Boston College Athletics
Football Savors FSU Win, Prepares For Buffalo
October 23, 2006 | Football
Oct. 23, 2006
Boston College Football Coach Tom O'Brien conducted his weekly media conference call Sunday afternoon. The following is a partial transcript of that call:
We're happy with the outcome of the game (Saturday). Our kids really played tough for 60 minutes. We played a lot of people. We had some cramping problems in the fourth quarter but came away with the victory, and that's the most important thing right now. We turn our attention now to Buffalo. Hopefully we can have a nice crowd here at home and a nice day on Saturday & see if we can continue winning football games.
Q: Can you talk about the mood of the team on the way home?
A: Obviously they were very pleased with their effort (Saturday), and they should have been. It's special to go to play Florida State, which was 55-3 (at home) in the ACC prior to us getting there, and to come away with a victory. Now it has become an elmination game for us every week, so it was a must-win situation for both teams. To go on the road and win in a place like Doak Campbell on what was a special day for them had to give our kids a lot of satisfaction.
(Saturday night), the band members met them (when they returned) and there was a nice homecoming for the football team, and they were excited about that, too. The students here have done a tremendous job supporting this football team and hopefully they'll get out of bed and show up at 1 o'clock on Saturday.
Q: L.V. Whitworth said Matt (Ryan) was your team's Tom Brady. Your thoughts on that.
A: Matt's a very valuable player to our offense. He's obviously one very tough individual who can play through the things he's played through. We're just lucky that he's still able to play. Hopefully he's got better days ahead of him.
Q: Any thought to giving Matt a rest this week against Buffalo?
A: None. You tell him he isn't going to play. You look at our out-of-conference games, we've played three teams that are 15-7 out-of-conference, so this is no different. It's important for us to win this football game. Right now we've played the 12th-toughest schedule in the country, so we can't let up on anything. We're not going to be anybody's upset special of the week this week. We're going to prepare like we do for every game. We're going out to win a football game.
Q: Does the interception on the last play of the game make up for the touchdown at N.C. State?
A: Actually, against North Carolina State, we were in regular zone coverage. It was just a busted play. The last play in this game was the "Hail Mary" play. If you go back to the situation when we were going to punt, we knew the ball was going to be thrown in the end zone because they were going to get the ball back. From that point on, when we took the safety, it was to use as much time off the clock as we could to minimize the amount of play they had and to to make sure we gave them the longest field position they could have in order to make the play. When you look at the play, one of the things with the defense was that we missed a lot of tackles early, but we missed a shot at Weatherford in the backfield, we could have ended it with a sack. We had hands on him on that play, and the ball may have never been thrown. The kids did a good job, I think we had five guys around one of them. Larry did a great job in trying to knock the ball down, but it came down on him, and he was in between, it was Carr, him and the ball. Actually, one of the officials came up to me during the replay and said they had to review it, but there's no question you guys intercepted and the ball game's over. So I would have been very disappointed if it was overturned.
Q: Was that play on your team's mind at the end of the game?
A: The one thing we knew about situations like that is you recognize what happened at the end of the game. You go back and you learn from it as we did, and you forget about it, because it's over with. There isn't anything we could do about it, and you can't worry about what happened weeks ago, you have to move on, forget it is the best thing you can do, which we've done. If you're thinking about it in that situation, then you're not playing with confidence, and our kids were confident. One of the things, when we were getting ready to take the safety, the defensive people were getting organized knowing that the ball's going to go in the end zone, it's going to happen if we can't get the sack, which we tried to get. So, here's how we're going to defend it and make the play.
I also have to credit our special teams. Florida State led the league in blocks going into the game. Once again, you have to credit the special teams. We kicked the ball, we kicked the ball well and we covered well.
