit with his longer kicks. We have seen him practie and get better. What we try to do as a staff is manage the game situations that we put him in so that we can try to create success for him. We knew that there was going to be a point in the season when he was going to have to go out and make a kick for us. I don’t think that there was a kid on that sideline that didn’t believe Ka’imi wasn’t going to put it through. He, for his age and his experience, has a lot of internal confidence.”
Quarterback Brett Hundley
On what he can do differently in the fast-paced play:
“Rush everything probably. Sometimes you may get rattled a little bit and go through your release a little bit too quickly but in that situation you have to be even calmer. Things will take time and everything is going so fast but you have to be the one out there leading the troops and just taking it easy and making sure you get the ball where it needs to go. Maybe it is from back when I was a kid, when me and my dad would throw the ball and create different situations, it’s just backyard football pretty much. Football is football at the end of the day. ”
On being able to move the ball on the last drive:
“We always know that anytime we get the ball we can move the ball whenever and wherever. We just have to play our game and play UCLA football and that’s really what it comes down to.”
Kicker Ka’imi Fairbairn
On the pressure of kicking the final field goal:
“I didn’t really pay attention to it at the time. I just wanted a shot and I knew our offense would get there so I was just visualizing the kick.”
On if he knew the winning kick kept them bowl eligible:
“No, I didn’t. I was just kicking.”
On if he was more anxious watching the final drive or kicking the field goal:
“I was trying to just focus on what I had to do in my technique; keep my eyes back and following through, what I do at practice and throughout the whole year. That was what I was focusing on. It was just quiet. I was trying to stay within myself.”