Sept. 13, 2008
Recap | Stats | Notes | Photo Gallery 
Kentucky Head Coach Rich Brooks
Opening statement
“Obviously we didn’t do as well as we needed to do, the very goodnews is that it’s a ‘W’. We did some good things on offense;we did some good things on defense. We had way too many people, particularlyon offense, not knowing what was going on, not running the right routes, missingchecks. I thought other than the fumble that MikeHartline had, I thought he did a lot of good things in this game, but hedidn’t get a lot help. He had some balls that should have been caught.We didn’t run the ball as well as I had hoped. Anybody that had any doubtthe kind of team Middle Tennessee State is, if you saw what Maryland did to Caltoday, you know that team just about embarrassed us in Commonwealth Stadium isa very, very good football team. They’ve got speed; the quarterback isvery elusive; he’s got a great arm. They’ve got some speed at receivers;they do enough things to give you a lot of problems out there. Defensively, theybring a lot of pressure on the weak side, they play their corner inside. We couldn’tget the block to get outside on the weak side and they pressured us on the insidepretty good. I thought there were several times, that we were one ankle tackleaway from breaking some longer plays, but we didn’t break those ankle tacklesand they got us down. I want to give them all the credit in the world, they camein prepared; they got after us. They attacked us in every phase of the game.I should have known something was wrong when we got on the bus to come over fromthe Campbell House, and the first time in six years, the train stopped us.”
On the Hail Mary…
“You know a Hail Mary is coming. We had plenty of people back there, butsomehow the ball got tipped up instead of down and somebody slipped in behindus. Thank God, Robbie (McAtee) grabbed him; it was really close to a touchdownand a loss. It’s happened around here before I got here. I’m justsure glad it didn’t happen again.”
On field goal attempt late in the game…
“The thought process was, ‘If we make it, we’ve got nine pointsand there’s no way we can possibly lose. If I run the ball, there’sgoing to be about six seconds off the clock and they’re still going tohave quite a bit of time left.’ They can get three or four plays in probably.I thought we would be able to make it, obviously you can call me an idiot becausewe got it blocked and they almost scooped and scored.”
On the offense…
“There were a lot of good things (Mike) Hartline was doing before, gettingus in the right play, and then all of a sudden the receiver wouldn’t completea route, wouldn’t run the right route. One of the things we’re goingto do during this off week is, we’re going to stop rotating Commonwealthcrowd in there at wide receiver. We’re going to narrow down and figureout who’s going to play out there and they’d better know what isgoing on. Right now our quarterback goes back there, he’s not sure whathe’s going to get on those routes. It was very disturbing. I thought hedid a good job of throwing the ball, making some really nice plays and steppingup in the pocket. BillyJoe Murphy got initiated to a speed rusher; he had trouble handling the edgeout there against a speed rush. They got some pressure on Hartline, but mostof the time he stepped up in the pocket and got away from it. The really disappointingthing is how we’re running the football. A lot of times they put so manypeople, pumping them down in the box, we’ve got to throw the balls, butsome of the times we’d check to throws and one receiver would run the wrongroutes. You can’t have a passing game, we’re not used to that aroundhere. Then we had a few that could have been caught, but weren’t caught.We need to step up our game and we have two weeks to do it before Western (Kentucky)comes to town. We’ve got a lot of work to do because right now, we’renot a real good football team.”
QB, Mike Hartline #5
On the game…
“Lones (Seiber) was having trouble all day but this one just felt safe. It shocked me. My heart fell out of my stomach. If you look at the last few plays anything that could have gone wrong, went wrong. We cannot do that. We have to finish games. More importantly we have to get better on offense. Seeing what we did tonight in moving the offense up and down the field, we should have scored more than 30 points, but we didn’t. It is a good time to have a bye week. We need to come back and communicate better. We have to come to practice and prepare for our games.”
On miscommunications with the receivers…
“It definitely happened and sometimes they were more key than others. We have to communicate better. I partially blame myself for the problems. If the receiver does not get what I am doing then some of it is their fault andsome is my fault. I take responsibility for that.”
On the last two drives of the game…
“We tried to come and play like we always play. They never really stopped us, we stopped ourselves. You have to give credit to Middle Tennessee State. They came after us and played hard on defense. But we were getting good looks and capitalizing on them, and converting on third downs was big for us tonight. We have to keep our drives moving. We tried to take advantage of what they were giving us and we did pretty well.”
CB, Robbie McAtee #36
On the last play…
“We were in our Hail Mary defense and I was running underneath one of their receivers. I looked back when the ball was thrown because everyone was going for the ball and I happened to be hanging out at the goal line. Somehow I got back to the guy and made the tackle. I was wrapped around his legs pretty tight and I didn’t want to let go. I got him down about the one-yardline.”
On if he knew he had stopped MT out of the end zone…
“I was hoping I had him as he tried to press forward and if I didn’t then we were all going to be sick tomorrow, but fortunately I got him down. I knew he was pretty close. When he caught the ball I think he was on the five-yard line so I had to hurry up and make the tackle. I was shocked he got the ball because I never thought it would get back that far. I thought someone would intercept it, but I made the play and it was all good. I didn’t know he was back there but I just followed the ball and watched him catch it. I have seen the LSU play a few times when they got that long pass to beat us and last year Louisville and Florida State attempted Hail Mary plays against us. It would have left us 2-1 had we loss, but we did what we had to do to get us to 3-0. It was the biggest play of my career.”
