Northwestern University Athletics
Postgame Quotes (Northwestern vs. Purdue - Oct. 9, 2010)
10/10/2010 12:00:00 AM | Football
Oct. 10, 2010
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PURDUE vs. NORTHWESTERN
Purdue 20, Northwestern 17
Ryan Field
Oct. 9, 2010
Postgame Quotes
Northwestern Head Coach Pat Fitzgerald
Opening Statement...
"Thanks, I appreciate everyone being here today. Obviously, we're disappointed with the loss, we had plenty of opportunities to win the football game but you've got to give Purdue and Danny [Hope] a lot of credit. They had a great plan coming in, made some changes in the bye week coming in-like we knew they would- and obviously we've got to do a better job adjusting as coaches to give our guys a better chance to win. As disappointing as it is, every mistake we made we can correct. Our bye week comes at a good time; we'll refocus, reenergize. We've got a great football team (Michigan State) scoming in here in a couple of weeks. We're going to focus and work, and try to improve and get better."
On Purdue's offensive adjustments from their last game...
"Yeah, on offense, we knew they were going to run the quarterback; how they were going to run him we had to adjust to. They changed up their scheme a little bit, and were reading our tackles as opposed to our defensive ends. There were times when we fit it very well, and there were times when we didn't. That led up to the explosion play, but outside of that we had a pretty strong performance from our defense. I'm disappointed that we gave those up, but like I said, we can fix them."
On the performance of quarterback Dan Persa...
"He's been very efficient and runs our offense well. I thought at times today, that collectively as an offense, that we could have executed a little bit better. The quarterback gets all the credit with a win, but obviously gets analyzed when things don't go their way. I thought Danny [Persa] played pretty well today."
On rushing performance at this point in the season...
"If we continue not to kill ourselves, I think we will be fine. We popped the ball there at the end, but we got the penalty. We had a couple other pretty good runs that we had holding calls on also. It's a little disappointing from that standpoint, but we are going to continue to work at it. I like the way that Mike [Trumpy] hit the hole today. I thought Jacob [Schmidt] ran hard also. We are working at it; we are not where we need to be, but we are working at it."
On coping with the loss...
"We're going to have to respond, it's up there in our values. We have to respond the same way we do after success. It's a terrible taste in our mouths right now; the taste of defeat is awful. It's going to sting and it's going to hurt, but we have a 24-hour rule. Tomorrow after we watch the tape we'll give them Monday off, let them focus up, heal up and get going academically. We'll try to be as fresh as we can when we come out in a couple of weeks."
Northwestern Players
Linebacker Quentin Davie
On his feelings after the loss...
"It's a bad feeling, a bad taste that we have in our mouth. As they were taking a knee we told ourselves remember this feeling, we don't want to have it again."
On Purdue's bye-week changes...
"We knew they were going to come out and switch things up. They had a bye week so we knew they were going to change things. Things that we expected them to change they changed; we just need to do our job. If we had a guy on a guy like we did in practice, things would have been ok."
On the personal foul call at the end of the game...
"It was a situation where he rolled out and I thought he was just trying to waste time. If I wouldn't have tackled him he would have kept backing up and not taken a knee. I kind of tapped him and he fell over."
On miscommunication on the field...
"We had specific calls for a linebacker to get a quarterback. It was breakdowns in our communication where we messed up. We let the quarterback run past us. We can get that fixed in practice. We have a couple weeks to get that fixed."
On Purdue's many different players who ran the ball...
"It was difficult, but it was everything we expected. We knew they were kind of beat up on the offensive side of the ball and they were going to throw guys in and fit them in. Everything we expected they did, it just comes down to us stopping them."
Quarterback Dan Persa
On the loss...
"The feeling is pretty awful. I mean the first loss of the year, Purdue outplayed us. They took it, they wanted it more than us in every phase, it feels just awful."
On going into next week's bye week...
"I'd rather have a win going into this week and relax, but I guess it's a good time to have it."
On the team's evaluation...
"We've got a lot of good stats but didn't convert in the red zone and that's been our problem all year. I think that's why we lost the game. We need to have better focus and a heightened sense of awareness in the red zone and we've got to score points; we can't keep kicking field goals."
On the next game versus Michigan State...
"We have two weeks to prepare, and if we don't come ready to play they're going to run us off the field."
PURDUE QUOTES
Purdue Head Coach Danny Hope
On beating a ranked team on the road...
"It feels really good, anytime you do your best and you don't have to second-guess yourself you should feel good. It's unfortunate that sometimes you can do your best and not win so it's good to come out of this thing with a win today. It's really huge for our football team."
On his thought process on a fourth-down timeout before the winning touchdown...
"We weren't sure we had the right play called and really we ended up coming and calling almost the exact same thing that we had signaled out there, but we had one shot left and we got everyone on the sideline regrouped on the same page. We talk a lot about it on the headset. It's not a dictatorship and to get everyone's input is really important. So we were all on the same page and we called a play that everyone believed in. We wanted to make sure we had a chance to either hand it off or have Rob Henry keep it so we called a play where if the hole is there, we hand it off and if it wasn't, Rob Henry would keep it. It gave us two options to score and win the game."
On the impact of the blocked field goal midway through the fourth quarter...
"It was huge, it was a game of inches. They're an outstanding football team. They play hard. They have so many redeeming qualities so to come up here to beat the Wildcats, in their house with a big crowd and (against) a ranked opponent, it was huge. You have to earn everything you get against these guys, they're a really good football team."
On Rob Henry and the effort he gave...
"I don't think anyone is surprised. I talked to Tim Newton (Purdue radio play-by-play) earlier today and told him how it would go and it went just about how we thought it would almost verbatim. You know the great thing is, there's this saying in the Bible that says, "As a man thinks in his heart, so does he become." We didn't sit around and fall apart because of injuries or start not believing in ourselves. We did what we believed in, we did what we thought was in our heart. We know that we can win, we know that we can beat a good football team. There's been some rough sledding. There's been a lot of work in the last couple of years and there's still going to be some more rough sledding and there will be some more skeptics and doubters and we'll prove you wrong again some more down the road. We're going to be a heck of a football team, a great football team, in time."
Purdue Player Quotes
DL Ryan Kerrigan
On quarterback Rob Henry's play...
"We see it everyday, so we didn't really appreciate how good he is until he got the chance to play against a very good defense like Northwestern's. He really opened my eyes with how well he played. He played phenomenal tonight."
On if the defense made adjustments in the second half...
"Not in particular. I think we just realized that we needed to play harder and get off the field on third down because that's been our bug-a-boo all season. It was huge for us to start getting stops on third downs in the second half."
RB Dan Dierking
On his game-winning touchdown...
"I couldn't have written up a better script. Rob Henry had the option of keeping it or giving it and I saw the hole open up so I jerked it from him and luckily it worked out."
On the play of the offensive line...
"They did a great job all day. We told them that the trenches were going to win this game today and they really took that to heart and had an unbelievable game for us."
