University of Pittsburgh Athletics
Pitt vs. Miami Postgame Quotes
9/24/2010 12:00:00 AM | Football
Sept. 24, 2010
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Pitt Head Coach Dave Wannstedt
“I know that our team worked hard. We got better over the four-day period of the bye week before the Thursday night game. But, we sure didn’t show it tonight.”
“We are not in sync in some areas of our football team. When you have five sacks, nine tackles for loss and three turnovers, you are not going to beat anybody.”
“We have good play on offense and then two bad plays. That’s where we are. We are inconsistent on offense and that’s the way we’ve been all year.”
“Dan Mason dislocated his knee cap. He is in Presbyterian Hospital right now. The details of that injury I am not 100 percent sure.”
“Dom DeCicco pulled his hamstring again in the third series of the game and didn’t play the rest of the game.”
“Defensively, we hung in there as long as we could have. The final blow was the turnover on the punt return.”
“It’s pretty simple. We need to get back to the basics and keep working, keep working, keep working. If changes need to be made, we’ll make some changes. We are not efficient enough to drive the ball to sustain drives and score points.”
“Right now we are a one win football team. What happened last year or two years ago means nothing. We’ve got to understand that no one is going to give us anything. That’s not going to happen.”
Quarterback Pat Bostick
“We didn’t execute well enough to win the game. We didn’t have any consistency.”
“They (Miami) are a good football team. They came out and they beat us up tonight. Did we beat ourselves a little? I think so. I’m not worried. We have too much character. I trust our coaching staff.”
“There’s nowhere to go right now but up. We have to go out and prove it and we have to earn it.”
“Clearly what we’re doing right now isn’t good enough. We need to go back and take a look at some things and find the answers.”
Defensive End Jabaal Sheard
“We have tremendous players but we have to play as a team. I don’t know what the problem is, but we have to find out and we have to fix it.”
“We’ve been through the ups and downs. The seniors have been through two bowl seasons but also a season where we didn’t go to a bowl. The message we have pass along to the younger guys is that winning comes with hard work – it’s not handed to you.”
“For myself, I need to just practice harder. I’m not the most vocal player, but if I have to step up, I will.”
“We need to come together as a team right now. The most important thing is that we have to play as a team. We need to support one another. It’s a team game.”
Miami Head Coach Randy Shannon
“Big win for us tonight on national television and bouncing back from a loss at Ohio State. Anytime that you can come in and get a win on the road against a team that was ranked in the top 25 at the beginning of the season, that is really big for us. We did a lot of great things tonight but there are still some things that we have to improve on. Our offense did a great job in the red zone; we didn’t do a great job against Ohio State on that, so we showed improvement. We still need to correct the turnovers. We need to make sure that those guys connect better. We just have to keep working at it. Offensively, toward the end of the game, we started running the football, grinding it out and we wanted to get the time off the clock and get it done. Defensively, I thought we did a tremendous job of tackling. Going against two great running backs, that was really huge for us to go out there and tackle. We snuffed the run game when Pitt had the chance to get some yards. We did a great job of tackling and getting guys to line up. We had nine tackles for losses and it shows that we are emphasizing tackling and getting our defensive guys up field. I thought that it was a good clean game.”
On Miami’s offense being of championship caliber:
“We’re not that far away at all. You can see that we have playmakers. I think that LaRon Byrd made some key catches in the game. I think the more we focus on getting things done on offense the more we can be crisp and we’ll be okay.”
On if his relationship with Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt helped his game plan:
“We have the same mentality. We both knew that it was going to be a grinding game and that we needed to be physical in order to win the game. We always need to be physical on both ends up front. For us, we came out on top today and they’ll do well in the Big East and you can expect good things from Coach Wannstedt.”
Miami DE Andrew Smith
On the effort of Miami’s defense
“We played great. We all played tough. Everybody was able to wrap up their tackles and everybody showed up to play. As a defense we played great.”
On stopping Pitt’s running game
“Coach emphasized that if we take them out of the running game we can force them a different way and we can bring the heat.”
Miami LB Sean Spence
“Coach told us that we needed to get guys to the ball. They had great running backs and we had great guys up front.”
On the win
“We needed this win really bad. We needed that momentum. Coach told us we may have lost before but we’re a better team today.”
