On the beginning of the game and having an early kickoff 6me…

“More than the outcome of the game, which is what everyone will look at because everyone is outcome oriented, is we had a great week of prac;ce. I’m so proud that we had a great day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and a good Thursday. I saw improvement in the team. Those things that I saw in prac;ce made me feel so much beAer about going into this game. It didn’t start perfectly but I was proud of the week of prac;ce we had, and I thought we created some energy through our special teams.”

On Mekhi Mews’ punt return for a touchdown seeing up the energy…

“You’re always looking for something. Defense turns to offense. It’s like basketball, when you play good defense, you get transition offense. When you play good defense in special teams, you can transition;on that to offense. We started getting momentum there as the defense got stops and then eventually we got them into a long yardage situation;on and we were able to return the punt. That gave the crowd some juice and our players some juice.”

On what impressed him about the Bulldog defense…

“I was impressed that we got the turnovers, that’s the thing. We didn’t get them the way we wanted to. We wanted to get some punch-outs, rip-outs. We got lucky. We got a great play by Malaki (Starks), we got a ; tipped ball, another tipped ball and we capitalized on those. You give kids credit for that but without those there are several drives where we didn’t stop them, they stopped themselves. They had a good plan, I thought they did a good job executing that plan. They were outmatched in a lot of ways and they had a nice plan to help themselves.”