WR, Dicky Lyons Jr. #12
On his overall play during the game…
“If you look back to the first half of the game I wasn’t playing very well. I wasn’t really helping my team win the game, but Middle Tennessee did a great job defending, not only me, but the entire wide receiver offense. Coach Phillips did a great job making adjustments to that. As coach said I got about 80 yards. Some big plays are really missing from our offense and that’s something that either me or someone else on the team is going to have to step up and do.”
On the last play of the game…
“I told the entire team that Coach Brooks had every right to be mad and we should not have let it come to this. This is a sign that this is the new Kentucky though, because if it had been six years ago, (our opponent) would have made that play. Six years ago, somebody would have blocked that kick and taken it into the end zone. Things are just going our way and everybody on the team just wants to win too much. We’re not going to give up a loss. This team is here to do big things.”
On if he takes this game as a good win …
“It’s a great win. It’s a great win against a great Middle Tennessee team. You have to consider that they beat Maryland and then Maryland went out and beat Cal. This is a great team and it helps that the young guys to know that they can play at this level. I’m just excited to have this week off and for things to get corrected and for this team to keep going forward.”
On Mike Hartline as quarterback…
“He really did a great job. He was just throwing the balls and doing what coach was asking him to do and putting the ball on point. He was doing what he’s been working on, and he’s just been doing a great job.”
DE, Jeremy Jarmon #99
On new Kentucky vs. Old Kentucky…
“The way we performed today was new Kentucky and we’re going to be in for a long season. It was just very fortunate that we escaped that last play from getting a huge upset.”
On Middle Tennessee’s defense vs. Kentucky’s defense…
“I think their coaching staff respected our defensive front. Their players were young and they couldn’t stand up and try to block us. There wasn’t a lot of trash talking. Their guys were just doing what they were told. Unfortunately some of our guys went down (with injuries). There’s nothing you can really do about that but just start protecting yourself when guys start going down.”
MTSU Head Coach Rick Stockstill
On the last play of the game…
“It was a great effort by our guys; it was a great block by Alex Suber.It was a good job by Ted Riley scooping it up and taking it down a good waysand then they called holding on Suber. All I can do is look at the televisionup on the big screen and you can never tell on the big screen, but in my opinion,just watching it on the television it did not look like Suber was holding.”
On the team’s morale…
“I’m disappointed because they fought their guts out against a goodSEC team. I told them going in we couldn’t turn the ball over and had towin the kicking game. I thought that was the difference in the game. We gavethem seven points off the fumble; we missed a field goal and then they had usbacked up there in the third quarter field position wise. They [Kentucky] gotgood field position off their punt return team. We all hurt, we hurt as a team.The players are hurting and crushed. That was a tough loss because we had a chanceto beat that crowd. We never gave up. We had eight seconds left in the game andprobably not too many people thought it would come down to the last play in thegame. They had the penalty to bring the ball back past mid-field, we thoughtwe would be at the 30-yard line, but then you throw one in the end zone and youcome up half a yard short. I’m proud of the guys for not quitting; I havea phenomenal bunch of guys out there. I’m proud of them.”
On Middle Tennessee’s defense…
“We fought out there, we didn’t give up the big play, and it washard for them to move the ball on us. We gave them seven points off a five-yarddrive and you take that off the board and they scored 14 points. We felt thatif we could make them go the long way and not give up the big play, we couldstay there and fight. I thought our defense was really good and created the turnover.We tackled well, and we put pressure on the quarterback. We had a couple buststhere where the tight end got free a little bit, but for the most part I thoughtour defense played well.”
On offense performance …
“I thought Joe Craddock played well again tonight. I thought our offensiveline did a good job with the pass protection. We couldn’t run the ball,Kentucky was just too big and strong for us out front, we couldn’t getanything done in the running game. It was more them, than us, they were justtoo physical, too strong. We just couldn’t match up with them in the runninggame. I thought we did a nice job with pass protection against them but to methat was the difference game. In the third quarter the field position just killedus.”
MTSU Alex Suber, CB, #7
On the second half…
“We just keep the confidence going, keep persevering. We just had to keep our heads together and keep playing hard and that’s what we did.”
MTSU Desmond Gee, RB, #2
On his opinion of the UK defense…
“Their defense played good. I tip my hat off to them.”
On his touchdown…
“It was me one on one with the linebacker. I just shook him one way and took off. The wide receiver had a good block down. I ran past him and it was just the end zone from there.”
On how UK’s defense accounted for him in the second half…
“They were trying to grab me before I got out wide. They were just trying to getto me before I made my move on the linebacker.”
MTSU Joe Craddock, QB, #12
On his feelings about the loss…
“We were up last week and I feel that we should have been up this week. It’s just tough losing to a team like that.
On managing the game against UK’s defense…
“I was so proud of our offensive line. We had good communication out there. We talked all week about how they would have a good front four on defense. (Our offensive line)did a great job.”
On how he plans to deal with tonight’s loss…
“It’s going to be tough tonight on the ride home and tomorrow too. I’ll be anxious to be back on the field Monday to prepare for next week.”
