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SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 18, 2017

Rocky Long

San Diego, California

Nevada - 23, SDSU - 42

COACH LONG: I thought that we came out a little rusty, a little ragged, especially on defense in the first half. I thought the secondary in the first half played horribly. I thought they played a lot better in the second half. I thought the offense was moving the ball pretty good but was hurting themselves with penalties. That kept them from having maybe a better night than they did.

But winning nine games, on course to win ten and hopefully maybe 11, that's going to put us in the elite class of college football. I don't know how many last year -- I don't know how many teams last year had 11 wins. There was only six in the entire country. I'm guessing if we win ten, we'll be in the Top 15.

And if you do that three years in a row, or four years in a row, something like that, that's pretty good stuff. That's a big-time program that you're getting to watch, whether you believe it or not.

And then the last thing I'll say is that's one of the best performances, if not the best performance, I've ever witnessed on a football field by Rashaad penny. I might have seen a couple that were close, but my goodness, I'm trying to see what he rushed for. He rushed for 222 yards, returned a kickoff for a touchdown, set a school record, returned a punt for a touchdown and he had a 60-, 70-yarder called back.

Now there's some guys helping with him with that. There's the guys blocking on the kick returns and there's some big guys and receivers blocking for him in the running game. But you don't see many players as good as Rashaad, and you don't very often get to see him a lot.

But that was by far his best game for us. If anybody was still awake back east, they ought to watch and find out he's one of the best five players in the country. I mean, I've seen a lot of really good players. They don't do things like he did. How many running backs in the country are in the Top-10 in rushing return punts? Tell me. How many of them return kickoffs?

Q. It was only the second time -- the guy down on three.
COACH LONG: We even tried to let him throw a pass. But instead he ran for a touchdown.

Q. You were smiling after that one.
COACH LONG: I was. I didn't want to see him throw that left-handed pass. I've seen him throw it in practice. He's okay when there's nobody around him but there's a lot of people around him at that time. He did the smart thing. Just tuck under and out-run them to the end zone. That was smart.

Q. When did you decide to have him start returning punts?
COACH LONG: Him and Quest have been the two best guys catching punts in practice ever since we started in the fall. We wanted to do it and wanted to do it but we thought he was going to be getting too many carries the other way and we didn't want to take a chance of getting him beat up.

Now we're at the end of the season, so we thought it was a real good idea to give him a chance to prove to everybody he's also a pretty good punt returner and maybe some of those guys back east would actually realize it's a real good football player out here on the West Coast. I don't plan on them doing that but I sure wish they would.

Q. Kind of hard to ignore, this one?
COACH LONG: Well, they ignored one last year, too. And they have been -- I saw the list of the six or seven on ESPN today. I saw the list of the six or seven guys that are the best players in the country; I didn't see Rashaad's name on there.

I mean, you know, because you've watched them all this time. I know because I've watched them but they are not going to give him the credit he deserves.

Q. Don't you think that this is one of those performances where because it's a single game, the astonishing yardage around, they have to?
COACH LONG: Let's hope so. I'll be positive tonight. Let's hope so; they do. I'll try not to be realistic. I'll be positive.

Q. Would it help if you're playing the next game at mid day?
COACH LONG: I don't know. I don't know how many people are going to be watching on Friday. Going to be quite a few because they will still be full from Thanksgiving and stuff? Maybe quite a few people will be watching.

Q. The punt return aside, only 22 carries.
COACH LONG: A lot of them were long ones, though.

Q. I guess the question being: Did you go into the game going, man, we're getting this guy.
COACH LONG: No. We don't ever go into a game for any personal reasons. We did last year for the Bowl game. If we have some personal reasons in the Bowl game, since the Bowl game is a reward, we might do something in the Bowl game. But we never do a regular-season game and a conference game like that. We go in to win. But we win a lot better when he has a good night.

Q. Does nothing he does surprise you now?
COACH LONG: No. Because I've seen him do it in practice. We've curtailed his number of things he does because we want to get him through the season.

We want to get him through the season healthy because he helps us win and he's got a bright future ahead of him. I think his future at the next level is a lot to do we has not been our No. 1 running back for the last couple years, so he has not taken near as many hits as some of those other guys have that they are going to draft.

So we are trying to -- he's helping us win. We're trying to get him to the end of the season, but we're also trying to get him to take care of him for the rest of his life, too.

Q. Just the early disappointment of the day with Fresno State, feelings about that as far as --
COACH LONG: Congratulations to them. I mean, they deserve it. They won the games they needed to do and they beat us.

So I think that it's a well-deserved honor for them. That's the way it works in this business. If you want to be sure that you're going to be in the Championship Game, you've got to win every game. We haven't ever done that. And you want me to say -- how many did it last year? Not one.

Q. The package with Ryan Agnew, that was a time where the game was still pretty tight.
COACH LONG: Yeah, we wanted it to be that way. We didn't want it to be mop-up duty. He's been doing a really good job in practice and he has some skills different than Christian. And since he's been playing really well in practice and you never know when you're going to need your backup quarterback, the offense put a package in specifically for him that we wanted him to run at crunch time. Maybe not in the fourth quarter at crunch time but we wanted him to run it when the game was still being very competitive and still in doubt.

It didn't look quite as good as it did in practice.

Q. What was part of the two -- lining up against you guys --
COACH LONG: No, I don't know. You can give him credit for that, but he missed the read. They tackled him for a loss because he have given it to the running back and then he runs a quarterback draw and the elite blocker misses his block. So it didn't look as good, so give them credit for playing good.

Q. How much concern do you still have for the secondary at this point in the season?
COACH LONG: I think that we got lulled to sleep with the bye week because our scout team receivers aren't anything close to what Nevada's receivers are. So our guys got used to sitting on patterns and being able to run with our scout team guys and all of a sudden they got out there, especially in the first half, and those guys were a whole lot faster than they have seen in a long time.

That's one of those bye-week deals that hurt you, really hurts you, because they are not used to the speed of things. It was no contest. They were just running by us like we were standing still. Well, they didn't run by us near as often in the second half because we got used to the speed.

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