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UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 3, 2015

Mark Stoops

Lexington, Kentucky

Eastern Kentucky - 27
Kentucky - 34

COACH STOOPS: We just feel very fortunate. That's the word that jumps out at me right now. Give them credit, I feel like they coached better than we did, they played with much greater energy and enthusiasm and executed better than we did. And fortunately, we had some guys step up and make some plays late, I am very proud of our team and our determination to stay with it and to finish the game and to somehow find a way to get the victory.

But overall not very pleased with our effort. And we'll get back to work, we have a bye week this week to get some guys healed up that we need to do and get back and get back to work and fundamentally get better as a football team. That's the good news, I guess, again, to somehow find a way to get the 4-1, at the end of the year, it doesn't matter, nobody will know how or what it looks like, a victory is a victory and very fortunate to get that tonight.

I think Coach Hood and his staff did a great job. Very good program that's very well coached and their players played extremely hard. So I'll leave it at that.

Q. How damaging would it have been to all this momentum you built to lose this game?
COACH STOOPS: Pretty significant, I would think. Yeah. Definitely would be.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH STOOPS: Yup, not very good. We don't respond to that very well. So, we can't be nice. At all. And so that's the game of football. You have to respect the game, respect the preparation, respect your opponent and you got to play with a toughness and a mental edge about you or else you won't look very good.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH STOOPS: I don't know. I got to do a better job of coaching.

Q. Talk about that touchdown pass on fourth down.
COACH STOOPS: Great individual effort. I mean, what can you say? I mean he just went up and made a play. And, boy, that's, it's hard to put into context how important that was. So, just a great play. We saw it, we had some other options on the play and we saw him in one-on-one and he's a big guy, so we went to it.

Q. Does this help you more in the long run to have to rescue the game at the end rather than winning big?
COACH STOOPS: I don't know, I would have liked to have seen us play and improve and move forward as a team. Not sure we did that tonight. But it is, again, very, getting a victory was obviously very critical.

Q. Your offensive line guys got a lot of praise against Missouri, but it seemed like EKU was really controlling the line.
COACH STOOPS: Yeah, definitely. I think, yeah, I felt like we were a little, to their credit, they took us out of it, but we weren't very comfortable all night with some of our run/options. They were taking care of the line of scrimmage, we weren't getting very much yardage in the run game, and they were mixing it up very well and kept us off balance.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH STOOPS: Absolutely. I mean, we have to get better and guys, we all have to do a better job. Starting with me and that's what we plan on doing.

Q. What were you thinking about with 4:59 to go?
COACH STOOPS: I'll be honest, it wasn't looking good, it really wasn't. I'm human and we were certainly going to fight and finish that game. We had to get a spark offensively and we finally got that. Got a little energy going. Gave the fans something to cheer about, gave our team a little bit of juice. We get the score, cut it to seven, the defense gets a stop. And I said it before you walked in, I just feel very fortunate to get the win. We get a couple stops, make a couple plays, and, but it wasn't looking good, that's for sure.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH STOOPS: Yeah, I mean he's -- they did a nice job offensively keeping us off balance, defensively they were getting too many yards, they were milking us, getting us some yards, and we had to go to some bigger people even in the spread set and try to anchor down a little bit more and started making a few more plays.

Q. What about Jabari?
COACH STOOPS: Jabari.

Q. Corey.
COACH STOOPS: Oh, Corey, Corey's been playing well for us. I have to see the film, but he's done, played very well the last couple weeks.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH STOOPS: I did. I did. I thought about it. Thank you.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH STOOPS: He'll be back. He'll be back.

Q. Was he suspended tonight?
COACH STOOPS: He'll be back Monday, he'll be ready to go.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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