Postgame Quotes - UCLA 27, Colorado 23

POSTGAME QUOTES
UCLA 27, Colorado 23
Pasadena, Calif. (Rose Bowl)
September 30, 2017

UCLA head coach Jim Mora
opening remarks
“I’m proud of these young men for a lot of reasons. Number one, through two weeks of tough losses, they have gotten closer. That is what has to happen when you’re going through adversity. It was reflected in the way that these guys came to work – to their practices and meetings every day. The energy that they had, the way they talked to each other, it all reflected in their attitude and their ability to still have fun, yet work hard. Tonight was a culmination of that. We were playing without a guard, so we had to move Poasi [Moala] in at right tackle. We did lose one of our best pass receivers in Caleb Wilson, and we were in a battle there against a really good team. If our young men didn’t have the character that they did, it would have been easy to just fold up the tents. But, they did not do that. So it’s something that I have felt has been growing. That gets lost when you lose. I’m very proud of them, happy for them and it’s a nice way to go into the bye.”

on making progress on defense, such as getting stops for field goals
“We were good in the red zone and held them to field goals for the most part. Twice there, their quarterback got the edge on us, on what we call 12 personnel. Guys get hungry and defensive ends collapse, and then the quarterback pulls it and goes. One of our best players on defense made a mistake that he never makes. We have to give these guys better calls, but I was proud of how the defense played. They tackled better. They had a good energy about them. They hung in there. We gave up a few plays and we bowed our neck in the red zone. I was proud of them.”

on UCLA running the ball
“When we needed to run it, we did. I’d like to see us finish the game with more productive runs and never have to kick a field goal and kick the ball off [in that final minute]. Our run game is improving. We have a lot of room for improvement. Poasi [Moala] being in there for his first real stretch at tackle, he will grow from that. We just have to keep improving.”

on Soso Jamabo getting more carries
“It’s really been the last couple of weeks that Soso has played more. He’s healthy. His back is better. He’s running with confidence, and we will continue to use him. We’ll use Bolu [Olorunfunmi] and Jalen [Starks] and you even saw Brandon Stephens get in there. It’s hard to play with just one back. But to play with two or three or four helps us.”

on getting a win to help embolden the team
“It’s critical. It really is. It’s important. You can take a sigh of relief, but you cannot act like it’s all fixed. There is a lot of work to do. While you’re excited about the win and you celebrate it, you go back on Sunday as a staff and then on Monday as a staff with your players and you have to be just as critical of what you did and the calls that you made. We have to be critical as if we’d just gotten the dog kicked out of us. I love that about these guys, that there is a thirst to get better.”

on Mossi Johnson getting more time in nickel snaps
“It wasn’t just practice. It’s some of the things that he has been doing on special teams. I love that kid. He’s tough as heck. He’s a Crenshaw kid. He’s been voted our captain the last two weeks. He’s always smiling and has the greatest attitude in the world. We thought he’d give us a presence as a tackler back there. I don’t know how he did, but I would like to expand his role.”

on Josh Rosen
“I don’t know what his numbers were, but I think that he has set the bar so high that we have to be a bit measured in our evaluations of him. But like with all of our players, Josh will be his own toughest critic. He’ll say that he left a lot on the table. That is one of the things that you love about Josh.”

on penalties being an issue
"The targeting penalty on Darnay [Holmes], I think that it was a good call. We have to keep player safety at a premium, and we have to teach him to lower his point-of-aim and to keep his head up. The things that do concern me [involve] the defensive holding down the field. Those bothered me more than anything tonight. The other one that bothered me was when we came out of a timeout and had 12 guys on the field. That is my fault. That might be the first time in my career that it’s happened. But that is no excuse. But that is not to justify it. We have to continue to work hard on stressing the fundamentals – of being good with our hands, of being good with our hands and our feet so that we don’t grab.”

on UCLA’s third down defense being tighter
“Just a lot of hard work between our coaches and players. We had outstanding execution by everybody on the field.”

UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen
opening remarks
“We have a lot to work on. Tonight, our defense played incredibly well. On offense, we had a few three-and-outs. We just have to finish those out. We have had a knack for inopportune penalties. I thought that we played a good game, overall. I love this team to death. We have a tight bond, we love being together and it just shows on the field.

on UCLA’s final offensive drive
“It’s what won the game. Ideally, we score a little earlier and it’s not as nerve-wracking but our defense had an awesome stop at the end. We had to kill some time there, and we drove down.”

on securing the victory
“I’ll take this any day of the week over 800 yards, 10 touchdowns and a loss.”

on the flea flicker play
I knew that I had two options there. And, it’s a cool play because you can look back at it and see it develop. I knew that as I got the ball back, I had to get it out. I don’t like holding onto the ball, too often, in general.”

on UCLA’s decision not to go for the end zone at the end of the first half
“Sometimes you just have to play smart, and that is why you have a head coach to manage situations, but I definitely wanted to keep going.”

on wide receiver Jordan Lasley
“Jordan’s awesome. He is insanely competitive. He is absurdly competitive. He knows how to walk the line behind competitiveness and recklessness. When you can harness that internal fire and dance on that fine edge, you can motivate yourself to play better than the rest of the pack. He has learned how to do that pretty well.”

UCLA defensive coordinator Tom Bradley
on defensive effort
“I thought we did a good job on third down tonight. Four for 16 is a good day. Red zone was still four for five, so they got scores on us. Hats off to them, they did a couple things different. Their quarterback had an excellent game both running and throwing the ball, so I give him a lot of credit. We got better and we worked hard to get better. There’s still a ton of work to get done. I think we have to get our tackling better. We had like nine penalties and it seemed like seven of them were defensive holding down field. Those are just some things we have to work on. We had some chances to get off the field on third down and we didn’t. You only have so many chances to get off the field early on third down to create good field position for our offense who did a great job tonight.”

on allowing long runs
“They did a couple things different that we haven’t seen before. We practiced that quarterback read a little different way then they ran it tonight. They got us a couple of times where we were in a certain defense and our defensive end was setting an edge more because that’s how we practiced it all week and they got us on it a couple of times.”

on defensive backs
“Losing Darnay [Holmes] early affected a lot of our calls how we were going to do different things. I think they did an excellent job and then Nate [Meadors] goes down and then different guys had to play and they did a really great job. It was a heck of a football game tonight and they did an excellent job. The penalty on Darnay, I thought was a good call but he is not trying to do that he is just so aggressive when he got in there. We have to do a better job because we have lost a lot of guys to targeting and we can’t afford that.”

on UCLA’s pass rush
“I thought our pass rush played well we just have to tackle him. We had our opportunities to get him. We just had to keep him in the pocket. One of our objectives was to squeeze the pocket. I don’t think we did a very good job of squeezing that pocket and he let him out too many times. And you can’t let him out because that’s when he’s his most dangerous. When you have a chance to make a sack you have to. We had a number of opportunities where we didn’t get that done. Then we started to mirror the quarterback which is great except you lose your pass rush. I think it’s something we have to work on because when we have a chance we have to make the tackle.”

UCLA offensive coordinator Jedd Fisch
on the Bruins’ running game
“The biggest thing for us in this game offensively was for us to have a 6:46 drive when it was a one-point drive. We move the ball down the field, we use over six minutes and make them use all their timeouts and then kick a field goal to go up four with 26 seconds left. We were able to do that because of the running game on a big third-down conversion. There are some things in the running game that we need to clean up as we had 35 carries for 95 yards so we have to be better than that. Our guys have to understand that being successful in the run game allows us to be explosive in the passing game.”

on Josh Rosen throwing an interception
“It was a situation where he had a one-on-one opportunity, under threw it a little bit and didn’t see the strong-side safety rotating across. There wasn’t anybody open so he probably should have thrown the ball away in that situation. But sometimes that happens. He threw the ball 45 times and threw one pick. He completed a ton of balls again and threw for a ton of yards again. I’m sure he would like to take that one back but that is going to happen. None of us are going to call a perfect game and none of us are going to play a perfect game.”

