Kentucky-Tennessee Postgame Quotes

Kentucky Head Coach Will Stein

Opening Statement…

“Credit to Tennessee, they won the game. (There were) a lot of uncharacteristic plays by us tonight. You can’t turn the ball over three times, that’s obvious. There’s fourth down mistakes, penalties, stuff that we’ve controlled all year long and did not play to our standard tonight. It’s a hurt locker room. We haven’t experienced losing in a long time, which is really good, but we gotta learn from it, we gotta grow, we gotta go back to work. There’s no loser mindset, no ‘poor me’s’. We got beat and now it’s about resetting our focus for this next week.”

On what he’s learned about the brutality of the SEC…

“Like I told the guys, we’re 7-2, we’re 5-2 in the league. Everything that we want is still right in front of us. We have a really tough test at home next week against Florida and we gotta reset our focus, but yeah, this is a really tough league. It’s the closest thing to the NFL, I’ve said that a million times. Everybody’s good and everybody has good players and a good scheme. We gotta come back next week.”

On how Kentucky Quarterback Kenny Minchey handled pressure and what he can learn from it…

”I think there were some good moments and bad moments. You’ve got to use your legs in this league. There are a lot of really good pass rushers and they do good stuff on defense. Credit to (Tennessee) for their plan, but you look up, I think we’re out gaining them at half, we’re moving the ball, it’s just that we’re not scoring touchdowns. You obviously have to score on the road. We had seven penalties for 50 yards. We had three turnovers, that’s the story of the game, the turnovers.”