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RUTGERS UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 21, 2019

Chris Ash

Piscataway, New Jersey

Boston College - 30, Rutgers - 16

CHRIS ASH: We'll go ahead and get started.
First, just would like to thank the fans that showed up today and cheered our football team on. Really appreciate it.
At the end of the day we didn't play well enough to win a game. That's my fault. It is all on me. I have to do a better job of getting the team ready. They did a better job than I did.
Penalties hurt. We had 11 penalties. They just killed drives and we fumbled the ball with the ball on the 12-yard line that led to a touchdown. You beat yourselves with penalties and ball on the ground. Squandered some field position. I think we thought we had some good starting field position, and it was tough to sustain drives.
We have to get touchdowns instead of field goals. If we would have gotten just a couple touchdowns instead of field goals it would have been a different game.
Defensively, we're down in the fourth quarter, the drives, a couple of the drives the fourth quarter just killed us.
End of the first half: Really two drives in the first half, the drive, we missed and hit a run, and letting him get 3 points at the end of the first half is unacceptable. Just not the way we should be playing in that situation.
It is all on me. We'll continue to work to try to get better.
Absolutely love our guys. Love our team. You know, we have had a really good two weeks. Actually we had a great, you know, practice, meetings, just chemistry on the football team since we started. I've got no complaints about anything from our players. They do what I ask them to do. Absolutely love all of them. Just got to find a better way to put them in position to win a game.
With that, I'll go on to any

Q. Chris, you say it's all on you. Where did you fail today?
CHRIS ASH: We lost the game. Didn't play clean enough.

Q. (Question).
CHRIS ASH: I didn't prepare the guys well enough.

Q. (Question).
CHRIS ASH: Played outstanding.

Q. (Question).
CHRIS ASH: We'll worry about that later. I'm just worried about today.

Q. Did you discuss the decision to punt fourth and ten late in the fourth quarter from the Boston College 40?
CHRIS ASH: Fourth and ten, it is a long situation. Just felt it was best to do.

Q. (Question).
CHRIS ASH: Yeah. He's fine.

Q. The fan base, seems to be exacerbated judging from the attendance.
CHRIS ASH: I'm just trying to work like heck to get our football team to play better only Saturdays is about what my concern is.

Q. I was hoping to ask this later in the year considering everything. Are you worried about your job status going forward?
CHRIS ASH: No. I'm worried about our football team.

Q. (Question).
CHRIS ASH: I thought he played well. He had the one fumble, put us in a bad situation. You know, Raheem is consistently a guy that shows up making plays every single week. He did that today as well.

Q. (Question).
CHRIS ASH: We'll do what's best for our offense, you know, moving forward. He's played multiple positions. He's learned multiple positions, and I think he does a great job. I absolutely love his competitive spirit and what he does every single day out there at practice, and what he does on gameday too.

Q. Was anything said to Arthur before the game about his confidence level, anything of that matter?
CHRIS ASH: No. Before the game, best thing we do is we left him alone.
He worked really, really hard to improve. We have talk a lot about that in these sessions. And hopefully he saw a lot of that improvement today. He had his best game that he's had since he's been here at Rutgers.

Q. Looking back, should you have been more aggressive at the end of the first half to try score a touchdown?
CHRIS ASH: We tried. We just didn't hit the plays.

Q. Any shots in the endzone we
CHRIS ASH: We tried. We tried. It didn't work.

Q. Did you think about the punt on fourth and ten? They had a 13 play drive, you said defense was
CHRIS ASH: It is one of those things, guys, if you punt it, change the field position, it works, great, it worked; when it doesn't work, then you always Question what you did. That's just the nature of, you know, being a coach and the nature of football.

Q. You played one Big Ten game, why will it be better going forward
CHRIS ASH: We'll keep working. Like I said, I'm not here ever to make any prediction. I'm going to keep working. I love our guys, trying to give everything I can to be the best coach I can be to put them in the best position to be successful. That's it.

Q. How do you keep the guy's confidence up?
CHRIS ASH: They have been trained. They're a really close group of guys. They love each other. They work hard for each other. I have got no complaints about our players. I've got no concerns about our players and their chemistry and their attitude moving forward.

Q. Susan Robeson spoke to the team yesterday. What was that like? What was the message?
CHRIS ASH: She gave a powerful message about Paul's career here, and the challenges and struggles he went through. Really it was eye-opening for our players to hear some of the comments that she made about Paul. I really appreciate Susan coming and spending time with us.

Q. Almost 300 yards rushing. What happened there?
CHRIS ASH: We didn't play well enough.
You know, we had some breakdowns. We wore down in the second half, in the fourth Q. uarter specifically. You know, we expect to be able to stop the run better than we did today.

Q. The penalties overall, was there one thing you can pinpoint that was the problem for the sloppy play?
CHRIS ASH: No. It was a number of things. We had I think three holding calls, false start. We had offensive pass interference. We ran into a defender. So there were mixed bags of different penalties.
All right, guys.
Thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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