The Victors

Could you talk a little bit about the decision to not call timeout?
Well, I didn't want to give them any more time to plan it. First of all, I was going to call timeout if they hadn't stopped it because John Henry was on the ground 20 yards behind where the ball was being snapped. And so, I was concerned that if he snapped it, it would be a free play because it would be offsides. And so, finally they shut it down. They realized he was back there and shut the thing down. And so, that was, in essence, a timeout because there was a stoppage in play, and we had a chance to gather ourselves over there.

And would we have benefited from another – well, I guess it would have been another one because you can't call consecutive timeouts. But since they didn't recognize that as a timeout, we could have. But I don't know if that would have been – if we would have played it any differently than we did, even if we had taken that timeout.

On penalties and turnovers again
Yeah. Well, that's football. I mean, you know, you can play not so well and win and play very well and lose. And it's a game of all kind of things that go on and transpire.

But I'm proud, like I said, how the offense performed. And, you know, we didn't finish a couple drives. We probably should have had 30-plus points, but we didn't. But they're taking steps forward each week. And I think that's very encouraging. And Bryce's play is encouraging. And the offensive line play is encouraging.

The defense, even though we gave up that last drive, they still rushed for, like, what, 55 yards or something like that, some very poor number from an offensive perspective.

But the one thing, and I've been saying it for a few weeks now, that we haven't been doing a good enough job is just getting takeaways on defense. We got zero today and ended up minus one in the turnover margin. And the offense sure could have used a little bit of help in short-field situations, but we weren't able to generate that today.

On the dramatic loss
Yeah, it was a tough locker room, but I told them, hey, you know, first of all, it's a shame that we let that one get away from us because we had it. And I told them sometimes in life you get knocked down, and things seem tough. And how are you going to overcome that? But that's life. You got to get back up, pick yourself back up. And we got to go right back to work on the next opponent. And that's how this profession is. You just got to keep going forward and learn from your mistakes. You know, watch the film, obviously, and critique things.

But I thought our offense was the best they've been all year. I thought Bryce was at his best game. Both receivers over 100 yards. Jordan Marshall finally got a little bit untracked. We completely dominated them statistically, but that doesn't really matter. Obviously, it doesn't matter at all. The final score is all that matters. But if you're looking for things we did well, then we did some really good things. We did have the one turnover and zero takeaways. That was a factor in the game being minus one.

And then that kickoff return that they had early in the game, that kept the score close. And that was a -- you just can't let that happen. I mean, that's something that is unacceptable. We've got to coach it better. We're trying to kick it to them. We're trying to kick it out of the back of the end zone. But just a little bit of a miss hit, and the guy took it back on us.