UTSA Roadrunners College Football Pregame Quote, 09/05/2022

On takeaways from last week’s game against Houston:

Exactly what I thought after the game was over, which, is usually not that way, right? Usually when the game’s over you think what you saw is not what you saw but our kids gave the most amazing effort ‚Ķ like they always do. I’ve coached them now for ‚Ķ this is my third year, other than one time, I thought our kids have always given effort that’s indescribable. I’ve had so many of my coaching buddies that just ‚Ķ they’re starting to pay attention to us now. They were literally like, ‚Äòy’alls effort jumps off the screen, like it comes through the screen.’ I couldn’t be more proud of them. Our execution was very much first game like and that’s on the head coach. I’ve got to get that cleaned up.

On taking the blame for the loss postgame and continuing to do so after film study:

Well, it’s all on me, right? Every bit of that. I don’t want to get too specific because what happens then is that assistant coaches then get blamed and then players start getting blamed. All that’s on me. There’re so many details in the game ‚Ķ I’ll be as vague as possible do I don’t give anybody up, but you know, substitution errors, having to burn timeouts when you don’t need to because of formations and technique of scheme ‚Ķ of protection, technique defensively, blitzes. The problem is vague and specific at the same time is that I don’t want to give media or my players that are listening to this or my coaches that watch this or coaches’ wives that watch this to think I’m throwing anyone under the bus. That’s all on Jeff Traylor because I’m responsible for every bit of that. And I mean that. There is no false humility there, there’s nobody trying to make anybody feel sorry for me, that’s on me. That’s my responsibility as the head coach to get that stuff taken care of and it was not taken care of.

 On offensive line’s performance last week:

Obviously with the injury to Makai Hart, that put us at a distinct disadvantage. I was so proud of Frankie (Martinez), the way he went out there and competed. Frankie’s a walk-on ‚Ķ pays for his own school ‚Ķ was going up against a superior athlete and Frankie battled his tail off. I thought (Ahofitu) Maka played a fantastic game. I thought Venly (Tatafu), for playing left tackle for the first time in his career, did a really good job. We had a few MAs (missed assignments) there. We’ve got a lot of run game that we’ve got to get cleaned up. I expected more from that unit going into the game but with the injury, you know, there’s some combos up front we have to get better at. Our running backs have got to hug some stuff better. There’s a lot to get better at. I just don’t want to be too specific because, again, I don’t want to throw my players ‚Ķ my players give me all they’ve got right? And I’ve just got to be careful how ‚Ķ I’ve got to protect my coaches and my players after an extremely, extremely tough loss on our program.