Kansas Player Quotes

Nebraska 20, Kansas 3
Saturday, Nov. 13, 2010
Memorial Stadium (Lincoln, Neb.)

Kansas Defensive End Toben Opurum
On if Turner Gill said anything before the game about facing Nebraska
"I don’t think he wanted to make the game personal to him. He realized it was for the team as a whole. He realized what we needed to do to compete against them."

If Gill said anything casually
"No, he didn’t say anything. I think we realized what type of legacy he left here at Nebraska and how people think of him here, and they think very highly of him. I don’t think he wanted to bring his past life or his personal life into this ball game. He just wanted us to come out and execute as a team and play well."

On if they had extra motivation
"Of course we wanted to win the game for Coach Gill, coming back to where he played, and it would have been a special win for us, but we weren’t able to pull it out."

If it’s frustrating for the defense to play well and have offense fizzle
"It’s real frustrating for me individually and us as an entire team. You can’t have one side of the ball play really well for a while and then have a bad play and the same on the other side. We got to compete and we got to be balanced on offense and defense. We can’t do this. When the offense plays well, we have to play well and vice versa."

If the defenses performance was bittersweet
"I think, we did as a defense, we did a good job. But there were a lot of balls on the ground that we could have got, or balls through the air that could have went six for us, and we weren’t able to capitalize on that, so I think overall we played a pretty good game but if we were able to capitalize on more turnovers, I think it would have been a different ballgame."

On if tonight’s game was a defensive success or failure
"Failure. You know we let them score too many points. Our offense was struggling a bit to move the ball, so as defense we've got to do the same thing that they were doing to our offense and we got to shut them down. We ended up letting them get 20 points."

Kansas Wide Receiver Bradley McDougald
On if Coach Turner Gill said anything about this game meaning more to him
"No. All week he didn’t say anything. He just treated it like another game and another opponent on our schedule. That’s basically how we face it and that’s how he did."

On if there was extra motivation for the team because Gill played for Nebraska
"Coach did a pretty good job of downplaying the situation, so that kind of rubbed off on us. We didn’t see it as too much of a difference in the game. We didn’t see a homecoming for Coach Gill, we just see Nebraska on our schedule, so we game planned for Nebraska to beat Nebraska."

On how frustrating it was to play against a defense like Nebraska
"It’s very frustrating, especially as a wide receiver. We do so much work on the outside and then we turn around and the quarterback is scrambling on our side, so we have to turn around and block, so that was a pretty frustrating thing all night. We wanted to move the ball because the defense was doing an excellent job of holding an excellent offense to low numbers tonight, so I feel like we let the defense down a little bit tonight."

Cornerback Tyler Patmon
On what it was like to play at Nebraska
"That’s a good football team, ranked ninth in the country. They had all kinds of weapons on offense."

On if he was proud of his defense at the end of the day
"I mean I am proud of my defense, but at the end of the day we didn’t get the win so it means nothing, but I am proud of those guys"

On what was the plan to stop Taylor Martinez
"Tackle him, that’s all we had to do, keep our assignments and make the tackles. I said that if we would have done that, we would have a pretty good defensive game. We just got to make those stops on third down and give our offense better field position."

On what was it like coming to Nebraska for Coach Gill
"Of course we want to win for that guy, he came here and we love him. Of course he wants to beat them, he went to school here, so we wanted to get the win for him. But not just for him we wanted it for ourselves too. We had a lot of confidence coming out of Colorado and we felt like we could have come out here and beat those guys."