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Sept. 23, 2000
“We played hard. But the thing we said from the beginning was, ‘Don’t let them run the ball especially with the quarterback.’ The other guys can make six or seven [yards] here and there, but it is Dantzler who has been making the long runs.”
“We thought we had enough people around the ball to stop him when he ran it. I don’t know if we missed tackles or what happened, but once he hit the secondary, I knew we were in trouble because it is in the open field and you have cornerbacks spread out on the boundaries and it is hard to converge on him. You have to stop him in the box for four or five yards. They have receivers running down the field in front of safeties. That’s the beauty of that offense right now that makes it so hard to stop. We have a couple of receivers down the field on corner[backs] but we can’t get them on safeties. They run all of those other guys out and cut [Virginia defenders]. We worked hard on stopping him. He is a single-wing tailback now..That offense helps him because they’ve tailor things for him. They spread you out and nickle and dime you with passes.”
“We ran the ball decently against a real good defensive team, but we didn’t throw and catch well. It wasn’t necessarily the pass protection..They did a good job covering our receivers and they knocked balls down.”
“A lot of times we had first downs taken away. Penalties hurt our momentum a lot. That’s part of the game.”
“Our special teams were not good with the exception of kickoff returns. We are spending more time in meeting, more time doing it, so we need better results. We can’t allow punt returns for touchdowns and we can’t have 10 yard punts.”