HEAD COACH LOVIE SMITH
“When you get dominated on both sides of the football, I’m talking about, up front, it’s going to be a tough day. It was bad football today we played, and you end up with a game like that. You look at the score and you say, ‘Hey, you had a chance to win.’ Never really were in it. Early on, of course, the interception was big where we had a little momentum to be able to get something going then. Good play on the punt return to get the ball out. Good play by Steve Nelson to intercept the ball. But besides that, just not a whole lot to talk about. Defensively we haven’t been able to really stop the run all year, and today that definitely showed up. And on the other side of the football too. We say we want to run the football, and it’s hard to get anything going when you can’t run it.”
Where do you go from here on defense after what happened today?
“Just like we’ve been doing after other days where we haven’t played as well. Short week, so it’s not like you can do an awful lot. Going to heal up. Hopefully get a few guys back. We’re a little shorthanded now and try to do a better job. We knew who we were playing. One of the best backs in the game. That physical brand of football, we weren’t ready to play that today.”
Where did the penalty issues in this game come from?
“It would be hard to say exactly. That’s not something we’ve dealt with. It’s not like we’ve been a team that’s been penalized a lot. Today we had too many, I acknowledge that.”
When you are unsuccessful running the ball, how does that impact the way you approach play calling?
“It’s just tough all the way around. Part of the game plan was to get in favorable third down situations, but that kind of started up front. When you can’t run the football, it’s pretty obvious down and distance on what we have to do. That’s just tough. We weren’t set up today to be able to handle some of that.”
With so many missed tackles, how do you get back to fundamentals?
“We’ve been getting back to the…
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