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Vandy Head Coach Bobby Johnson Quotes
11/12/2005
Vanderbilt Head Coach Bobby Johnson
Opening Statement
“I think it was just an extremely, extremely poor first half by the whole football team, which is obviously my fault. I need to get them ready and get them in here and get them ready to play. We had execution mistakes, mistakes on special teams, turnovers and when we’re that far behind it’s just hard to come back. I’m proud of the way our guys did play in the second half, but we still did not play well enough to overcome the mistakes we made in the first half. You give up 365 yards and they score 48 points you’re just giving up too many opportunities and you’re just not doing the things you need to do to win.”
On having to use timeouts early in the second half
“At that point in time we’re trying to make adjustments and make sure we got the right play because every at that point is critical. And if you allow a bad play to be run I think it is worse that losing a timeout, because you have a chance for a turnover or lost yardage. It would be wonderful if we never had to call a timeout, if we had every play called correctly and we got out of the huddle correctly, but that’s not the way it goes.”
On why the team was flat in the first half
I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I thought our guys practiced really well this week. The tide turned when they returned that blocked field goal and we just sort of deflated then. I thought we played hard at first — we had a turnover, we had a field goal. We had some positive things happen early. But we couldn’t follow through with it.
On the special teams play
“There were several special teams’ poor plays. We allowed a punt return, another punt return that set up another touchdown. The blocked field goal probably was a deflating moment. Kentucky did a good job blocking the kick. They did an excellent job on the punt returns. They blocked us. It wasn’t so much breakdowns as we just didn’t do a very good job of beating their blocks. I would say they did an excellent job.”
On the come-back effort
“I’ve been with some teams, some good teams, who’ve been in that situation and not been able to come back. I think our guys hung in there and we got it down to a on-sides-kick attempt. We had a chance to get the ball back with two minutes to go and if we had gotten it back I think we would have gotten it in the end zone.”
On the play of the defense
“Mainly it was missed tackles and bad pursuit angles and we allowed big plays. At times we played extremely well. We played the run well and then we allowed big plays. We just let them run down there and either get in position to score or score. The big play hurt us. Like I said 365 yards usually doesn’t yield 48 points, but we just gave them so many opportunities. We gave them short-fields. We fumbled in the first drive of the second half and allowed them to score one of their touchdowns. We played better on defens in the second half, we just gave them too many opportunities.”
On the seniors’ last home game
“My thoughts on the seniors hasn’t changed no matter what the outcome of the game is. They’ve worked extremely hard for Vanderbilt. They’ve been top-notch people and they’ll be top-notch people when they leave here.
On freshman wide receiver Earl Bennett
“Early Bennett is a football player. I just don’t know what else to say about him. Earl returns punts, returns kicks, he covers kicks and he’s been running out there — we passed 67 times — and he was probably out there 57 of them running routes. He’s top notch and he’ll be a great player for us and he had a great performance out there today, and that wasn’t his first one.”
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