UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 14, 2020

Karl Dorrell

Postgame Media Conference

Colorado - 35, Stanford - 32

Q. Comments, thoughts on this ball game today.

KARL DORRELL: Well, it was a great win for our team. We would have, if I had the choice, I would have orchestrated it a little bit better in the second half. I thought we had a good first half where we were battling back and forth and we had a couple scores, we were up leading at halftime, and I felt our defense was playing really well. Really controlled the line of scrimmage from a run game perspective. I thought we did a really nice job from that standpoint. So the halftime, at halftime we felt we were in pretty good shape. We knew we had the ball coming out of half. The offense went down and scored, which was a positive thing and we felt we built a pretty comfortable lead. That's the point of the matter. It wasn't too comfortable because they came back. Probably similar to what happened last week against UCLA. But our players, they hung in there. That's a good team. That's a good team that we played, that Stanford team, and I mentioned that to you guys all last week. And I thought our guys went toe-to-toe with these guys and I would have liked to have finished that game on our terms. That would have been much better for us to feel better about it, but it's a great win still, I think we're still learning as a team. I felt we played as well as we needed to to finish the game. They came back in the fourth quarter with a couple scores and two-point conversions. Offensively, we didn't want to give them opportunities to trade turnovers and whatnot against us from an offensive standpoint. What can I say? I think it was just a good team win. We have a lot of work to work on and complete and get better at in a lot of areas, just like it was last week. The thing about this team is they're pretty resilient. I think they understand that we've got some struggles that we need to work through and get better at and we're 2-0 with a chance to get better. So we're pleased at where we're at, but we still have so much work to do.

Q. Some of the issues you had last week, that young secondary, your linebacking corps was playing a little more solid football. Is part of the finishing part of the maturation process of a football team?

KARL DORRELL: It is. I got a young freshman corner that people are trying to pick on and he's battling and he's trying to make plays. And I disagree with the pass interference call late in the game in that last drive that they made. I felt that the receiver was pulling on my corner as much as anything and they called pass interference against us, which I quickly don't, I don't understand. But our guys kept fighting, and offense put together a good performance. I would have loved to have finished the game like we finished it last week, where we had the ball and we took the knee, but we had the dramatics all the way to the end, unfortunately. But the fortunate thing, we got the W. We can learn from this and move on to next week.

Q. Dimitri Stanley, six receptions, 126 yards and a touchdown. We were talking. He's a dynamic presence out there for you guys and really a weapon that, when Sam needs somebody to go to, he can really be a guy that can make some plays, can't he?

KARL DORRELL: He really can. And Dimitri's had, probably of our receiver group, had a very consistent, very productive camp leading into the season. And I think he had six catches in the first game against UCLA and this game he duplicated those numbers, but had more yards and got in the end zone. He's a really good player and he's a sophomore and we're young in a lot of spots still. So it's good to have him for a couple more years. He's a really dynamic kid and he showed some of that today.

Q. Like you said, both games this season so far, big leads, then you have to sweat it out at the end. Do you feel like you guys maybe took your foot off the gas a little bit offensively in that fourth quarter?

KARL DORRELL: I wouldn't say we were taking our foot off the gas. It was, I wanted to eat some clock and we had a pretty comfortable lead. I hate using that word, comfortable, but we had a good lead at a certain point in the game where you needed to try to get them to burn his timeouts, which eventually that's what happened. I think when have you a lead like what we had, which was two or three scores, and it's about 11, 10 minutes left in the quarter, you want the other side to start burning their timeouts, just because those are the saving factors for them, when time gets low when they're trying to put together drives. So we were fortunate enough to get them burned out. They still created some drives and scored and had a couple two-point conversions, but at least we had one more chance with the ball with them having no timeouts. And we didn't get a first down, which would have iced the game if we got the first down in the series offensively. We wanted to run the ball three times so we could keep the clock moving. You saw that we did have a timeout for ourselves to call on that fourth down so I can try to takes a much time off of the clock and try to pin them deep in their territory for at least, make them try to go 90 yards for a score. Our punter did a great job. Josh did a great job on the fourth down punt and got it inside the 10. We probably, this is the youth of our football team. We had people in position to down the ball inside the 10, but we didn't need to touch it so soon. We could have let the ball roll around just a little bit longer, might have taken off another two or three seconds. But it was at least at 10 seconds by the time they took possession of it and really with only 10 seconds, if you're inside the 10, it's really hard to do anything, and fortunately for us, we were able to finish the game.

Q. You had a first-time starter on the offensive line, Cary playing center for the first time. And yet Sam wasn't sacked once. What can you say about the performance of that group today and through two games?

KARL DORRELL: Well, I mean, Cary is a very good player for us. He was one of the, he's the most quiet guy of the people on our team. He doesn't say boo. He just works his tail off and he plays normally our left guard. With Colby down, we moved him to center and then I gave Chance Lytle a chance to play, and Chance played well, which is I'm really excited about. He really did some nice things. So it's kind of that next man up mentality. When someone gets dinged you just kind of have to go to the next guy to come in and be productive and keep the offense moving and we were able to do that up front. We had decent yardage rushing. I think we had, I don't know what the stats are officially, but I know it was a little over 150 yards rushing and we had about 250, 60 yards passing. So pretty good balance. Wanted to run the ball. Like I said, that defense was a lot tougher defense than the defense we played the previous week. We were able to do some really positive things that I'm sure we felt we could have had a few more opportunities to put some points on the board where we had some drives stall. But I think for the most part that we played enough that, we put enough points on the board to win offensively.

