Post Game Quotes From Ohio State vs. Penn State – Ohio State Buckeyes
10/27/2001 12:00:00 AM | Football
Oct. 27, 2001
Recap| Final Stats| Notes
Coach Tressel
“We talk all the time about things we have to do to win road games in the Big Ten. Don’t give up big plays, and we gave up the Zack Mills touchdown run. Don’t turn the ball over and we fumbled the ball and had interceptions. The long and short of it is, we didn’t do the things we needed to do to win a Big Ten game on the road.”
On his comment to Paterno after the game:
“I just said congratulations, and that’s all I had time to do. I respect what he’s done over the past 50 years, but it was their event.”
On Zack Mills:
“Mills is the quarterback with the most potential (on the Penn State team). He was the one who worried us the most on film. He has shown all year that he can make plays under pressure, and he impressed me with his abilities today.”
On his team’s play today:
“We knew that we had a lot of work to do today, and we didn’t get it done. In the first half we held them to three field goals, that was good. I don’t think we made the adjustments. We practice the same things every day and do them better and better. Seven (Mills) just made some plays. The one long touchdown run was uncharacteristic. The (Ohio State) defense was scrapping and scrapping like they always do and Penn State made some plays and our offense didn’t make enough plays. We had our opportunities to score more than 29 points but we didn’t. We’ve done things that we could have done better. They had a couple of big plays, and we needed to answer that.”
On being on the other side of history:
“There were 333 others that have been here, and I’m sure they don’t feel good either. That doesn’t change the respect that I have for Coach Paterno. He has always done things by the book.”
On what bothered him the most about this game:
“Anytime you play a game that you feel like you could have won, that’s what bothers me the most. I’m disappointed with that. We’ve got to do things all the time that we need to do to win.”
Mike Doss
“We’re a mature club and mentally tough enough to stick together as a team and a family. We won’t let this loss get us down. We’ll be ready to come out next week ready to play.”
“We’ve never seen (Mills) run the ball like that all year.”
On Penn State’s comeback:
“I wasn’t concerned at the time with them gaining momentum. We just had to come back and answer their scores. And we came up a little bit short.
Michael Jenkins
On his two TD’s
“We knew coming in that they didn’t have a lot of help from the safeties, and they were playing a lot of cover-three defense. We exposed it early on but they made great adjustments down the stretch.”
On his near-third TD:
“We got great protection, a great throw by Steve, I just got tripped up. Maybe I should have dove. It was tough to come up short.”
On the team progress:
“I feel like we’ve been progressing all year. The confidence is there, we always feel like we can drive down the field and get the job done.”
Steve Bellisari
“Any time you play a game in the Big Ten, you know it’s going to be a war. There were so many momentum shifts each way and it just came down to that last field goal attempt at the end.”
On Penn State’s resiliency:
“Considering what was riding on this game for Penn State and the emotion involved in trying to win it for Coach Paterno, I still wasn’t comfortable when the score was 27-9. One thing you can never expect Penn State to do is roll over and die.”
On next week’s game:
“We’ve got another big challenge coming up next week. We’ve got to regroup and pull it all together to get a Big Ten win on the road.”
“Anytime you get toe the 1-yd line, you want to get seven on the board. When you put yourself and your team in the position to win, it’s very frustrating.
