STANFORD UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 25, 2021

Tanner McKee

Postgame Media Conference

Q. Tanner, take us through the two touchdowns in the second half as you remember them.

TANNER McKEE: Yeah, so the two touchdowns were kind of -- coach said we're going to take a shot, if he's open, take it. They were running a lot different coverages, a lot of different disguises, and so with how they disguised it we knew there was going to be an opening and we tried to take advantage of it.

Q. It was a rough start for the offense and I guess for everyone. What do you think was going on the first quarter and a half and how were you able to compensate and overcome that?

TANNER McKEE: Yeah, I don't know. It was just off to a slow start. Had a couple missed assignments, miscommunications. Couple missed throws by me. We have to come out better, come out with a little more juice, more fired up. I would say more mental. Just to know our assignments, because they didn't show anything that we weren't expecting or didn't know from practice. We just needed to identify it better and pick up the defense.

Q. (No microphone.)

TANNER McKEE: I think we just settled down. We had a lot of times where we had a false start or a guy jumping offside or things like that. Once we settled down and realized that, yeah, the defenses are funky, but we've seen them in practice all week, that we were going to be all right and we were able to take advantage.

Once we picked up the initial rush there were holes down field that we took advantage of a few times.

Q. Talk about the touchdown to Elijah Higgins, 51-yard touchdown. What did you see on that play? Yeah, that's the question.

TANNER McKEE: Yeah, so all game they were doing a really good job of protecting the perimeter, running cloud coverages, kind of high-lowing our outside guys to have a flat defender and then a deep defender as well.

So we knew that middle was going to be vulnerable. Elijah ran a great route. Took a great angle. They ran a cut coverage where the safety came across the field and then he had to turn back around and run. He almost had to turn a complete 360 and run back in a different direction. So Elijah did a great job and it was a good timing play.

Q. (No microphone.) Obviously it wasn't the way you wanted the first home start to go, but just in general talk about how nice it was to be back home and start a game here.

TANNER McKEE: Yeah, so the first question obviously they are great players. They're going to make a really big difference, so we're super excited for them to be back in the special teams game, offensively, really everything.

That is a 1-2 punch that we miss definitely. I mean, it felt great come back here. Obviously losing is unacceptable, but being back and seeing the crowd and everyone into the game, the band and everything like that, it was a lot of fun to be back in our home stadium. Been a really long time, especially with fans.

So it was really great to be back.