NOKIA SUGAR BOWL: GEORGIA v FLORIDA STATE

January 1, 2003

Bobby Bowden

COACH BOWDEN: Well, when you get beat like that, there's not a lot of good things you'd like to say. But I will say this for our players, I thought they fought, they fought the hard way. I thought we went down fighting. Georgia's an excellent football team, an excellent-coached football team. First half, they make a catch, we don't make the catch, and a pretty even first half. They probably made a couple of plays the second half, that won the ballgame. Our offense was not very structured, wasn't very structured. We had to do what we had to do, and it just wasn't -- it's not -- the split second timing and all that definitely wasn't there, and it's kind of like you're just hoping somebody can make some plays and we made a couple.

COACH BOWDEN: Well, it put them in the lead and probably gave them a lot of momentum. It seemed like we were working hard for our points and they got theirs easy. That's frustrating. Again, if they were still -- if we make a catch and they don't make a catch, you've got an even ballgame, you know. But anyway, we didn't do it.

COACH BOWDEN: The tailback was very effective, because we had field position a couple of times on them, which could have been detrimental to them. They fought their way out of it with their tailback. He ran them out of there. I think they took from the five -- went to about our ten -- our defense did a great job and held them to two field goals. But that happened several times. We had a hard time stopping him.

COACH BOWDEN: Well, they did exactly what anybody would do, and that's blitz a new quarterback. They blitzed our quarterback and we simply, again, could not get anything going with that. We had to -- his hands were tied so bad there, and they blitzed nearly every down. It ain't like they blitzed every now and then. They blitzed nearly every down. When you blitz like that, you not only get to the passer, but you stop the running game. You hope you can hit something because if you hit something you might get something big, but we couldn't do it.

COACH BOWDEN: My impression of Anquan? I thought it was pretty darned good for the first time he played quarterback since high school. And there are so many things that can occur in a game that he was faced with that cost us a penalty or something like that, because there's simply no way we could get him ready working part-time like we did, trying to work him as a receiver and quarterback. I thought he did an excellent job under the circumstances.

COACH BOWDEN: Well, we were hoping. I told Bob Griese and them before the game, the best thing that could happen to us would be if Fabian could start and finish the game and that way we could use Anquan as a wide-out and that would mean that Fabian was doing pretty good. Because once we got down to Anquan, then that really was all the quarterback we had left, we could have used Matt Henshaw some, but it would have been more of a handing off stage. I thought Anquan did an excellent job under the circumstances.

COACH BOWDEN: Fabian? Well, Fabian, he would have been real good, I thought we saw that. I think that we saw that if we could protect him, he could produce and guess what we saw -- and I think Georgia saw that, too. So therefore, they decided to come with pressure, pressure, pressure; and they never let up and we couldn't -- we couldn't handle it. We could not handle it.

COACH BOWDEN: No, he played some more after that. He might have gotten hurt, but he played some more after that.

COACH BOWDEN: Now, you're saying, would I try to use Anquan at quarterback next year? I don't want to. I don't want to. You know, we had another quarterback tonight that could have blade, but he was a freshman and we were redshirting him, and it wasn't fair to waste his eligibility on one game. That's why it's Sexton. You know, next year with Chris coming back and then Sexton moving up and Fabian there, I hope that I'm not -- I hope I don't have to use him there because he's too valuable as a receiver.