Mark Stoops Weekly Press Conference After Tennessee Loss
After Kentucky’s loss against Tennessee, Mark Stoops had this to say. “This is an extremely difficult loss for our team. I really appreciate our team’s effort and their attitude and their preparation and their fight. A very good football game. The two teams playing extremely hard. Very hungry for a victory and comes down to a goal line stand. And our players fought extremely hard. You come up a yard short and it’s very, very difficult, tough pill to swallow, but again I appreciate our team, I love their fight and their desire and their competitiveness to win. We all got to find a way to make up those yards and do a better job. Defensively I felt like they played, we played extremely good the majority of the night. It comes down to some 50/50 balls. We know that going into it. We talked about that being their strength and that hurt us tonight. You take away some of those 50/50 catches, with some very, very talented receivers, and you play a pretty solid game. Offensively, again, they did some really good things, ripped off some big runs and big chunks and just getting into the end zone is obviously, we got to find a way to get the ball in the end zone and that’s the bottom line. Again, you make that yard, you make a couple plays, you get the ball in the end zone and it’s a much different situation, much different locker room. But it didn’t happen and we got to regroup and get back to work and I’m sure this team will.”
Stoops had this to say regarding Kentucky’s performance in short yardage situations..
“Yeah, it has been from time to time. We’re looking at all options. We have gone to the perimeter, we have gone right at them, so tried a bit of everything. When you get one dimensional it gets hard. Tennessee, their strength defensively has been up front and they have been covering well. Their secondary is playing well. So it make it’s tough and we did miss some short yardage plays today, certainly the one at the end there.”
Stoops on not letting the goal-line stand define Kentucky’s season…
“I can’t. It can’t. That’s what I talked to the team about. I appreciate their effort and preparation and there’s going to be frustration and they got to control that, because it’s hard, these guys invest a lot. When you invest what we invest it’s going to hurt. So we got to handle that as best you can and try to keep the frustration to yourself and regroup and then go look at the film and go look at the things and the areas where we all can do things better. And that’s the only way can you handle it.”
