January 3, 2003
TEMPE, ARIZONA
COACH LARRY COKER: First of all, I want to congratulate Coach Tressel and his staff and the Ohio State football team for an excellent effort. Like we thought, they had that type of year all year. They're a great football team and well coached and played extremely hard to fight. I'm really proud of our football team the way we fought. It just wasn't meant to be tonight, but I'm extremely proud of the way we fought and played for four quarters and plus the overtime.
Q. Coach, you didn't ever wanted to talk about the winning streak ending; are you surprised?
COACH LARRY COKER: About what I expected, very painful. You play a lot of these plays for a long time. That's the way it should be.
Q. Coach, defensively you seemed to do what you wanted against Ohio State but offensively they seemed to stop you. Can you talk about the offense?
COACH LARRY COKER: It didn't surprise us that much, but they're very good at what they did. It sort of caused us some problems. Losing McGahee sort of hurt us. They have a great defensive football team. They don't allow many yards. They scored I think off the two turnovers we had. Again, we didn't have enough offense to finish it off tonight.
Q. Larry, on the fourth downplay, there was a pass interference call. The team jumped on the field thinking they had one. Did you have a chance to see the call. What was your reaction?
COACH LARRY COKER: I did not have a chance to see the call. I don't know. I know the call was made. That's what we have to deal with. We have to adjust and go to the next play. Obviously a fourth down and long, that was a huge, huge play in the game. You hate for an official to have to make that call. You would like for it to be a legitimate call. Thank you.
End of FastScripts...
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