Western Kentucky Coach Willie Taggart

WKU at Nebraska
Memorial Stadium (Lincoln, Neb.)
Sept. 4, 2010

On the game
"I don't like the outcome, but I like our football team. I feel like we've gotten better from where we were and our guys didn't quit. And that's one thing I'm looking for as a head coach. I want to see guys out competing to the end and I felt like our football team did that tonight."

On handling adversity after two quick Nebraska scores
"It hurt. It hurt a lot, because our goal was to make them earn everything they get and we didn't do that. We gave up some big plays, and you can't give up big plays against a team like that if you stand a chance of winning. We just have to do a better job of tackling, and offensively we have to come out and move the ball. One of our goals was to get two first downs every possession and we didn't do that. Overall we didn't accomplish our goals that we wanted to going into the game."

On how rattled the team was by the crowd
"Yeah, some of the guys hear the crowd and they let that bother them a lot, and it happens if they aren't used to it as much. We played Tennessee last year and that was the only crowd that big that they were playing in last year, so one crowd isn't (going to make a difference). But we still could've played a lot better no matter what the crowd was doing out there. We just have to execute. We didn't do that early and then once we got a little comfortable, then we started to execute a lot better, like we are capable of doing and we have to learn how to do that from the beginning."

On how hard it was to prepare for (Taylor) Martinez given that there wasn't much tape on him
"It wasn't hard. They ran their offense. We just have to tackle. We just missed a lot of tackles. That guy got a lot of yards because we missed tackles. And if you miss tackles, that's what's going to happen. We have to get better tackling and we're going to get better tackling."

On how they will improve for next week
"They say you make the most improvement from game one to game two. And we're going to go back and evaluate this film and correct our mistakes and make sure we don't make the same mistake twice."

On improving on special teams
"(We need to) get first downs, offensively. If we get some first downs, then we don't have to worry about those things."

On what the experience was like for his first game as head coach
"It was surreal. To be honest, I didn't know what to do. I was asking myself what the head coach was supposed to do, so I just ran out with the guys and told them, 'let's go have fun'. I thought I would be a little nervous but I didn't get that. I really felt like I wasn't nervous because we were prepared."

On how not knowing who Nebraska's quarterback was until today affected their preparation
"It didn't. We knew they were going to do a lot of the stuff they did. It wasn't a matter of them beating us schematically; it was just a matter of us tackling."