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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 29, 2016

Mark Richt

South Bend, Indiana

Miami - 27, Notre Dame - 30

COACH RICHT: First, congratulations to Coach Kelly and the Notre Dame football team. They played an excellent ball game and deserved to win -- how they played, how they finished. Obviously, started very slow. It could have been really bad, but somehow or another, after they went up 20, we found a way to offense, defense, special teams to get 27 and take the lead, which is exciting to me as a coach to see that happen.

And then really from that point on, Notre Dame pretty much took the game over, and we weren't able to get the job done, really either side of the ball at that point.

Absolutely proud of the effort of our young men. It's not easy to stem the tide like that and rally in a place like this. (CHECK AUDIO).

With that, I'll open it up.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH RICHT: We never really established the run much offensively. Defensively, they just kind of picked at it, picked apart, picked us apart a little bit, short passes, intermediates, a little bit of a run here, run there, just kind of worked their way down the field. High execution by them, and we didn't have any answers early on on defense.

I thought the stop to force the field goal that made it 20 was huge because we know teams at 20, you're three scores from taking the lead. We did get a touchdown on the board before the half, which was good.

And the other, we onside kicked, get it, just a beautiful job there by Carter especially. Not the best kick, but good enough. I thought his patience to wait for it to go ten was huge. A lot of guys might have jumped on it too quick. The kick wasn't quite as we thought, but we saw a film and thought we had a shot at getting that thing. Man, when you get that, that's when you got to score. That's when you got to put points on the board. We could have had it within six points at halftime, which would have been huge.

But we started the second half, and we score on the first drive, which is great. Cut the lead down to six. Before you know it, it's tied, and then we get the lead. At the very end, again, we just didn't have enough answers defensively or offensively.

Q. Coach, the way this team was about a month ago, 4-0, ranked top ten in the country, four losses now. Where do you go from here?
COACH RICHT: Go play Pitt.

Q. How can you assess what happened in the four-game losing streak?
COACH RICHT: We didn't get it done, obviously. I mean, it's a team thing -- offense, defense, special teams. Bottom line is we didn't get it done. Came close. 3 out of 4 came close, but close doesn't count. We've got to get better.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH RICHT: They're all good players. There's a bunch of good quarterbacks around. Kizer certainly played well tonight.

Q. What did you guys say at halftime? You guys came out totally different in the second half. Who stepped up in the locker room?
COACH RICHT: I think everybody was in a good place. The coaching staff did a good job of painting a picture of what could happen. Just fight. Just fight. See what happens. We knew if we would fight and execute it, we'd have a chance to get back in this thing, which we did. We did more than that, quite frankly.

You can look in a group of guys' eyes and see if they're going to pack their bags, and that wasn't it. We lost four in a row, as you mentioned back there. We haven't lost our fight. People that aren't in the game itself -- it's hard to turn it around when it starts like that, really hard to do, especially after you've lost three. You're looking around and saying, hey, I've had enough, and that's not what they did.

That's hard above everything. That's the thing that made me most proud of what happened tonight, but we all know it's about wins and losses, and we lost.

Q. Mark, where do you think the biggest breakdown for them the last few weeks in the pass protection. The numbers have doubled or tripled.
COACH RICHT: Part of it is just getting behind. You get behind, and you may end up having to chunk it a little bit more than you may want to. The other thing is just not really establishing the run well enough, getting ourselves in a situation where it's third and manageable or medium. It's just hard to call a run and expect to get the first down. We just did not really run the ball well enough on first and second down and set ourselves up for more manageable in third down situations.

Of course, if you run and play action pass, it takes a little edge off the rush because you're not quite sure. Is it run? Is it pass? What is it? It changes their pass rush a little bit and the intensity of it. But if you're sitting there like we've got to scheme them up and pass pro and run these route concepts and get people open -- and I think we did get people open, maybe more so in the first half than the second.

There's times when -- there's always going to be times when you get beat and then you get a sack, and that's going to happen. But when you get behind and you don't get the running game going like you should, it just puts us in a situation where we have to drop back and throw the ball to have a chance to get back in it.

A lot of good things did happen, but in the end, not enough.

Q. What was the range on Badgley there on the last drive? Where did you think you had to get him?
COACH RICHT: If we got to 40, he can make that. It would have been a 57-yarder. We were getting close. We were getting close. Maybe one more completion on the clock play is what we were hoping for, but couldn't quite get it done.

I had called a play before the time-out that I wish I'd have called again -- I don't know if it would have mattered in regard to protection. There's a play I would have called that would have given us a better chance to get him throwing on rhythm and having a shot, but when they called time-out, I thought they were going to change coverage. And they may have changed coverage, but it looked pretty close to the same as what they had played before.

So I called something that I thought -- I was reacting to the fact that I thought they might run more of a true prevent defense on that one.

Thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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