AUSTIN, Tx. - No. 1 Texas lost 30-15 to Georgia on Saturday night. Here's what Longhorn head coach Steve Sarkisian had to say after the loss.
"Unfortunately we didn't play our best football tonight. But we were still competitive. Hopefully we get another crack at them. That's a good football team. Credit to Kirby and their staff and their players being ready to go in the first half. And like I said, they've been the standard in college football now for about five, six, seven years. And I thought we played them really well in the second half. But we just, when you get behind the eight ball with the way we played the first half, it's a lot to overcome against good football teams. And like I told the team, when you're playing good teams, you've got to fight for 60 minutes. But you have to play well as well. And we just weren't able to get the recipe right."
On the pass interference call overturned in the second half: "I was literally just asking the official what he saw to warrant DPI. And then at that moment, the trash came on the field. I understand frustration. We all were frustrated in the moment. All of us, Longhorn Nation, I know we can be better than that. The fact that we're able to get that stopped and get that taken care of and then regroup, then they overturn that call, give us an opportunity to get a short field and punch one in and close it to a one-score game."
On if he was surprised by anything Georgia did defensively: "I wasn't necessarily surprised. I knew they'd be prepared, which they were. They did a nice job of disguising, I'll say that. They held a lot of their two safety shells and then when they got out of that, there were some pressure packages and they were holding that shell even though they were going to poke one high defense. They're well coached. They made it difficult on us to find some explosive plays. We started to find some there in the second half ,working the middle of the field a little bit more. But again, we knew they were a really well coached team. They've got talented players with talented coaches and it wasn't as if they were going to not come in here ready to go and play at a high level.So when you do that, you have to execute. You've got to execute not only physically, you've got to have a great plan and then when your opportunities come, you've got to try to take advantage of them. We just missed our opportunities in the first half. I thought we took advantage of a few more in the second."
On what made Georgia's defensive front hard to handle: "Well, I think number 13 (Mykel Williams) being healthy helped them. He hadn't played there for a while. I think he played nine snaps last week and then came back tonight ready to go, and he's a problem. Eleven (Jalon Walker) is a physical player off the edge as well at linebacker. You don't have the top one or two recruiting classes in the country for six straight years and not have good defensive personnel. They've got good players, and like I said, they've got a good scheme. When you do that, our good players and our scheme has to match or be better than theirs, and tonight it wasn't."
