Oct. 4, 2014
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GEORGIA TECH HEAD COACH Paul Johnson
Opening Statement
“I’m proud of our guys. That was a huge win. Anytime you can get a division win in conference and certainly Miami has a lot of good players and good athletes. We played a pretty clean game except for some penalties. Other than that it was a pretty clean game. Offensively we did a great job possessing the ball and keeping their athletes off the field. And we got some crucial stops on defense when we had to. When we got backed up we made them kick the field goal and got the pick at the end. We played about the way we needed to play to win the game. I’m happy for our players and I thought it was a good team win.”
Tony Zenon’s 1st down reception on 3rd and 16
“Well the pass play to Tony we got ourselves in a bind at 3rd and 16 which wasn’t good. I thought maybe we could catch the wheel. We caught him on the linebacker and Justin made a good throw and Tony made a big catch for us. It was a post wheel with the dig, the wheel being the first option, and we got what we were looking for.”
Deon Hill’s 4th down touchdown run
“The way the game was going I thought we were moving the ball pretty well and that’s what we do. I told our team we’re going to run the triple and it’s what we do. We do it every day. It’s two yards, let’s go get it. And we did. Justin made a nice read and we had Deon on the edge and they didn’t have anybody out there. So it was good.”
Zach Laskey’s performance
“It’s the way they played. The first guy that we were reading didn’t take him. When that happens he’s going to get the carries. And we ran some speed balance stuff out of our unbalanced set. Zach played hard. I thought he ran the ball really hard”
“He made some nice runs. They had decided that they were not going to let Justin carry the ball. And it’s okay. If everybody does what they’re supposed to, then the other facet should be there. Zach worked hard for what he got.”
Total performance
“We got contributions out of everybody. It was a crazy game because they hit several big plays. It was kind of a tale of two tales. They were hitting big plays and we were six-and-eight-yarding them to death. Once we got up on them and we got up by two scores, I felt pretty good about the way it went. Our defense bent a little bit, but Jamal made a great play at the end to seal the thing.”
The performances of Jamal Golden and Isaiah Johnson
“They both had huge interceptions and they both tackled better. We’ll look at the tape but we missed some tackles still. But I think we’re getting better. We’re getting better every week. That’s what you hope that you can do. We’ll have to get better this week because the crowd coming in doesn’t beat themselves. They’re well coached and they play hard. They’ve got guys that are older and redshirted and have played. It’ll be a good game again.”
Defending Duke Johnson
“There really weren’t a lot of adjustments. I think we just played better. The only thing we talked about a little bit was just to get in a base defense and settle down and play where everybody knows where they’re going and limit some big plays. He’s a good player and he makes a lot of people look silly. They’ve got a lot of really good athletes.”
Neutralizing the speed of Miami’s offense
“How do you neutralize it? You hold the ball for 40 minutes and 45 seconds and they don’t get it and they’re not out there. That’s the best way to play a team like that is to keep them off the field. I don’t know how many total plays they ran, but they had 21 at half. They ran 44 plays the whole game.”
Ryan Rodwell’s fake punt
“We just watched the film and Coach Rychelski did a nice job padding the fake in. And if you’re going to fake a punt, you’ve got to do it on your end. Everybody’s going to play safe around midfield. At the point in the game both sides we’re moving and scoring. I mean there were four possessions in the first half. Both teams had the ball four times. It couldn’t have been much more than that in the second half. Each possession was paramount and if you can steal yourself another turn. You know Rodwell looked like a tailback when he took off with that thing.”
DeAndre Smelter did not factor in the game
“No he didn’t. But I’m going to tell you what he blocked his tail off. And I told him after the game he’ll get his turn. The way that game was going it was limited possessions. If we ran the ball three times they had a hard time stopping it. There were some things maybe in the passing game that we could have done. I thought it was more important that we try to run the clock and keep them off the field. Like I said, when we ran the ball three times we usually made a first down. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to throw it. And actually Justin hit a couple big passes to bail us out of some third down plays. It worked about like it needed to for us to win the game. I thought the crowd was great, especially the students. They were loud and into it. Night games here are always a lot of fun.”
MIAMI HEAD COACH AL GOLDEN
Opening remarks
“We got beat in all three phases tonight by Georgia Tech. I thought they played a helluva ball game. We helped them in too many ways to win. We didn’t get off the field on third down on defense. We didn’t get a fourth-down stop. We gave up a third-and-15. On offense, we had two red-zone interceptions. No points there. We didn’t do well on third down, so we didn’t possess the ball. We were just on the field too long (defensively). On special teams, [we had] a critical penalty, taking off great field position on a punt return, and we gave up a fourth-down change of possession on a (punt) fake. So, they beat us in all three phases.
