Kentucky Head Football Coach Hal Mumme
On what to tell the UK players about the Georgia game:
“You have to look at the very fine difference between winning that game and losing that game. It really does hinge on 10 or 12 plays where, if you can make two of those plays go our way instead of theirs, we win. And it varies as to which two. It could be any two. That’s what I want to talk to them about, ‘Look how close we are. That’s the No. 15 team in the nation. They’re bowl eligible. They’re obviously going to go to a bowl this year. They’re where you want to be. Now, you went down there in their back yard and played them that close, for that long on national TV. And look how many young guys we’ve got here. We can do this, we just need to improve.’ The exciting thing is we still have three weeks to do it and two of the games are at home.”
“I think it speaks well for the future. We just need to do some good recruiting and get a few more bodies in here. You look at us offensively, we have most everybody back for at least one year, a lot of them two years. And the guys that are playing a good role on defense are all young guys with just a few seniors sprinkled in there. We just need to learn to overcome these little things on the road and keep our focus a little bit better then we’re doing and get this thing turned around. We’re very close.”
On preparing for this week:
“(Mistakes) are the things young teams make when they play in pressure situations on the road. We have to improve on that. We’re not going to spend a lot of time talking about the touchdown that got called back, or this call or that call because it’s not productive. There’s really nothing we can control about that, but there are things we can control. If we can improve on those things we have a chance in the last three games.”
On the final three regular-season games remaining on the schedule:
“Fortunately in these last three games we have two of them at home. Our guys seem to focus a little better at home. A lot of that is due to youth and inexperience. Our seniors are trying to give great leadership and they’re really doing a good job for the most part. Even for them they are freshmen in our offensive and defensive schemes and a lot of times that leads to some key breakdowns and that’s what we had happen (against Georgia) and it ended up costing us the game.”
On LSU’s offense:
“They are a great team. They scare me because they are physical enough to line up and run over you. Tyler is an extremely talented quarterback. If I were going to run an option offense, he’d be the guy I’d want running it. He’s a good passer. He’s very good and very effective.”
On LSU’s defense:
“They are very talented. They have great athletes. Obviously they can match up with Florida and shut them down. They do a good job with the blitz occasionally. They are predominantly a zone team, but they will blitz you some and they have athletes come off the corner and get you.”
On learning from mistakes throughout the year:
“They’ve done well. It’s been the same pattern every place we’ve been. Early in the year they try to blitz you. They don’t believe you can get away with doing the things you’re getting away with. So they try to come after you. Then you learn to handle that and make some big plays, then everybody says ‘You can’t blitz them, so let’s play zone, let’s play soft on them and make them run the ball and throw underneath and hopefully, they’ll make some mistakes.’ Our kids are at that point in this first year of doing this.”
CB Willie Gary
“Our defense was ready to play (against Georgia). We worked hard and improved. I thought we had a good performance. Against LSU we have to come out and work hard again. We are going to have to play as hard as we can to beat them. We still need two wins to go to a bowl game, so we have to come out and fight hard in our last three games.”
“It’s always nice to play in front of the home crowd. We have played much better at home. We still have to face the challenge of winning on the road, but I think we still can.”
WR Craig Yeast
“It was kind of frustrating (to lose to Georgia). But it’s like Coach Mumme says, ‘We are a team of destiny.’ We’ve been a win-one, lose-one team and this is our week. Hopefully we can get it done.”
“I saw them one time and that was the Florida game. It seems they play a lot of loose coverage. We should be able to get a lot underneath and just take what they give us.”
“We can build a little confidence from the performance, but we should have easily won. We stopped ourselves by making mistakes like stalling and turning the ball over. So, we can get some confidence from that we played hard, but we should have won the game.”
DE Robert Jones
“The confidence level of the team is fine. We are not a team that is going to hang our heads in defeat. We are going to look ahead and do what we can to get into a bowl game. No one on the team has lost focus because of the loss to Georgia. We should have won the game but we are moving on.”
“We understand the defense. We work a lot of things off of our defense. The defensive unit is trying to understand Coach Mumme’s system totally so there are no mistakes during the game. The scheme is fine and we are comfortable with it, but it will take some time for the newer members of the team to adjust. It is a lot more physical and aggressive.”
LB Lee Wesley
“LSU is a good team. We are going to come out and put the Georgia loss behind us and focus on this game. We need to stop their quarterback. We will be ready for their option.”
