The University of Texas at Austin Athletics
Kansas quotes
10.27.2012 | Football
Oct. 27, 2012
TEXAS COACHES
Texas head coach Mack Brown
On Kansas: I want to give Charlie Weis, Dave Campo and Kansas a whole lot of credit. They've played TCU down to the end here. They've played Oklahoma State down to the end here and did the same with us. They couldn't have hired a better couch than Charlie. He's a great coach. The guys are playing hard. They had a good crowd. It was loud, and you can tell they're headed in the right direction.
On putting in QB Case McCoy: The offensive staff thought he was ready to go. We thought Case was prepared, and he gave us the little momentum that we needed to get it turned in the right direction. And we made some speed plays there. We did things that we needed to be doing with him.
On the last minute win: You all [the media] always talk about losses. I don't. What I thought about was it's so similar to 2004, and the 2004 team ended up in the Rose Bowl. Same end zone, 17 seconds left in 2004, and there were eight seconds left in the same end zone this time. It was Vince Young throwing the ball to Tony Jeffery back then, and Case McCoy throwing it to D.J. Grant this time. I thought the offensive staff did a great job of killing the clock and getting it down to where Kansas had no chance at the end.
On the victory: I'm excited that we won the game. It was really, really hard to win this game, and it can give this team and this staff so much confidence moving forward to play poorly most of the game and win. That is when you get better, believe it or not. Not the blowouts. You walk out and feel too good about yourself. One like this, we have a win and we have their attention next week, and that's about as good as it gets.
TEXAS PLAYERS
QB Case McCoy
On the game-winning drive: It wasn't anything I did. I think our coaches and our team just decided to dig down deep and decide to fight. We definitely came out slow and sluggish and that's something we can't do the rest of this year. We got lucky, and we were able to come out of here with a win, but for the most part, I thought our team decided to dig deep. We were able to start running the ball, get downhill and give me time to get warm for when we had to throw in that last series.
On the fourth down conversion on the final drive: I wish I was never in fourth-and-seven, but we got into that situation and luckily had a dropped pick on the first play. A couple of things definitely went our way, but at the same time, we got into that situation. It's just like every other play. We've got to execute. We just turned our execution level up. [WR] Jaxon [Shipley] saw a live safety. He bent in like he was supposed to, and we were able to connect on that and convert. That was a big momentum swing for us, and we executed the rest of the game plan and scored.
On learning from last year's game against Texas A&M: A&M was last year. I learned a lot from that and that was that team. This is a new team, and we've got higher goals and higher standards this year. I'm glad we got this win. We're going to move on and go play Texas Tech next week.
On what was going through his mind before going into the game: Like [co-offensive coordinator]coach [Bryan] Harsin said, he does a great job of preparing us like we're going to play. Some of us are redshirting and some of us are backing up, and he prepares us like we're all the starter. That's part of football. I was a backup for part of last year, and I was a backup for part of my freshman year. I'm glad that he prepares me, and we've just got to move forward from here.
S Kenny Vaccaro
On the defensive mind-set late in the game: I thought the defense was playing solid the whole game, so our confidence level was already up. We were confident and knew we could get the stops we needed. We made a couple in the first half, and it was really stress-free.
On holding Kansas to a field goal on its late drive: It's our goal to just keep the offense out of the end zone and make stops. That's our goal on every drive and it's just something we had to execute, because the offense had been carrying us all year. This game, we had to get a stop to set them up for good field position.
DE Alex Okafor
On what he was trying to communicate to the defense late in the game: It just came down to if we wanted to be the defense that we had talked about. We had to change our mentality in the game and start getting some stops and start taking action to stop the run. That's just what I was portraying to them.
On becoming bowl eligible: We go game in and game out and prepare for each team differently. This win is a win and luckily we got a bowl berth.