On having little room for error against a team like Georgia Tech
“No you don’t have room for error, and I think that maybe for the first time in a long time since we’ve played them, we didn’t take the ball away from them at all. We weren’t good enough on third down, even when it was third and six or seven, we weren’t good enough. The offense didn’t help the defense out. It has to work both ways. When you have a lead, you have to continue to attack. But you can’t lose the ball in the red zone twice. And you have to hold on to the ball. We didn’t hold onto the ball on third down.”
On Tech dominating inside
“They got too many yards inside, too many yards inside between out tackles, and mike. We never got them off-track from that standpoint.”
On Tech having success outside
“We’ve got to give them credit. We pushed them into third or fourth down 16 times, and they converted 11 of them. I don’t know what they’re longest runs were. I wouldn’t say we didn’t have anybody there (on the pitch man). They executed better than we did. Our safeties needed to make more plays in the alley. We needed more linebackers in the alley. It wasn’t good enough. There are too many variations that we have.”
On Tech converting a third and 15 (pass)
“We weren’t good enough. I think they ran the wheel on us. We didn’t stay with the wheel. On the one before that, we had pressure on them, and they threw a sprint-out. We played it too off from the safety position, and they converted it. Those are two third-and-longs, and we should be in better shape on both of those. They ended up being big plays. On both of them, we could have gotten off the field. That’s disappointing.”
On making adjustments
“That’s all you’re doing is making adjustments in a game like this. You’re constantly making adjustments. Laskey was gaining too many yards inside, falling forward too many times. There are so many adjustments you’re making during the game, who’s the quarterback player, changing the tempo, who’s the dive players. We weren’t as effective as we have been. Give credit to them. There were a couple new nuances in there. They executed better than we did.”
GEORGIA TECH PLAYERS
Charles Perkins, AB, Sr., #21
On matchup with Denzel Perryman
“He’s a great athlete. I think he could have gone to the NFL last year. It was fun going against him. He is a load to try and block, but we were able to get him down a few times and make plays.”
On crowd’s impact and overall atmosphere
“It was a great atmosphere. Saturday night. Bobby Dodd. Whiteout. I mean you could not ask for a better atmosphere. I think it helped us a lot. We love when the fans get behind us and it was a great atmosphere to play in tonight.”
On Coach Johnson’s confidence in offense on 4th down red-zone situation
Coach came into the huddle and told us we do this every day at practice. It was just about running a basic option play. We kicked it out and Deon made a great play. Great execution.
On his 7 carries and 65 yard performance
“I feel great. It hurt to be out two weeks ago, but we got the win and that’s all that matters. It just felt great to be able to come back out healthy and help my team win a big game.
On team’s energy level coming off the bye week
“Coming off a bye week, we were all fresh. Guys were able to get healthy and we came out strong all around. We had a lot left in the tank at the end. Conditioning was great and we just flew around all game.”
Jamal Golden, FS, Jr., #4
On his game-sealing interception
“That interception came directly from film studies. We saw that almost every time in the red-zone they were pretty much running a smash route or they were running a fake smash route with the receiver going back inside. I knew he was going to do it. It was just a matter of the quarterback throwing the ball. The ball was in the air so I just tried to go up and make a play.”
On defense’s ability to stop Miami on third down
“We didn’t do anything different; we just had to play better. We did the same things we did in the first half and we just executed a little better. You do that and you’re going to get them off the field.”
On stronger second-half performances throughout the season
“There’s really nothing different. We’re running our same stuff really. We tweak some things week to week, but it’s just a matter of overlapping each other with great effort. One person busts and then you have ten other guys running to the ball and you kind of don’t notice the bust. It’s not that we are doing anything different; we’re just playing better.
On improvement on kickoff returns
“It was great. We really pushed on that coming off of the last game because we hadn’t been to good. Coach Ray really pushed us on that going into the bye week. We worked kick return really hard and you could tell that we had been working on it cause the seams opened up a little more. I feel like we will continue to get better.”
On strong performance in the backfield alongside Isaiah Johnson
“We still had some miscues back there, but for the most part we had our eyes in the right place. We studied them really hard. We had two weeks to study them really hard on film. We could kind of predict the routes that were coming and when it was time to make a play we both stepped up and made a play. Credit to Coach Roof and the coaching staff for getting us in the right position.”
