Nebraska vs. Minnesota
Head Coach Bo Pelini
Saturday, Nov. 22, 2014
Memorial Stadium (Lincoln, Neb.)
Opening Statement
“Well we're obviously disappointed. I feel bad for the seniors. But like I told the team, we lost because we didn't deserve to win. We didn't play well enough. We had too many busts. Our execution was subpar. Our tackling was horrendous. Too much leaky yardage. We beat ourselves in a lot of instances. We lost some opportunities, obviously on offense. Put the ball on the ground. Didn't take advantage of some opportunities. And all those things add up to losing against a good football team. So I'll open up for any questions."
On why the defense struggled against Minnesota's zone read
"We ran a number of different things on them. Sometimes there were a lot of unblocked guys. When we should have been tackling at the line of scrimmage or in the back field, they're getting 4-or-5 yards. That's a bad recipe. It's a recipe for disaster. The zone read puts stress on you. You have certain things that people are responsible for. And you better make plays. It's not anything magical. The guy who is responsible has got to do his responsibility. They were zoning very, very hard. It's going to make it hard for the guy cutting back on those gaps. They guy who is responsible for the quarterback has got to make a play in space. Sometimes we were blitzing right into it unblocked. And I look up and it's 2nd-and-6 or 2nd-and-5. You can't do it. What killed us defensively was our third down execution and some of the things in the passing game in the second half. We could have weathered the storm. We just didn't play the way we've been taught to play. There are some things that are stressed when we say that this is the leverage of play, this is how you play it. When you don' do it, you're going to lose. You're going to lose the football game."
On why he thinks the errors remained the same from last week
"There were different guys making different errors. If you play undisciplined and don't handle your responsibility, you're going to struggle. It happened way too many times when we were there. We had some guys that went unblocked a number of times. Like the last first down. We should have tackled him in the back field, but we tripped over our own feet. We dived at his feet or whatever he tried to do. All I saw was the ball on the ground unblocked. And they get eight or nine yards. You can sit there and look at it all day. There's no excuse there. We have to make some changes because we didn't play very well. There are a couple positions that played horrendous. Especially on defense. Offensively we did some good things at times. Obviously turning the ball over twice inside the 5-yardline is going to cost you. And it did."
On the pass play call when it was 2nd-and-1 on the fourth quarter drive
"That's my call. That's a bad call. You know, it's waste down. I wasn't expecting us to take a sack in that situation. We had two more downs to get the first down. You live and learn It ended up being a bad call."
On how often he makes an offensive call
"Every now and then. I didn't make the actual call. But I didn't say let's run the football either. You know what, it was a bad call. That call isn't why we lost the game. Trust me, there was a lot more than that."
On his perspective of the last play when freshman wide receiver De'Mornay Pierson-El fumbled the ball
"I couldn't tell how he had gone out or when he was forced out or whatever happened. I think what they were looking at was whether he jumped in from out of bounds to make the catch, which would have made it dead. From my vantage point, I don't think it was even close. I don't know. I'm not looking at that the whole time."
On his perspective of the play when senior linebacker Trevor Roach seemed to force a fumble and started to return the ball
"I don't know. I couldn't see it."
On how he thinks the team will respond at this point
"Effort-wise, they're good kids who want to win. They're going to play hard and fight. But we've got to play smarter and execute at a higher level or we'll get the same result. It's a good football team we have to play."
On if he thinks the team has regressed
"No. We haven't regressed. I said it about three weeks ago. I said some of the things that are plaguing us haven't hurt us up to this point. These last two weeks it hurt us. I mean it's as simple as that. We're not executing at a high enough of a level. Sometimes you can get away with it, sometimes you can't. We almost got away with it today. It wouldn't have changed with where we are. Had De'Mornay (Pierson-El) caught the ball and went in and scored, we would have won the football game and maybe felt better about it. But from my standpoint, that wouldn't change how I look at it. We didn't play at the level I want to see us playing at in a lot of areas."
On why he thinks the defense is struggling
"We're not good enough right now. We're not playing well enough. We don't play very smart for one. I'll be able to give you a little bit better of an answer once I watch the film. Inconsistence. Inconsistency will kill you. Some of the plays we ran that they got on us, we ran two, three, four and five times in practice. It wasn't anything new. We ran a couple of new things, but most of them were things that we covered, went over and executed. And we got into the game, and it was like we never saw it before. It's a bad recipe. You're always going to have to deal with things you haven't seen, but when you see a guy running out on the flat with nobody responsible for him, and it's the exact same formation, play, everything, same defense that you practice, you're going to struggle."
On the statuses of senior wide receiver Kenny Bell and senior offensive lineman Mark Pelini
"Mark has a high ankle. Not sure how bad it is. Kenny has a head injury."
On if Kenny's injury seemed to impact the game
"He's a great player on offense and in the passing game. But like I said, that one guy doesn't make it. We lost because we didn't play well enough to win. I'll give Minnesota credit, but I gave us a lot of credit for that, too."