Opening Statement …
“First off, hats off to Mississippi State and Coach Mike Leach and his team. To come over here and have some guys down and go out and play the way they did; I thought they played with a lot of heart and a lot of fight. What they were able to do defensively in terms of stopping our run game, we knew the guys they had played up front play really hard and physical, they do a tremendous job of making you one dimensional and I give them a lot of credit for that. And then offensively, they had the quarterback [Will Rogers] that I thought played outstanding. He’s gotten better and better and you watch all the games, and you see him progress. You see K.J. Costello in there then you see this young kid. Talking to Coach Leach after the game, he played so much better than they had been playing and gave us fits. I want to thank our crowd. I think they impacted the game when we needed most. Second half defensively, we were finally able to rise up and get some stops and I was really pleased with how the crowd impacted that. Then, offensively, we were so much more explosive tonight. We’ve got wideouts who can make plays, and when all those guys are healthy and in tune, we’ve got really good pass protection. We couldn’t run the ball very well but when we’ve got good pass protection, we can be explosive. I’ve seen those kinds of plays in practice and even other times when we’ve been able to be explosive and I thought that was the difference in the game.”
On JT Daniels’ preparation leading into Saturday’s game…
“What JT did, he said ‘coach, I want to come down to the scouts and I want to throw, and I want to be part of the game plan.’ And he came down in front of me and went every day against what I think is a pretty good defense and he made plays and moved around the pocket and he started showing us that ‘I can do this thing’ and he took the bull by the horns and he took advantage of it tonight. Mississippi State played us to stop the run too and took a lot of chances and he took advantage of that.”