Tom O'Brien Audio
Opening Statement:
Obviously a tough start. I think the team was fine until the last series we fumbled the ball at the half and the first series of the second half we kind of let things get away from us. From there it seemed to go downhill. We just ran out of gas on defense at the end.
A lot of it was due to the ineptness of our offense. Certainly we have to solve some problems there.
What do you know on Russell Wilson:
I don't know anything. Ask the doctors.
If Wilson is out for a long period of time, does that change things for Mike Glennon?
I don't know. We'll have to wait and see what happens. We'll make that decision when we find out.
What will you do the next few days to get ready for next week?
We have to re-evaluate everything we've done. You have to look at the defense and say for three quarters they played pretty good there after being put in awful tough situations by the offense.
We have to get back... with Russell goes out that kind of takes away a lot of things we wanted to do on offense. We have to go back to the drawing board and see what we want to do.
Thoughts on not capitalizing on turnovers:
You got to take advantage of those situations. We only got one in decent field position that we might have made something out of it.
That was part of our problem. We couldn't change field position and they could. That was the big thing for us offensively, we couldn't get... we'd intercept the ball, run it out, block in the back and go back 15 yards.
A lot of different things we have to take care of if we're going to start winning football games.
How impressed were you with Nate Irving at linebacker?
I was impressed with a lot of guys on defense until the fourth quarter when they tired. The problem there is you want to substitute and get them out... but the longer they stayed on the more you had a chance of cramping. You take them out to rest them and then... we're fighting that.
General impressions of South Carolina's defense:
I think they are an excellent defense. I think they are powerful. I think we rushed the ball, Brown had over 100 yards rushing... if we can get a back to get a hundred and a couple more, that's good enough for us running the ball.
We just couldn't throw the ball on them. We couldn't get away from them.
With a young team like this, are you worried about them having a letdown from a game like this?
No. I'm not going to let them. We're going to get them back and we're going to go and win a football game this Saturday.
More thoughts on offense:
I think what we tried to accomplish was good. The bad thing is with the snaps... Ted Larsen is a kid playing his first game at center. It's awful hard to do what he did, shotgun snap the ball and go block somebody.
He throws one of them at a terrible time there right before the half. All we're going to do is try and get out the half at 0-0. We get the kickoff and then come down and play. We take the kickoff, try to run it out, and end up on the 13-yard line. All of a sudden field position starts changing and that's what happens. You've got to be smarter than that and you've got to be better than that.
How encouraged were you by the play of your secondary?
I think I was encouraged by putting a lot of pressure on the quarterback with a four-man rush. I think we hit him a lot. I think that helps... it certainly helps when you throw the ball up like he did and we made plays.
I think they hit one deep ball on us there at the end of the game and got one deep run on us there in the fourth quarter. Other than that we didn't play all that bad. What did they have? 100 yards at halftime... 60 yards in the third quarter. It all came in the fourth quarter when we were dead.
It seems like Andre was close to 100%
Yes. Certainly we missed Jamelle Eugene, but everybody kept talking like Andre was chopped liver.
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