Tennessee 24, No. 11/12/12 Kentucky 7
Nov. 10, 2018 | Knoxville, Tenn. | Neyland Stadium
Kentucky Head Coach Mark Stoops
Opening Statement:
“Not a very good effort, really. It starts with me, and it really ends with me. Didn’t have the team prepared. Not a good enough job by myself. I’ve got to accept that responsibility, get back to work, do some things differently and try to get a better result. Not a very good effort and needed to do a better job. We’ll get back to it – tomorrow for the coaching staff, and the team will get back at it Monday.”
On if there was a hangover from last week’s loss to Georgia:
“I don’t know. I mean, there can’t be. It wasn’t good enough. Obviously, I didn’t have the team prepared to play, so that’s on me.”
On how the Hail Mary pass to Marquez Callaway impacted the game:
“That was a big play. [Ty Chandler’s 14-yard run] on third down was a huge play. It led to seven points. That was a big, big play for us. That one…we’ll be kicking ourselves for a while with the call that we made. That set up the seven [points], and that’s kind of like a punch in the gut – when you give up one of those Hail Mary’s at the end of the half there. That’s a tough one to come back from.”
On the message to the locker room after back-to-back losses:
“There will be a different message, believe me. That’s on me. I’ve got to get them ready to play, and it didn’t happen this week.”
On if teams approach Kentucky’s run game differently from the start of the season:
“We’re playing some teams that are stout. Tennessee, early in the system with Jeremy [Pruitt] and what they were doing, a lot of times they were beating themselves. They’ve obviously not been doing that lately. I talked to him before the game about how hard they were playing and how much more effective they’ve been. You can see them getting more and more comfortable in the system. They have some talented guys, and they just beat us.”
KENTUCKY SENIOR TIGHT END C.J. CONRAD
On if there was a hangover from last week’s loss to Georgia:
“I don’t think so. I thought we had a really good week of practice. I was telling someone, I thought even during warmups today, I felt the energy that we needed to have to win on the road in the SEC. I don’t know what happened.”
On how Kentucky can ‘stop the bleeding’ of back-to-back losses:
“Your senior leaders have to step up. We’re going to have to have a meeting. I know some of the older guys are extremely frustrated right now, myself included, because this is our last go-around here. You don’t want to end it like it was tonight. We’re going to have to pull it together, have a meeting Monday and really just address the team and what we need to do to not let this happen again.”
On how tough the loss is considering Tennessee’s 17-game home win streak vs. UK:
“It’s very frustrating. We didn’t really talk much about the streak. We talked about playing our last SEC game, a lot of us seniors. That was my last SEC game, so obviously not the way I wanted to go out. Once again, I thought we had really good preparation. I thought we had good practices, good focus. We’re really just killing ourselves offensively right now. On offense, you need all 11 guys to be on the same page. All it takes is one guy, and the play doesn’t work. We’ve been having a lot of that lately.”
KENTUCKY SENIOR LINEBACKER JOSH ALLEN
On if he saw a loss like this coming:
“No, I didn’t. I felt like we had a good week of practice. A lot of guys made some plays. I felt like we were in the right spots, but I guess we didn’t capitalize off of those mistakes.”
On what’s been different among the defensive group:
“I felt like we played good. Last week, I feel like we weren’t at our best. This week, I feel like we made the turnovers. We made the plays that we needed to do, but in the end, it is what it is.”
KENTUCKY DEFENSIVE BACK MIKE EDWARDS
On how physical of a matchup Tennessee presented:
“Very physical. I mean, they played more physical than us definitely. They did a lot of things Georgia did. They steal a lot of things that other teams did to their opponents … I think they copied what Georgia did a little bit, and they just outplayed us.”
KENTUCKY RUNNING BACK BENNY SNELL, JR.
On if there are players on Kentucky’s team that aren’t taking the game seriously:
“I don’t want to say it’s not serious, but I feel like on the team, there’s not guys that have that dog mentality. You know what I’m saying? [Guys] that want it, that are hungry for it. It was obvious that Tennessee wanted it more than Kentucky, so that’s why the outcome was what it was. We’ve got to eliminate those guys that don’t have that hunger. If you don’t have it anymore, we don’t need you.”
On how you get the hunger back with two games left in the season:
“Put the guys in that want to play. Put the guys in that are not going to hurt the team, that are going to make us better.”
On if teams have approached Kentucky’s run game differently the last few games:
“They’ve been defending it differently. They’ve been loading the box from now to the beginning of the year. That really shouldn’t matter to me. Me, and how I think of my O-Line, I don’t care if the best defense in the nation lines up and loads the box. If the linemen can do what they do with their guys, then get to the second level, it’s unstoppable. I’ve proven that my sophomore year to my freshman [year], to now me being a junior. 1,000 yards, three years, so it doesn’t matter. It matters about coming off and being the more physical team up front, hands down. If the run game’s not there, here and there at times, that’s a team thing. You put that blame on me. You put that blame on my line. All we can do is go forward from tonight.”
On how to keep from snow-balling down the stretch:
“We’ve got to get those guys that are hungry. We’ve got to have everybody sold on this team and on this mission. This loss hurt. It hurt. The Georgia one, we were so close but that one hurt too. I don’t want to say it snowballs, because I see how people are around practice and how people are around the facility. It’s just about executing. [Mark] Stoops was saying in there that he’s got to do a good job preparing us. He’s got to prepare us for situations like this, when we’re coming fresh off a loss with Georgia, guys being up and wanting to be ready for a game like this. The blame isn’t even on Stoops. The blame isn’t on anybody as a team. We just take it as a team. We’ve got to keep our head up, because we’ve came so far. We’ve came so far from what we used to be. It’s going to be what it’s going to be.”
