Nebraska vs. Iowa State
Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009
Memorial Stadium - Lincoln, Neb.
Opening Statement
"Good week for Iowa State University over Lincoln, Nebraska. The volleyball team comes over here and ends a 75-match losing streak and helped send a message for this university and our athletic department. The football team comes over here and wins for the first time since 1977. What great fan support that we had here today. I'm sure the student section as well as everybody back in Ames would love to come out and greet this football team when we get back, probably about 7:30 in Ames, Iowa tonight. You come into a stadium like this and you play without the Big 12's leading rusher, you play without your starting quarterback, not to mention a lengthy list of individual football players who were sick. We had fevers throughout the week. We had guys miss practice throughout the week. We had guys puking in buckets before the game, at the hotel, at halftime. To extend that kind of effort is just a fabulous, phenomenal effort, and I couldn't be prouder of our football team."
On how they were able to pull out the win
"Team. Team. It was an interview with one of the Nebraska networks that called and wanted to talk, and it was "How did you beat Baylor? How did you come back?" How we came back from the Kansas State and Kansas losses were because of those losses and because the kids felt bad about it. Kids today in my opinion, or at least some of the guys I've been around in the last five to seven years, are too resilient. They bounce back too fast. And those losses hurt. Those are long bus rides home. Those are long Saturday nights. There was a lot of carry-over into Sunday in the kind of work we had to do the next week, but we didn't shy away from that work. And we knew if we were going to win games like that, we were going to advance this program sooner rather than later. We were going to do it as a football team and not as inviduals."
On the successful fake punt
"(Nebraska's special teams) was very sound with what they did. We've gone into every game with a fake punt, everybody does. It was time for momentum, for an opportunity of momentum, to possibly swing. They've got an outstanding defense. Are you kidding me? Eight turnovers I think we gained, and the final score of this game was 9-7. Anybody else that had that kind of turnover advantage would've won by 30 or 40 points. Credit Nebraska. They've got an unbelievable defensive football team, and the coaching staff that got them to hang around. At that point, we thought how much are we going to be able to drive, and how much are we going to be able to score. It was the right place on the field to run it. We'd had a couple looks at what they've done. They'd actually done something different, and we had to adjust the fake to accomodate that if we got it. And the boys executed the play awfully well. Before that, we're down 7-3 and they are smoking down the field. They're heading for paydirt and there's no question they're going in. And we take a timeout and rally the troops, and that set the stage up for, "Hey, we can't play with a lack of juice, with a lack of enthusiasm like we're playing right now." Defensively, they bode up. We got the stop. We go out there and get the fake punt and then Jerome, Jake and the rest of the offense executed. We were fortunate enough to get seven points out of it on the big play."
On the significance of the win for the program
"It's big. (When) you don't win in a stadium on the road since 1977, it's big. This (Nebraska) is a program that has as much tradition as anybody in college football. This is a program that was in the top 25 a week ago. It's a big win. I don't want to belittle just how we're trying to build this football program. As a team, you take steps and you get over hurdles. The win last week versus Baylor was a dang big win because it was our fourth win of the season. It was our first Big 12 win in a long time and it was our first Big 12 win of the season. Now we've got two of them. We're excited about that. When the film's done tomorrow and we put this one to bed, Texas A&M's up next on the docket and we've got to go back to work."
On Nebraska's fumbles
"Strange. Who knows why we get all those balls out like we do. We didn't do any extra strip drills or anything like that. Strange, strange day. Maybe somebody thought 32 years was long enough and we needed to come out of here victorious."