San Diego State Post Game Press Conference Quotes

Head Coach Rocky Long

On after a 6-1 record and having to send kids home, did that affect the season and tonight
“You can put how we played at the end of the season, and it has nothing to do with that. We had so many starters hurt and we played Freshman after Freshman. We lost our fullback, we lost ourquarterback, our tailback and starting offensive lineman. Right there that will tell you we had a bad second part of the season than the first part of the season. We lost alot of our good players and inthe end we ended playing a lot of guys that ended up being good players right now.”

On the interceiption and did that create a spark tonight
“I think that was the biggest point of the game. Obviously we struggled to move the ball and they played great defense tonight. In this day and age you do well unless you score. You can’t win if you don’t score. So, obviously that was the biggest issue. We had to score some points. I thought the biggest point of the game was halftime. We punt the ball they do a nice job with the punt return Whichever way you want to write it, we did a lousy job recovering the punt. You can write it eitherway you want. They get some moementum and get the ball on our side of the field. We didn’t playto bad of defense, we got a chance to stop them in a fourth down situation and got three guys to tackle, and then eventually they scored. So instead of going in at halftime with a decent second chance to come back, we get momentum and get the touchdown at halftime. That was the biggest point of the game.”

On the two win season this year and getting back to that point
“I think you have to look at everything you do. From the top on down. I am going to say this we can dive into this as deep as you want and you can look at everything in your program, and it might benothing, but it might be one top player. That might be the difference. We averaged two touchdownsor more and about 14 points more a game last year. If we had done that this year, we would have won 10 or 11 games. So it might just be infact that we need one big time player. Or you can dive into it and come up with all these fantastic theories why we didn’t play well the second half of the season. It might just be we needed a bigtime player. There are no secrets. It’s some imaginarything that you pull up in the air and fix it. Players have to play and coaches have to coach. We dida lousy job at coaching and we did a lousy job at playing.”

On the last few minutes of the game and whether it was furstrating or surprising
“It’s frustrating. But we didn’t spend three weeks preparing for this game. At that point of the sea- son what you do is prepare your team for next year. So we spent that last four games trying to getready for this game, but before that we were in spring practice. Now if that had an affect on thegame, I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”