Post Game Quotes From Ohio State at Wisconsin – Ohio State Buckeyes
10/7/2000 12:00:00 AM | Football
Oct. 7, 2000
Recap| Box Score
Ohio State Head Coach John Cooper
“Again, you’re looking at a happy football coach. I can’t say enough nice things about our football team. I’m really proud of them, to come up here in this kind of environment and beat a good Wisconsin football team at their place the way they did today was very satisfying indeed.”
“We thought it was important to take the big play away from them [Wisconsin], and maybe try to jump on them early, maybe take the crowd out of the ball game.”
“A great victory for us. Anything can happen in college football game. A lot of upsets happened again today but the Buckeyes came away with a great win.”
On running back Derek Combs and other backs on OSU vs. Wisconsin’s Michael Bennett:
“We told our running backs that you have to make one guy miss you. We’ll get you in the secondary but you have to make one guy miss you, either number 8 [Jason Doering] or number 36 [Mike Echols], the guys who made all the tackles last week in the Michigan game.”
“We heard all week about how fast Michael Bennett is, and he is fast, he’s a great football player. But Derek Combs is fast too. To see him go and break the long touchdown run early in the game, was great. I didn’t know he lost his shoe at the line of scrimmage until I saw someone go back an pick it up. You don’t want to get into a footrace with Derek, Derek’s got great speed.”
Wisconsin Head Coach Barry Alverez
We were beaten by a very good Ohio State football team and we were beaten in all three phases. I didn’t think we played very well because we didn’t start the game very well. I thought we did play a little better in the second half, I thought we had a chance to get back in the game but then we couldn’t get anything going. That was a good football team that beat us today.” On starting slow in the first quarter:
“I didn’t think we would start slow. I have to take fault for that. That’s my job to get the kids ready to play. Obviously we started very slow and put ourselves in a hole. Why, I don’t know.”
On Ohio State’s defense:
“They’re a blitzing team, which we knew coming in. They did a lot of blitzing, but they beat us one on one several times. Brooks [Bollinger] didn’t have a whole lot of time to throw.”
On the rest of the season:
“We’ve got to regroup with the guys that are healthy. We’ve got to patch things up and continue to get better. We’ve got to try to salvage things and work to see if we can get ourselves in a bowl game someplace.”
On what has surprised him this season:
“Let me tell you this, nothing will surprise me ever again because just about anything that could happen has happened.”
