From The Locker Room: Miami
Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly …
On his team’s indecisiveness this season, and how a win effects that: “It helps a lot. Decisiveness is trusting your coach. It’s trusting in yourself and trusting in your teammates. Those three things have to come together. If one of those three things is not present, it brings some indecisiveness in what you’re doing.
“That happens to different players at one of those three levels. Some is they don’t trust their teammate, and so they go do his job, which, obviously, is not a good thing. Or they don’t trust themselves. Or the third, obviously, is they don’t trust the coaching, and they do their own thing.
“We’re really close to getting all those three things together, and a lot of that has to do with inexperienced players who are now eight weeks into the season. They should be a lot more experienced, and they shouldn’t be freshmen anymore. That’s where we’re at.”
Notre Dame junior quarterback DeShone Kizer …
On blowing a 20-0 lead: “We won tonight. That’s all that matters. I don’t know how they came back. I don’t care what it took for them to come back or the lull we were having on offense.
“Whatever it takes to win the game. It all led to those issues. Special teams play, fumbling on the 1-yard line, all of those things allowed us to have the motivation and the mindset to come back and get the win.
“I don’t care how pretty it looks. I don’t care how many yards I threw. I don’t care how many trick plays we run. I just want to make sure we win games. That’s the only thing on my mind.”
Notre Dame senior left tackle Mike McGlinchey …
On the sideline demeanor late in the game: “We haven’t wavered, we didn’t waver today and I don’t think we’ve wavered on the rest of our games either. We’ve done a really good job of staying up and staying ready to play, and it just came down to execution.
“Today was the day we finally cashed in on that, and the energy and the feeling we had on the sideline and in the huddle has been the theme of this team. There’s never been a back-down team or anything like that. We’ve always worked hard, kept the energy up. We know that we can do it and believe that we can do it.”
Miami head coach Mark Richt …
Opening statement: “First, congratulations to Coach Kelly and the Notre Dame football team. They played an excellent ball game and deserved to win — how they played, how they finished.
“Obviously, we started very slow. It could have been really bad, but somehow or another, after they went up 20, we found a way on offense, defense, special teams to get 27 and take the lead, which is exciting to me as a coach to see that happen.
“And then really from that point on, Notre Dame pretty much took the game over, and we weren’t able to get the job done, really on either side of the ball at that point. I-m absolutely proud of the effort of our young men. It’s not easy to stem the tide like that and rally in a place like this.”
On trying to get into field goal range on the final drive: “If we got to the 40, [kicker Michael Badgley] can make that. It would have been a 57-yarder. We were getting close. One more completion is what we were hoping for, but couldn’t quite get it done.
“There’s a play I would have called that would have given us a better chance to get him throwing on rhythm and having a shot, but when they called timeout I thought they were going to change coverage. And they may have changed coverage, but it looked pretty close to the same as what they had played before.
“So I was reacting to the fact that I thought they might run more of a true prevent defense on that one.”
--------
• Talk about it inside Rockne’s Roundtable
• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Learn more about our print and digital publication, Blue & Gold Illustrated.
• Follow us on Twitter: @BGINews, @BGI_LouSomogyi, @BGI_CoachD,
@BGI_MattJones, @BGI_DMcKinney and @BGI_CoreyBodden.
• Like us on Facebook