University of Pittsburgh Athletics
Pitt vs. New Hampshire Postgame Quotes
9/11/2010 12:00:00 AM | Football
Sept. 11, 2010
Recap | Final Stats | Notes
PITTSBURGH -
Pitt Head Coach Dave Wannstedt
“From a game standpoint, we have a lot of upside and a lot of work to do. It’s exciting to be the coach of this team.”
“We have so many young players with so much growth potential. As long as our players keep working like we have worked over the past couple of weeks, we should expect to improve week after week.”
“They are a great group of kids. When you have ten seniors on the team to begin with and two miss this game, I would beg you to check any team’s roster and you won’t find many, if any, that have that amount of youth participating.”
“We take it one game at a time and we want to be playing our best football in December.”
“I thought our defensive line showed up today. They needed to show up and they did.”
“If you watch us play, we’re still not there yet. This happens every year. The execution is not perfect but as long as the effort is perfect I will accept that and we will get better. That’s the key.”
“We struggled running the ball in the first half. We changed it up in the second half. I thought our coaches did a nice job with their adjustments. We started running some draw plays instead of the power runs, and we opened things up.”
“Ray Graham’s got a lot of ability. It was nice to get him out there and have a one-two punch with Dion Lewis. I think we can play them both. We’re going to need them both. We played four halfbacks today and we’re going to need them all.”
“Miami is a great football team and we’re going to need everyone to get back, from a health standpoint.”
Pitt Left Tackle Jason Pinkston
“Teams have seen what Dion accomplished last year so it’s really no secret what he brings to our offense. We know they’re going to stack the box and make us come out with the pass a little bit, which I thought we did today.”
“The screen passes help a lot. We gave them a couple of different looks in the formations. It worked out well.”
“We weren’t concerned about our running game early on. It’s a four quarter game. We need to take things one play at a time. It might go three yards here or four yards there and the next play could be 80 yards. We stick to our game plan and don’t get worried.”
Pitt Running Back Ray Graham
“We came out and fought today. After the game against Utah, we could have put our heads down, but we want to get things going in the right direction as soon as possible and we did that today.”
“Tino is a good quarterback and he made things happen today. We have great receivers and they do what they need to when the ball is thrown to them.”
(On the touchdown run)
“What happened was the guy came from the side and I knew it was one-on-one. When I saw the guy cut, I just went the other way. Without our front (line) doing their job, I can’t make it happen. Give them credit.”
“Teams are going to key in on Dion, so when I get a chance or an opportunity to play, I want to make something happen.”
“If we kept worrying about Utah, we wouldn’t be able to execute today. We put that game behind us. It’s in the past. Now we start preparing for Miami.”
Pitt Quarterback Tino Sunseri
“Whenever you can have two running backs with skill like Dion and Ray, it takes a lot of pressure off me. We have a lot of guys who are playmakers for us, and that’s the biggest thing. When you have guys like Jon Baldwin and Mike Shanahan who can make plays and then bring in a fresh running back, it’s going to make our opponents tired.”
“The thing I want to work on the most is picking up the protection. I want to understand where the blitz is coming from. Teams are going to try and put pressure on me and I want to clean that up so it eases things for our offensive line.”
“Every time we go out there, there are going to be things that we do well and things that we don’t. It’s important for us to continue to do the things we did well and really focus on the weaknesses and work from there to make our team stronger.”
New Hampshire Head Coach Sean McDonnell
“One of the things that killed us was our field position. Pitt’s kickoff and cover teams put the ball deep and we were stuck. Coming in, we knew that we were going to have a tough time running the ball against this team because of their size and how physical they are. I was impressed with the way they locked up on our wideouts. The thing that surprised me was their passing options and ability to make big plays and how they involved WR Jonathan Baldwin, especially at the end of the half when they scored a touchdown. That killed us. We could have gone into the locker room being down 10-7, instead we were down 17-3. We played hard, but we made a lot of little mistakes with penalties and big plays.”
“I would say that it’s a fair assessment that their offense took off in the third quarter. I didn’t think they would beat us the way they did. We expected them to be physical and run the ball with RB Dion Lewis, not to come out and pass the ball the way they did.”
“To tell you the truth, I hadn’t seen much on RB Ray Graham. He was illusive with his schemes and he took off. We talked more about Lewis and on that 56-yard play, we had our guys blitz and I was baffled by it. Pitt is a football team with two or three good running backs. Our focus was to stop the run and they threw the ball and got some big plays with their play action.”
New Hampshire Tight End Chris Jeannot
“It was great to come here and play well. I had a lot of support. I’m glad that my friends and family got to see me play well. I give credit to QB R.J. Toman for passing the ball well and our offensive coordinator. But, it would have been nice to get a win. I would take not having any catches for winning the game. You can’t help but have that feeling whenever you lose, no matter how well you played.”
