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ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 30, 2017

Todd Graham

Stanford, California

Stanford, 34 - Arizona State, 24

COACH GRAHAM: Congratulate Coach Shaw and Stanford. They did a good job today. They were the better team today. They played more disciplined, and I was proud of how our guys fought. I thought our guys fought hard. We just made too many mistakes. Obviously turning the football over was the key for us.

But I'm really proud of how hard our guys fought. But gotta give them the credit. They were very disciplined today.

Q. You talked all week about how special Bryce Love is watching him on film and in person, is there any difference?
COACH GRAHAM: Yeah, I mean, you've just got to tackle the guy. The guy's really hard to tackle. Even on the play, every play he broke we had someone there unblocked and couldn't tackle him. So you've got to give him a lot of credit. He's very, very good. They know their identity.

But you know, I mean, the game started off there were things against them that the margin for error is just very small. They're not going to make mistakes.

And even though they turned the ball over, J'Marcus did a great job of stripping that, but they score, we're going down to score in the first drive, got the ball in the fringe.

Worst we're getting is three points and we take a side. That's three points off the field. And those things hurt you.

We just had the -- I know one of the interceptions was on first down. I think the other one was on second down.

And we're moving the ball. So those are the things that really hurt us. I thought we rushed the ball well. I felt good the first half. I thought man coming into halftime we're going to get the ball go down and tie this thing up.

Holding them to a field goal right before half was big. But at the end of the day we gave up too many big plays in the run game. You can't give up that many yards rushing and have a chance but on the same hand we've got to score -- we should score a heck of a lot more than 24 points. You've got to give them credit. They did a good job.

Just discipline errors that we made. We got a third down and one and supposed to be handing the ball over and we had a miscue there. We had one play, pass play that we ran if we would have executed it properly it would have been a big play and we executed it wrong.

There wasn't a whole lot of that. I thought our guys were pretty clean. We didn't have very many penalties. But there were just things like that that from a discipline standpoint. And he's a really special guy. I mean, when he broke, he's very, very difficult to tackle.

And we just didn't -- I thought the first half we didn't play very good from a standpoint of corralling him. He had some big, big plays. And the second half, the defense, they get a fake punt. We back them up 20 yards and make them punt again further back than where they did the fake punt.

We didn't field the ball early in the game. On the first time they punted cost us about 15 yards. All these little things that add up that we've been pretty disciplined to this point. We didn't play undisciplined. Just at the end of the day it was a 10-point game and the difference was the turnovers.

I said to the team the whole week, if you're plus two, plus three, that's who will win this game.

Q. You mentioned the team at the beginning, winning play after winning play, the toughness was still there. How can you speak to the toughness of this team?
COACH GRAHAM: Our guys have heart. The whole time we were -- the third quarter was kind of surprising to me, because -- and they did. They played even front first half and odd front, did some zone pressure stuff but we were running the ball, running the ball and moving the ball.

And what I think slowed us down or what hurt us is obviously we're moving the ball right at almost midfield then we throw an interception on first down.

That was a huge play in the game. And we tried to stay out of drop-back situations early. We were in some drop-back situations in the first half and got some sacks. I think they only this let sacks but he had a lot of pressure and got hit a lot.

But our guys have a lot of resolve. I'm proud of how our guys played. They battled. Even there at the end, guy on the sideline, try to kick a field goal, do an onside kick, and they were fighting all the way down at the end.

And I liked the fight and I liked the competitiveness. But it's Pac-12. It's going to be usually a one-score game and you can't -- we made too many errors and errors were not a whole bunch of them, they're just ones that the two turnovers is what wound up costing us.

And that sack right there cost us three points. So all those little things add up. I'm proud -- I thought the defense in the second half I thought they rallied, in the third quarter they were playing hard, getting off the field.

And then there were a couple of downs there like when they scored -- it was a third down and four and they hit a slant on us. We gotta compete. We cannot give up that slant.

It was just a really, really -- it was two teams I think that are really disciplined playing each other, and they were just a little bit more disciplined today than we were.

Q. With everything that Billy Napier is going through, you still had pretty creative game plan offensively. Could you speak to that?
COACH GRAHAM: My heart goes out to Billy. I think he flew last night, I don't know, five and a half, six hours on a plane. Buried his dad yesterday. And he's a champion for even coming and doing that today and did a good job. He did a good job for us today. That was tough.

Q. What did you think about the Sparky (indiscernible) to N'Keal and those others?
COACH GRAHAM: Yeah, we thought we had some pretty good stuff there. One of the things was in our game plan was third down five, six, seven, we were going to run the football. And I think we converted a whole bunch of them.

Probably 50 percent on third down. They're pretty efficient on third down. It wasn't anything that stood out -- it's not like I'm coming in here saying we played undisciplined. Because I don't think we did. I think we had three or four penalties and the key was turnovers. They were costly. Cost us big time.

You've got to score more than 24 points to win in the Pac-12. And we should have. We just didn't execute. You've got to give them credit. They did some nice things.

Still, we're losing yardage in special teams not fielding punts. Thought that in the fake punt they got us on that. But we also were trying to force, trying to block the punt and they caught us doing that. But I like how our defense responded. Says a lot about our guys how they responded. They fight.

They've got a lot of heart. And we're one and one, I think there's only one team in the south that's undefeated, Utah. And there's a lot of football left to play. And we get an off week and a great opportunity to come back home and play a top 5 team in the country.

We've got to go to work to get better. We've got a good football team. I think we lost to a good football team today. But we've got to go to work. We've still got all our goals on the table but we've got to get better.

The key for us is being efficient with the ball. This is the first game that we've really turned the ball over like that. And that was the difference for us.

But you've also gotta give them credit because a lot has to do with them. Heck of an interception. Spectacular interception.

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