Tulsa Post-Game Quotes
9/5/2004 12:00:00 AM | Football
Sept. 5, 2004
Head Coach Steve Kragthorpe:
I have to give Kansas all the credit. They outplayed us tonight. They were opportunistic tonight. They took advantage of the mistakes we made, and we made quite a few mistakes. They did a good job of taking advantage of those. I thought our guys played from the first snap to the last snap of the game with great effort. I think we can hold our heads high in terms of that. This was a game that as it unfolded, through the course of the game, we needed to make plays to put us in a position to have some momentum. We give up a kickoff return at the start of the second half, and hold them to a field goal there. We just had some opportunities to make some plays that we didn't make. We get a bad snap on a punt and get the ball blocked, so it was a combination of a few things like that. When you make mistakes against a good team like Kansas. They did a nice job of taking advantage of them. You just can't make mistakes like we made tonight and beat anybody. I don't care about yards. Never have and never will. I care about points. I care about the score of the game and having one more than they do at the end of the game. We didn't do that tonight. You can take statistics and construe them any way you want, but I'm more concerned about the score because that's ultimately how you're judged. I thought Kansas had a good defense coming in. They have a tremendous amount of talent and they supplemented that with some junior college players, so we knew they'd be talented on defense. We just didn't make plays when we had a chance to make plays that were available to us. It would have been nice to go up 7-0 instead of 3-0 for a momentum standpoint. Again, we had some opportunities to make some plays and when you don't capitalize on those you're not going to win any football games. I thought James (Kilian) battled tonight. He took some shots, but I can tell you this, he never gave up and battled throughout the course of the game. That's how I evaluate his play until I can look at film. We weren't able to sustain drives and keep our defense off the field. I thought our defense did a good job on some sudden changes in terms of limiting their point production in those situations. We just never really got a drive going where we felt we could seize the momentum back. We had the momentum at various points in time in the first half, and we just didn't do a good job in the second half of seizing the momentum when we had some opportunities to do it. When you're playing a good football team those opportunities aren't going to present themselves as many times as maybe when you're playing a team not as talented as KU. Again, I thought they did a good job of taking advantage of our miscues, and we didn't do a good enough job of taking advantage of their miscues.
