Louisiana Tech head coach Skip Holtz and select student-athletes spoke with the media Monday in advance of the team's road game at Texas Tech Saturday, Sept. 17 at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock.

Head Coach Skip Holtz

Opening comments:

"It is always nice to get your first win of the season. Let's start with that because as I told the football team after Arkansas, as much as everyone is patting each other on the back and saying we played close, the reality of it was we were 0-1 going into this weekend."

"You have your pregame talk with your team, you go out there on the field, try and get everything geared up to kick off right at 6 o'clock. You have your pregame meal four hours before kickoff and all of a sudden you come out and 30 minutes before kickoff, it is go in there, take your shoes off, take your shoulder pads off and relax. I had a little experience with rain-delayed games when I was at South Florida. We played Notre Dame and had two three-hour rain delays at halftime and end of the third quarter, so six hours of rain delays. What I learned in that one, take your shoes off, take your shoulder pads off, lay down and relax. I don't know how long this is going to last."

"As we started getting closer to 10 o'clock, it started becoming a concern with safety for the players just as far as they had not eaten at that point in eight hours. We ordered about 80 pizzas for the two teams to try and get some pizzas in everybody and just whatever we could do to get some food in them and keep their strength up to go play the game."

"The rain delay definitely took a while, but fortunately at 10 o'clock we were able to get started. I am very grateful to everybody that stuck around, the student body and the people that hung around to watch the game. I thought we played hard. I think statistically you look at the game and it was impressive, but I did not think it was very clean. I felt like from the red zone production on both offense and defense, the turnovers on offense, missed assignments, the penalties; I just did not feel like we played the game as clean as we could play it."

"Fundamentally, I just think we need to keep getting better. We are not where we need to be, but like I said, you can look at it and say 720 yards and you outgained your opponent by a lot of yards, but when I talked to our football team last night in the team meeting, it was very somber from the standpoint of we did not play as well as we would have liked to. We are starting to build expectations from the inside in how they expect to play. It is not just about wins and losses. It is about the expectation of doing your job and everyone playing at the level we need to play. From that standpoint, I am encouraged because we definitely need to start getting better as we get into this."

"Overall, it was a nice win, but we definitely feel like we can play better as a football team on both sides of the ball. This week, the challenge does not get any easier with Texas Tech this weekend. I think Kliff Kingsbury has been there four years and has done a great job. I played against him when he was at Houston. He has a great football mind. He is incredibly smart and innovative in a lot of ways with some of the things they do offensively. They are putting up video game-type numbers on offense. When you look at them, they have six returning starters off last year's football team, but they are number one in passing offense, No. 2 in total offense and No. 3 in scoring offense. I think it is 62 points a game or something along those lines. I think they have a quarterback that off what little film I have seen so far, he and the quarterback at Louisville are two dynamic, game-changing football players. You have to game plan against them. I think it is the closest thing I have seen to Johnny Manziel, the only difference is this one is 6-3, 230 pounds, athletic, can run, throws the ball, strong and smart. I don't know how you stop him. Nobody else does either. I think they are very talented with what they do. Patrick (Mahomes) is the one that makes it all go. I could not be more complimentary of him."

"It is going to be a great challenge for our football team playing our second game on the road and going out there and playing there. Hopefully, some of our younger players were able to cut their teeth at Arkansas on the road and that will help us a little bit where maybe we are not so big-eyed going into this stadium and playing this game. We are going to have to be playing at a high level if we want any chance to be competitive in this game."