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SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 26, 2013Rocky LongO.T. COACH LONG: I'll answer any questions. Q. Have you had much tougher of a loss than that? COACH LONG: Oh, I've been around losses as tough as that one, sure. I'm an old man. I've been around a lot of 'em. Q. What is your reaction to this one? COACH LONG: I think that our team showed unbelievable spirit. I thought it was a great football, first of all. I think our team showed an unbelievable spirit. When they return a fumble for a touchdown, we go down by 14, I would bet 95% of the teams in the country would fold at that point. Not only did we not fold, we came back and had a legitimate chance to win the game. Q. Any second thoughts on the last 22 seconds, playing for the field goal? COACH LONG: Yeah. I'd play it different if I knew we weren't going to make it. I mean, you expect guys that practice all day long every day of the week, you expect them to make a 30‑something‑yard field goal. You have to have confidence in your kickers. Q. What is the state of that confidence in those kickers today? COACH LONG: These are not pro players. We're not going to cut them, get somebody off the wires, try to hire somebody else. They're young people that make mistakes. They'll get better. You just keep working with them, just like you do a quarterback that throws an interception, or a DB that gives up a touchdown pass. You put them back out there, keep them working, and hopefully the next time they have a chance to make one to win the game, they will. Q. What did you see? COACH LONG: The kick was low. It shouldn't have been blocked. If he had gotten the ball up, it wouldn't have been blocked. I don't know if it would have gone through. But it wouldn't have been blocked because you couldn't tell if it was going through or not. Q. What was your take on the fumble return from your vantage point? COACH LONG: I don't worry about that. They make their decisions. You live with the way the game is called. Q. (Question regarding the whistle.) COACH LONG: If you stand on the sidelines enough, you know that officials don't blow the whistle a lot of times. Everybody just assumes the play is over. They do that on purpose. They don't blow the whistle a lot of times, and the ball is still counted as dead. Q. How do you think your defense played? COACH LONG: I thought until the fourth quarter the defense played them pretty good ‑ till the fourth quarter.  You have to give them credit. As the fourth quarter started, they made a couple adjustments, and we weren't able to readjust what we were doing to take it away. They had more success in the fourth quarter. Q. Back to the fumble. The thing I noticed as soon as the guy went to the ref, Is this live, can I go? Is there fear to make sure play doesn't stop? Do your players also go, I don't want to tackle a guy and get a 15‑yard penalty? Does there need to be more clarity? COACH LONG: I think part of the whistle being blown, that's been happening for four or five years where they don't blow the whistle all the time and the ball is down. I think everybody out there thought it was a dead ball, including them, thought it was a dead ball. And then the guy picked it up off of Ezell's chest, picked it up off his chest, stood there, looked at the official. The official wasn't waving his arms so he took off. I mean, I think he even thought it was a dead ball, the guy that picked up the ball. Q. That official was on your sideline. Did he hear about your perspective? COACH LONG: No. Q. Do you leave this game saying, Hey, we gave it basically our all against one of the top teams in this conference? At the same time are you thinking about the mistakes that robbed the game from you? Do you leave this with any sort of positivity? COACH LONG: The positives I've already mentioned: where most teams would fold, our team did not. That's the positive. We still lost the game. In my humble opinion, the only difference was they made one more play than we did. That's the only difference. Guess what? They made mistakes, too. And if you all weren't watching the same game I was watching, let me tell you, that was a great, great college football game. Great college football game. They made one more play. That is all. Q. Talk about that on‑sidekick, the execution. COACH LONG: We practice it every Thursday so if the opportunity arises, we can do it. To be honest with you, that's as good of execution as any we've ever done in practice. Better than about 90% of the ones we've done in practice. Now that's about a 10% ratio what you saw. It looks like that in practice once in a while, but not very often. Q. Was that a no‑brainer call for you? COACH LONG: No. I think if you look in Football Handbook 101, with nine minutes or eight minutes left on the clock, you're supposed to kick it deep, right? We don't want to abide by Football Handbook 101 at our place. Q. (Question regarding Adam.) COACH LONG: He's still on the team. He practiced Tuesday and Wednesday. Q. (Question regarding the kickers.) COACH LONG: We spent two weeks with those guys competing daily. Seamus won the competition. Q. (Question regarding Adam.) COACH LONG: Yeah, it is. Q. Can you elaborate at all? COACH LONG: No. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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