on controlling the clock at the end of the game
“We didn’t talk so much about controlling the clock so much as we talked about getting our run game out there with some different personnel groups and what we were going to do. We were going to try to sub in and not try to play with great tempo the whole time. We were going to get people in and out of personnel groups and huddle a little bit more. We then tried to establish some of that run game, play-action game which was good. There were some things that when we went quickly we moved the ball well. We have to look in the bye week what’s the best way for our offense to move the ball and sustain a good run-pass balance.”

on the flea-flicker play
“We thought it was a good time to run it and a good team to run it against. Josh [Rosen] did an unbelievable job on that play because they brought a free safety blitz that we were not counting on unblocked. Josh caught the flea flicker and then stepped up in the pocket and then threw a dime. That is as good as it gets. I think with that play it’s so easy to look at the results and not the process behind it and the fact that Josh was able to take that blitz and make that pass was unbelievable.”

Colorado head coach Mike MacIntyre
opening remarks
“Well, that was one heck of a football game, hats off to UCLA. That was a great college football game. I was really proud of the way our guys fought and the way we played.”

on creative playcalling
“We needed to be able to run the ball better, so we tried a few things to do that. We knew we were going to have to score a lot of points. We knew they were averaging 50 a game or 50 something. Unfortunately, we have been scoring half of what they have been scoring. We felt like we had a good game plan – just quite couldn’t execute on a couple times that were just right there. Just didn’t get it done. Hats go off to UCLA and the way they played.

on lack of execution theme this season
“We had chances to make some plays. We played better offensively tonight against an extremely extremely talented defense. They are an extremely talented defense. We won’t play many more talented defenses like theirs. We’re right there and we’ll keep getting better, happier days ahead.

on UCLA’s success on defense
“They’re good. They’re good. We moved the ball and did some good things. Got in the end zone, got called back. Had a catch in the end zone didn’t make it. That’s 14 points right there, but I felt we moved the ball well. They just did some better things than we did.”

on how frustrating it is to not finish drives
“We had some chances to finish some. Just didn’t make the plays.”

on Colorado’s decision to run the fake field goal play
“Yes, I’d do it again. 100 times if I had 100 more chances. Everything we saw was set up the right way, just didn’t work out. We had that plan, and we knew we were going to have to score more points to beat these guys. Thought that would be a good way to do that. I would do it 100 times after watching those 4 hours of film.”

on the feeling in the locker room, with an 0-2 Pac-12 start
“They know were getting better. We’ll start clicking off some wins here. You know we played the best team in the Pac-12, got beat at home, played them hard. And then we played a really talented football team with probably one of the best quarterbacks in America. Just keep fixing it and we will.”

Colorado quarterback Steven Montez
on frustration level of leaving points on the field
“It’s real frustrating, actually. I thought there were a lot of plays out there that could have gone our way. Obviously they didn’t. We need to get back to practice on Monday and just use this as motivation. If this doesn’t fire you up, I don’t know what will.”

“I thought that we played a good game. We’ve just got to finish.”

on creative playcalling
“We drew up new formations, new plays. Some of them worked really well, some of them didn’t work. That’s football. Sometimes plays are going to work, sometimes they’re not going to work. You’ve just got to make the best out of the situation in which you’ve got.”

on what UCLA was doing differently
“I think they changed their front up for this game. We didn’t expect to see the front that they gave us. We adjusted to it and started to run the ball really well.”

on where to go after starting 0-2 in the Pac
“The only way to go is up. That’s the only way to go is up. So we’ll try and go back on Monday and go back to the drawing board and get prepared for a good U of A team. They’re coming to Folsom (Field), so we’ll have to make it pretty tough in Folsom to get a win, so hopefully we’ll get it done.”

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Postgame Quotes - UCLA 27, Colorado 23

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Postgame Quotes - UCLA 27, Colorado 23