Opening Statement: “First of all give Georgia credit, your football team they show that today. Second of all, we apologize to our fans that were out here today. That was a poor performance to say the least. We challenged them in the press conference during the week to show up and they did. It was an unbelievable atmosphere throughout the game. For a noon kickoff that was awesome, and was great. The atmosphere pregame was great, and they were fantastic. Sorry, we didn’t coach better and play better for them. Obvi- ously not a lot that went well today. We’ve just told the team in there we’re not playing well. We’re not playing our best football right now. And that starts with me as a football coach. Obviously, I could have done a better job of getting our team ready to play today, regardless of how many guys we had out. We had a good enough team to go out there and compete better than we did today. And we didn’t do it. We’re going to get right. We’re a fourth of the way through the season. We’ve played three games. We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to get right back to work and continue to find a way to play winning football. However, we turned it over three times today, so not going to win football games doing that. I sound like a broken record coming in here ev- ery week talking about the turnover battle, and we haven’t been good enough. Injury wise you obviously got five starters out on defense today. Jaylen Nichols was out on offense. So anticipate all those guys being back next week. Devonni Reed hurt his hip, he’s getting an x-ray right now. We’ll see what the results are of that. We lost Darius Rush during the game to a hamstring injury. We’ll see what the MRI looks like on that and then Stone Blanton went out with a with a shoulder (injury). So clearly we’ve got to get better and we’ve got to get healthy without a doubt.”

On how to prepare the offense for next week... “We just played the number one defense in the country, they’ve given up a total of three points for the entire season. So we had some good stuff called today. I know if you guys go back and watch the video you’re going to see a lot of guys wide open at times and for whatever reason we weren’t able to connect and when we turn the ball over, it makes it harder. At times we didn’t finish drives like we needed to. Got to be better in the red zone when we get down there. And just finishing drives all together. But to me it’s go back to work and continue to figure out how we’re going to move the football and score points and stop the run, stop the pass and everything else on defense. Did we play well on offense today? No, but we didn’t exactly look like the ‘85 bears out there defensively.”

On if the fake punt was in the game plan ... “Yeah, we felt like we needed it with us missing five starters on defense, just from a depth standpoint. If Georgia was out there for a ton of plays today, it was going to be kind of like the bowl game last year against North Carolina. We needed to control the ball and score points and then take some chances and we didn’t really have to take chances against North Carolina in that ball- game. But yes, we felt like we were going to have to go for some fourth downs today, which we did. Then we felt like we were going to need to steal a possession special teams wise as well. So the fake punt was something that we had a general idea if we came out in that formation, how they would line up and our guys did a good job of executing that. But yeah, that was some- thing that we wanted to get to early in the game and at that point, I think it was 14-0 and we hadn’t stopped them yet. I wasn’t going to put our defense back out there for another drop at that point. “

On the message to the team after the interception... “I mean, we just got to be smarter with the football right there. We got a chance to go in there and score points and it’s disap- pointing to turn the ball over in there when you go into score. We felt like if you go back to last year’s game, we had a deep ball to Josh Vann on the first series of the game. Jalen Brooks made plays down the field in the game last year as well. And we felt good about our opportunity to make plays downfield. Jaheim showed that on that one, and, you know, we just got to not make mistakes like that down there in the red zone.”