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Louisiana Tech Head Coach Skip Holtz

Opening Statement:
"I'm really proud of this team. The questions I got this week were, you know, 'Is the ship sinking?''Is this a must-win game?' When you look at this team, being this early as we are in the season, being the 16-point underdog, a lot of people gave up on these kids. To have them come in here, after losing to a #3 Oklahoma, to come in here and show what kind of football team [they are] and what kind of character [they have] and what kind of pride they have in this program, and the way they came out here and played, I thought they played physically; I thought they played hard; I thought they played together; they never flinched."

"Offensively, especially early, looked really bad with three penalties on the opening drive; we had a muffed snap. It looked really bad; it looked like a continuation of what we did last week. But I'm going to say the same thing this week that I said after last week's game when we lost 48-16: we are a work in progress. We have a lot of young players on this football team. We have a lot of guys that have never started that have now started two college football games. We are a work in progress and I am incredibly proud of the way they came out and competed tonight. I said it that way last week that we're a work in progress and I'll say it again this week, we have a lot of things that we have to get better at and a lot of things that we can do an awful lot better. But I can't ask these players the last two weeks to compete any harder, to play any harder, to be more emotional, to have more energy, two weeks in a row."

"Now we have a short week and we have to go play in five days, our first conference game. We talked about the difficulty of this schedule at the beginning, but I'm just really proud of this football team that we were able to come down here and show what we're made of. And we've talked about it all week, where these two programs are and the success that UL-L has had in the Sun Belt. But coming in here as a 16-point underdog and doing what this team did, I'm proud of them."

On how the team gained momentum:
"In the first quarter, we had three penalties on the opening drive. We started with the quarterback having the cadence, and then the center said he couldn't hear him, so the tackles were jumping so we went back to the center taking it. I kept going over there going "Everybody calm down; we're okay." Trent [Taylor] couldn't hear one of the play calls. We had to take a timeout while he was trying to get all organized. We just had some communication issues early and didn't look very organized to be honest. And that's our fault as coaches; that's on us."

"But I thought once they calmed down, we started to get a beat, spread it out, put the ball in Cody [Sokol]'s hands a little bit and open it up because we just wanted to get a running game going consistently enough. And I said the same thing last week, some of the discipline mistakes that we make like if the guard didn't hear the call, or the tackle went the wrong way. And the next thing you know you're in 3rd and long and the whole first quarter it seemed like we were in situations where we kept having two high safeties."

"We thought with some of their bracket coverage that they were very vulnerable deep, and we came in with the mindset that we wanted to throw the ball deep quite a bit early. But every time we were on yardage they would go too high and it was no longer there. So once we calmed down a little bit, taking some of the underneath stuff, gaining some confidence, put those two drives together, came out in the second half and said let's go back to our game plan, let's get in a little bit bigger personnel, run a play-action pass and see if we can hit the post. And I thought Cody and Sterling [Griffin] ran a great route and the offensive line protected him. I thought Cody threw a beautiful ball down the field."

On RB Kenneth Dixon's 99-yard touchdown:
"I don't know if it was an emotional lift but it was a huge play in the game because it was points. You go from being backed up on the 1-yard line to all of a sudden it's seven to nothing. I don't know what the total yards were before that run but we weren't doing much on offense and they had taken the ball and driven the field… Early on, we were bending but not breaking and weren't giving up any points, but offensively we were sputtered. We were sputtered trying to get anything going, trying to get some consistency on offense. But then Kenneth broke that 99-yard run and you look back up and you're up seven to nothing."

"Kenneth is a great player. He's a phenomenal competitor and a great young man, and I'm just really proud of the way that he went out there and competed tonight. I think that there was nobody madder in that entire stadium on his 4th-and-1 run than him. And he said, "That will not happen again, coach." That was the very same play we ran on 4th-and-1; the one that went for no gain was the same play as the one that went for ninety-nine."

Louisiana Head Coach Mark Hudspeth Quotes

On how the team played …
"When you look at everything, it's pretty evident why we did not play well and did not win the football game. We had a plan to win, and when you do not follow that plan to win, you lose. It's pretty simple. You have to take care of the ball and we did neither. We had three turnovers, they had zero, giving us two straight weeks without causing a turnover. That is tough to overcome."
"We are much better than we showed tonight, and I am confident we are going to show that. One game does not make or break your season and we are fixing to come back and grind and get better."

On defensive performance …
"Defensively, I thought we played well in the first half, but we did not help them offensively in the first half with just seven points. They (Louisiana Tech) had the big play in the first half with the 99-yard run, but we did not do anything offensively to keep our defense off the field. In the second half the defense dropped off, and the offense did the same."
"We can't give up big plays. They (Tech) had two big plays that were just daggers. We ran the ball effectively and probably should have done that more and kept it between the tackles more."

On Louisiana Tech's preparation …
"Give Louisiana Tech credit. They did a great job in preparation for us. I told the team, it is a total team loss. We will find out a lot about our team now. By no means are we pressing the panic button in any manner. We are just going to get back to work."

On the upcoming schedule …
"It doesn't get any easier. If we don't come back and get to work and fix some of these things, it's going to be even tougher. We'll see a lot on film tomorrow, and a lot of things we wish we could have done differently."

On the 99-yard Kenneth Dixon touchdown …
"That was tough because we had just come close on the previ- ous drive. You always jockey with field position and wait for the right time to strike, so if we could have held them and forced them to punt from their own end zone, then we are looking at great field position and having a chance to score and maybe a chance to get the game going in our direction."