Postgame Quotes -- Wake Forest vs. Duke
11/23/2013 12:00:00 AM | Football
Nov. 23, 2013
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Opening Statement...
"Offensively we turned the ball over too much and we lost the turnover battle. They just played better than us today. I don't think there was a turning point. I thought the game went back and forth pretty good. I thought we still had a great shot there at the end with two timeouts and over three minutes to go in pretty good field position. We turned the ball over and you just can't do that"
On the play of seniors Nikita Whitlock and Tanner Price...
"Obviously they are both great guys and I think they have tried as hard as they can this year. Nikita has had a great year this year and there is no better person than Tanner Price. They are both guys that we will miss. We still have a game though. That is what I told the kids in the locker room. It is not like this is over. Everyone is feeling pretty bad in the locker room right now but we are not through playing. If you love to play football than you know the guys are looking forward to having one more chance."
On the strategy for next week's game against Vanderbilt...
"A lot of times you try to get younger guys in there and give them some experience. If I felt like we weren't getting great effort out of our old guys and that they weren't trying their best then we might feel a little bit differently. I think the old guys still deserve another chance to win another football game. We will decide how much we try to get the younger guys out there but we want to win. We don't want to intentionally lose a game just to play the young guys so we are going to play the guys who give us the best chance to win the game."
On the running game...
"We wanted to run the ball better today. I thought Tanner (Price) ran the ball well today and did some nice things. Josh (Harris) had a couple of nice runs as well. We had some many runs that were 3-yard runs and we need to get more longer runs than those. We missed some possession throws that hurt us so the short game stuff was not very good today. We really came into the game today wanting to run the ball more but we didn't get many people blocked up front."
On the loss...
"We're a little down. This is definitely not where we thought we would be at this point in the season. I thought we had a strong senior class. We fought hard all year, but some breaks just haven't gone our way sometimes. We're going to come out and just play hard next week. That's all we know how to do."
On scoring a touchdown coming out of halftime...
"That was our goal. We wanted to come out in the second half, get the ball, and go out and score. Unfortunately, we couldn't keep that momentum going. It just seemed like every time we got something, we got a penalty. We're all at fault."
On next Saturday's game against Vanderbilt...
"Pride means a lot, especially in football. We're going to go out there, in our last game of the year, and put everything on the line. We literally have nothing to lose, and we're just going to play as hard as we can."
On the loss...
"That's a tough one. We needed that one game to keep our hopes alive. Being our last home game and last ever as a senior, that's hard to take."
On the opening drive of the second half...
"That's what we wanted to do coming out of the half, to have a really great start offensively, and we did that. Duke did a good job of responding to us. Unfortunately, we could just never get anything going after that."
On the Blue Devils...
"They're a good team. They've had a good year and you've got to give it to them. They played really well. They executed really well."
On next week's game at Vanderbilt...
"It's our last game, and this is my last college football game ever. So I'm obviously going to leave it all out there and give it everything I have, and hopefully everybody else has the same attitude going into that game."
On the fumble and the loss...
"I got hit hard but I should have been able to hold on. I don't know what happened. It's tough. It's your last year so you want to have the chance to play after your season. We can't now."
On the second half...
"We had said all during halftime all the things that we needed to do, and we came out on that drive and actually did those things. It was small things after that drive that got us off track."
On next week's game at Vanderbilt...
"We all have been playing football since we were small, so I feel like we are all people who actually love to play. We are going to just go out and play as hard as we can. Also for me, this could be my last game I actually play so I'm going to go out and just play as hard as I can."
On never achieving a winning season at Wake Forest...
"It was just a bad year. I think we had the team to do something special but we didn't so you've just got to move on. You can't cry over spilled milk. You've got another game you've got to go play."
On his approach to the game next weekend with no Bowl Game implications...
"It's about pride, it's about manhood, I mean if you love the game you're going to go play. For many of us it's our last game on a college field. Who knows if you make it to the league or if you get hurt on the second play. It's about being a man and having fun. You've just got to do that, man. We've got one more game to show what we've got, it doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things but it matters to us."
On how much this loss hurts...
"Honestly, I think this game hurts the worst for me personally because my father always told me if you play your hardest and you do what you're supposed to do, and you leave the field with a loss, but you left it on the field, you shouldn't be sorry. You should keep your head up and keep playing. I personally think this was my worst game as a player this year. Not as in making plays but gap sound, I don't think I was very gap sound today and I think that hurt us. Would me being more gap sound stop the long pass? No. But, I think there was a few runs in there that I think maybe we could have had seven minutes on the clock if I could have done that."
Opening statement...
"I think the thing that I would like to say first is that I thought about it when I went into the locker room, the first thing I did was thank the players for their commitment, a tremendous commitment to the program. It's all the way from our seniors to our freshmen. I don't think I've been around a group of players that is committed to doing everything you ask them to do as well as this team. I said the same thing about the people that coached them and support them. The players certainly agreed with that. I'm just a little bit almost at loss for words because of the emotions are pretty strong of what those guys accomplished; nine wins, 72 years is a long time - 1941, that's pretty significant. I hope they savor this tonight and I think the thing that pleased me is every time we've won a game, obviously, the next one gets bigger. The challenge gets bigger. This will be our greatest challenge of the year coming forward. Who knows what's going to happen. I think it's great for our program to be challenged the way we've been challenged with another big game. By winning we create another big game and I think it's a real growth process for our program."
On the play of quarterback Anthony Boone...
"Anthony has kind of gotten back in his rhythm. He's healthier which always helps. It's not easy to have a throwing shoulder collarbone, come back from it, we were all kind of like, "Wow", after the Navy game. But the reality is that takes time. The reason Brandon (Connette) didn't play more today is he went in pretty beat up. We weren't sure where that was going to be when we started warming up. We made a decision to play Anthony in the second half which was obviously a good decision."
On the play of the defense in the fourth quarter...
"I think it's a tribute to Jim Knowles and the defensive staff and their ability to adjust. It's also a tribute to some older players that we finally have become systematic defensively. I don't know if you understand quite what I mean, we have answers. They do this and we do this. We really worked hard particularly in this offseason to grow that. That's one of the great beliefs that we have is that you have to be systematic, you can't just be grab bag. I think it's helped us play better as the game goes."
