ULM Head Coach Todd Berry
Opening statement: “Tough loss. We've certainly experienced enough of these. I think our hearts are ripe. We're playing hard. We're just making mistakes. Today, offense, defense, but certainly in the kicking game, we had some kicking game mistakes in the second half in particular that really hurt us, some lack of execution there. One of the things we talked about is on days like this you have to take care of the football, and the kicking game becomes magnified in these kinds of conditions. Lafayette came back after the second half and they executed better than we did, and so consequently, they won.”
On special teams mistakes: “The bottom line is, they need to go out and do what we ask them to do. I know we know better, but we're not getting it done, and that's my responsibility regardless, to make sure that that happens, that we're not putting guys out there in situations where they're uncomfortable and not going to make a play. We're young in a lot of positions. Obviously the conditions today were not outstanding in relation to punting and kicking and snapping and catching. But also we ran into the kicker, missed a field goal, did a lot of things there in the second half that were impactful in the game, especially in a field position game like this one was going to be.”
On second half adjustments being a struggle for younger players: “I don't think there's any question that it did, because we actually tried to do something there in the second half and we didn't. We didn't execute it at all after putting it in at halftime and talking about it. It's not something we haven't done, it's something we've done before, it's just that this group doesn't have a significant amount of experience with some of those things and we didn't execute it well at all and it's too bad because we had something really good and it didn't work up to fruition.”
On players' reactions: “I think it's tremendously frustrating to think that when you're that age and you're playing that hard. It's just difficult because they're looking around wanting to catch a break at some point in time but we're not catching any breaks between some of the already scheduled, Daniel (Fitzwater)'s passing, to the loss of a lot of players on our team that were impactful. This is not the same team we started off with, and guys have had to grow up. It's frustrating to get so close.
On moving on from the loss: “I think it's a credit to their character and their desires. We went through this last year to some degree, not necessarily the injuries or some of those things, but we just kind of kept fighting back, and regardless of how tough that loss was that week, and we had a bunch of them in a row there at the end of the season that were very close games kind of like this one. I think it attested to some of the character, but we need to win it. It's a tough loss.”