Q. 177 on the ground.

KARL DORRELL: That's a pretty good day.

Q. There were some mysteries about this team given the circumstances of the off-season and everything else going on around it. How important was this kind of a win as reinforcement and a revelation that last week was no surprise, no fluke, that this team's actually pretty good, even in your mind, really not knowing a lot going into the season?

KARL DORRELL: I'm still learning so much about this football team. We feel pretty confidently about ourselves and I think that's more in our building than probably the people outside of our building. I like to ride on the temperature of the team, and the team is very hungry. They're inspired about playing well and having success this year. They told me that from the very beginning when I was hired here. So I'm kind of riding on that wave of thought process and been building on that thought process for the last nine months. And these guys have, they have done everything I've asked them to do, absolutely everything, and that's why I love these kids. They're learning how to win and they're learning how to win ugly and that's still a good sign and it's a good trait to have in these types of games that we had today. There were some really good moments where you saw really good engineered drives and touchdowns, it seemed like things were seamless, but then there's still those struggles. That's the ebbs and flow of football. There's good teams that you're going to have some good drives and some not so good. And this team is learning how to play in difficult circumstances and that can be a great experience for them to continue to build on so that when we're in a championship model-type of game at least we say we have been there and we know how to gut it out to find a way to win.

Q. Can you take us back to the last two minutes of the game, and your offense had the ball. In your perfect world, how would those three plays have went to clinch that first down, if you would have got that?

KARL DORRELL: Well, it wasn't a perfect world where we got the first down, and that was the unfortunate thing. There's always a lot of ideas and there's, I call them the Monday morning quarterback of what you could have done perfectly to create a better scenario than that. But I felt our offensive coaches, and they had a good plan and they, it didn't look so good at the end there, I know that, when they had everybody up on the line of scrimmage. But the bottom line for us, those last three plays, we needed to take some time off the clock. I believe it was about two minutes and right around three seconds, I think that was left when we took possession of the game. And we needed to run the ball. We didn't want to take knees. And unfortunately we tried to get a first down and didn't. It was right around mid-field or just short of it or just a little bit past it that I felt it was important for us, since we had the timeouts and they didn't, was to run it on the first three plays of that last series and try to milk the clock as far as I could, which I did all the way down to 10 seconds and pin them deep. And really that gives a great advantage for us, for our defense to kind of keep them down there with minimizing the threat. So it worked out okay. I'm sure I'm going to go back and look at the tape and there are going to be a lot of woulda, couldas, and shouldas. But our team knows they can get better and the coaches know we can play better and coach better and we will. We're not going to give up on each other. We're going to continue to get better as a team and figure out the right points of emphasis for us to continue to get better week-to-week. This was a good win for us on the road. We got a win at home, a win on the road against a great team like this. And I'm sure there's going to be some things we're going to be upset with, but we'll work to get them fixed. That's part of the process.

Q. How has this team taken on the personality of these seniors, guys like Nate, guys like Sam, that you said you had talked you want this so bad. And two, how do you temper Buffs' fans expectations when they see 2-0 and they see a big road win like this and they want to dream big when it's a weird year?

KARL DORRELL: Well, I'm so into these players. All I do is live and think about these guys and what we can do to get better as a team and try to continue to build this program in a way that we all have expectations for it to be at some point in time. And I'm just so pleased with what they have done in such a short period of time. They've worked really hard. And I know you guys have heard me say that, but we haven't had a lot of time together in terms of field time, working with each other, and they have really maximized every day of, every play matters, everything that we did. And I just have so much admiration for what they want and what they can achieve. So for us to come away with a win like today, given the circumstances, I'm extremely excited about this team having the fortitude and the grit to try to finish games, and we did it twice in a row. We're figuring out how to do it. I think sometimes, even really good teams struggle at these waning moments late in the fourth quarter, and we have been able to figure out a way to finish, at least for the first two weeks of the season. So we're hopeful that we can continue this progress. We need to play cleaner. We need to continue to get better. And I think that will get better in time. But I'm very proud of these guys, how they hung in there. It's interesting how in their stadium here, all we had are us, it's just us. Our players on the sideline were very behind each other or encouraging either side of the ball and looking for guys making plays, so it was really just a fun team win where the team was really into it.

Q. Y'all are 2-0. USC got to another kind of ugly win today. They're in the top-25. Y'all are in the same division. Do you think that y'all have done enough in the first two weeks of the season to turn top-25 consideration?

KARL DORRELL: I'm not really made, I'm really trying to get better as a team. My focus is on this team. I'm going to let all the voters and all that stuff, that's their job. My job is to continue to try to produce winning games week after week, and that's really my focus. I don't have any control over the other things. So I hope our team does get the recognition it deserves at some point in time, but right now we feel like we're just getting better. We just want to get better and go on to the next challenge of the season and focus on that opponent and continue to try to win games. So that's really where we are right now. We're not really paying much attention to anything outside of that.