Opening Statement …
“You know, I think I’ll open with immense amount of respect for Coach Stoops. The atmosphere, the culture he created here. I tried to tell everybody all week, nobody listened to me. I know what this teams made out of, I know how tough he coaches, I know several coaches on the staff, I’ve known them for a long time. I have tremendous respect. When they get disrespected like they did last week and they listen to it for a week, they come out ready to play. I think our kids listen to that; they understood it but also think it’s a tough environment to play in. So proud of the resiliency our kids showed. They never flinched. We thought this would be a blow-by-blow game. We talked all week about blow-by-blow, we had more blows than them. And we said that the first chop of the tree doesn’t chop the tree down, it takes sometimes two other sets and two axes. It took every single one tonight to get the job done. What I will say, I’m proud of our team, proud of our leadership. Honestly, we even won this game, the culture. The culture of our team never panicked. I saw more leadership tonight than I’ve seen all season. And you guys asked me a thousand questions about what about this team this, this team this, I don’t know much about this team, but I found out more tonight than I’ve known them this morning. That makes me extremely proud of how they responded, how they handled some difficult situations.”
On how important for them to face adversity and overcome it …
“I’d rather not face it. I mean, I didn’t, I’d prefer to be that way. But I also told people all week. We played on the road to Missouri two years ago I guess, three years ago.? I don’t know, we’ve been on the road to Auburn. I get it. When you go on the road for the first time in the SEC at night, and you keep a team in the game, you don’t start fast. It’s going to be a challenge, and we responded to the challenge. The best thing is we got a lot of things to work on.”
On Georgia's offense playing with fire …
“Playing with fire or not scoring first? I wouldn’t call that playing with fire, I would call that not playing. Playing with fire is like playing with your hair on fire and playing hard. I do think they play hard. I think we have a really good offensive staff, we have a really good offense, we have people around them, we have a good quarterback. We’ve got to do a good job and go out and execute. I mean say what you want about Kentucky's defense, but Kentucky's defense is pretty good to me. We’ll judge that at the end of the year, and I think people are looking at that the wrong way of the South Carolina game. I think Kentucky has a really good defense and I think Clemson’s got a really good defense. We’ve got to do a better job at starting faster.”
On how playing in Kentucky’s atmosphere will help the team and young guys …
“It will be an adventure every time we go on the road. It’s a tough schedule guys, when we got it, I knew it. The first game I pointed out was Kentucky because everybody was talking about the other three on the road, but I was like guys we’re going to Kentucky on the road. And people don’t credit them because they had turnovers against South Carolina, and they didn’t play well against South Carolina. But that team was going to play well tonight, and they did. And we responded.”
