WATCH: Rhett Lashlee previews SMU at Missouri State
SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee spoke with the media on Tuesday ahead of the Mustangs heading to Missouri State on Saturday. Watch the press conference above as SMU looks to bounce back from the loss to Baylor.
“Well, good to be back practicing and getting ready for another game on Saturday. It’s what we needed. Just recapping after having a chance to look at Saturday’s game back. It kind of was exactly what we felt, what it felt like. It was a game where our guys did a lot of things really well,” Lashlee said. “We ran the ball well, we won the run game, we won the turnover battle. We won the battle of field position. Explosives were pretty even. We did a lot of the things that we needed to do to win the football game. I think that’s why we found ourselves up 38-24 with eight minutes and 24 seconds to go. We did a lot of things that would say we deserved to win, but we didn’t earn the win. I think it was a 98 percent chance to win at one point, whether it was at 8:24 or five or six minutes. It was a great opportunity in a disappointing situation for us to teach and learn as a young team, a young team playing a team with a lot of veterans. When you go up 14 with 8:24 to go, we’ve been really good at finishing here, and we didn’t finish.
“If it says 98 percent, the reality of it is the hardest thing to do in sports is close out. Those last 2 percent is the hardest two of the 100. I think there’s some lessons to be learned, some painful growing pains that we gotta go through. Make no mistake, we don’t accept it and wanna tolerate it. We’re not okay with it, we’re pissed off about it because the guys put in so much work throughout the year, throughout the week and for three and a half quarters to put themselves in a great position to win against a good football team, in my opinion, a Top 25 caliber football team. Like I said, I think we deserve to win, but we didn’t earn the win. It’s very similar, you think about the Duke game last year. We probably didn’t deserve to win and we did. We’re not giving it back, they aren’t either. I think there’s a lot of positives, but when you lose, nobody thinks about that.”
SMU kicks off at Missouri State at 2:30 p.m. CT on CBS Sports Network.
