The other side: Five interesting quotes from the Tennessee Vols
GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA — Following the Florida Gators’ 29-16 win over No. 11 Tennessee at The Swamp on Saturday night, Vols coach Josh Heupel and his quarterback, Joe Milton, met with the media. Here are five quotes of note from their respective post-game interviews:
–Opening post-game press conference statement: “Extremely disappointing start to the football game, first half. Not very good in any sense of the way. Offense had the one drive and defense got the one stop. Other than that, not the way you wanna start. I do appreciate the competitiveness of the guys come out and compete and play in in the second half. Still didn’t play as clean as we need to, as well as we need to in a lot of ways. But they did fight. We gotta get a lot better. Hats off to, give credit to Florida. They did a good job. But we gotta get a lot better. We need to be cleaner.” — Heupel
–On how much the road environment at The Swamp contributed to Tennessee’s numerous pre-snap offensive penalties (The Vols had 10 penalties for 79 yards overall and many were costly): “Not as much, man. When you’re in environments like this as a team, you gotta come together as a collective and just gotta execute plays. We didn’t start off doing that as the beginning of the first half, so that led up to the score tonight. … Just not being focused, just shooting ourself in the foot, man. That’s all it is.” — Milton
Pre-snap penalties were a major issue for the Vols
–On the Vols believe most oftheir mistakes made in the loss were self inflicted: “Absolutely. It’s all self-inflicted wounds. Like I just said, you look at it like, oh, we lost in Florida. But you know, you go in there and you see all the (self-inflicted mistakes) we made, the self things that we did, that you did yourself that messed up the play or messed up the drive. Like those small things we can go change. But you gotta keep believing in yourself as a team. That’s my message to the team. Keep believing in yourself and go execute.” — Milton
–On Tennessee’s trouble stopping the Gators on third down (Florida finished 7 of 14 on third-down conversions): “Didn’t get off the field. Had been some third and long situations. Applied some pressure to the quarterback. We didn’t match out on some things. Yeah, we gotta be better. Gotta get off the field.” — Heupel
–On the Vols struggles with tackling in the open field: “Not very good in the first half. It was part of the problem. You can look at tackling and not getting off the field. And third down, defensively and offensively you can look at pre-snap penalties and lack of efficiency and all.” — Heupel
