Head Coach Mark Richt
Opening Statement…
“We have been getting ready the past couple of weeks for
Kentucky. We’re looking forward to going to that ballgame. We haven’t had the
best of luck out there in Lexington with some very close ballgames. I have a
lot of respect for Coach Phillips, and he really does a great job. We also have
a lot of respect for what Coach Sanders does offensively.
It’s been tough for them going through
two or three quarterbacks. I can’t imagine what that would be like.
Kentucky’s always done a great job on special teams and
they’ve always had some outstanding blocking schemes to block your punt, so
we’ve got to make sure we’re ready for that. We know we have a lot of big
challenges in that area, as well.”
On recruiting Kentucky
wide receiver Demarco Robinson…
“I remember him being in our camps and being a guy we liked.
He’s a good football player. Kentucky’s always done extremely well recruiting
our state.”
On recent offensive
and defensive miscommunication issues…
“I know we’ve given up some big plays off not communicating
well in the back and making mistakes and being over-aggressive on play-action
fakes. I don’t think there’s been a ton of missed assignments offensively, but
when you do have negative yardage plays, a lot of times it is a guy turning
someone free rather than getting whipped. But I don’t want to talk about South Carolina anymore. They beat us soundly and congratulations to them, but we’ve
moved forward. Every game you’ll have miscommunications, and we’re not going to
sit here and make excuses other than that we didn’t do a good job and we have
to get better.”
On the team’s
cohesion…
“When you have a group of linemen or the defensive
backfield, communication is very important, and the more reps you get with the
same five, they tend to communicate well. The more they play together, the
better chance they have of not making those mistakes.”
On letdowns in the
first half this season…
“I think everyone will have things you didn’t prepare for
and things that catch you off guard. Sometimes you just get overaggressive when
it comes to wanting to stop the run and be physical. All that’s good, but you
have a certain area of responsibility that you have to take care of.”
On whether or not
anyone is looking ahead towards NFL draft projections…
No, not at all. I think there are a
lot of guys that have an NFL future, but I think they know that the better we
play as a team, the better everyone looks. I don’t think you can play in such a
way that it wouldn’t benefit the team if you did well. I think everybody knows
that every goal we’ve set for ourselves, other than winning every game, is
still a very real possibility.”
On Aaron Murray
handling the news regarding his father’s health…
“Sometimes you just have to take off and forget about
football, and that was one of those times. I think the family had some news
before they told him, and they knew he’d have some time to come see family
after the operation. As far as the timing, it was something they could time out
in the open date, being a sports family like they are.”
On the experience that
the offensive line gained against South Carolina…
“Anytime you play a game and you don’t have the success that
you hope for, especially when we were rolling right along with running the ball
and protecting well enough to put some good numbers up offensively, it’s
disappointing. Then they (the offensive line) ran into a greater challenge and
didn’t have as much success, so they had to look in the mirror, and they
realize they still have a ways to go and need to get better. After a rough day,
most guys want to come back and prove that they’re better than what they showed
in the last one.”
On the play of
Kenarious Gates…
“He’s done pretty well. We think he’s our best left tackle
right now, no doubt about that. I think he’s done a good job. I don’t know (if
he’ll stay at left tackle next year), so I wouldn’t say that he has nailed it
down for the rest of his career.”
On the play of Garrison Smith…
“He’s done well for us. He’s been very productive and pretty
stout against the run. He’s had some quarterback pressures, and we think he’s an
SEC-caliber defensive lineman and we like what he’s doing for us. I think he’ll
just keep getting more and more playing time as he goes.”
On the team’s
mentality moving forward after the South Carolina game…
“We need to beat Kentucky right now. That’s really all I’m
worried about right now, and then the next week we’ll worry about that game.
We’re a pretty good team, and we thought we could beat anyone we play when the
season began, so that hasn’t changed.”
On sympathizing with
Kentucky and their share of injuries and struggles this season…
“Well people have asked me those types of questions before,
and especially last season when we go 0-2, so I think somebody addressed that
question in regard to me and how we’re doing at Georgia. My answer was that I
don’t expect anybody to feel sorry for me. I expect everybody to hook it up and
play the very best that they can play. I expect everybody to watch film and get
the best plan possible and try to exploit whatever can then be exploited and
play 60 minutes as hard and as fast as you can play against anybody you play.
So I’m sure that’s how all of the coaches feel in the league.”
On Kentucky’s recent
pile-up of injuries…
“They have had a lot of injuries. No coach wants to make any
excuses for anything, but there’s no question that if you’re playing a bunch of
true freshman on your team and in the back end of your defense, that’s tough. I
think they’re almost all true freshmen playing in the back end, so it’s tough.
Those guys all want to play SEC ball, but if you get too many of them playing
at the same time, you’re going to have some problems. So how many guys will be
back healthy, I don’t know. If you watch them play us last year, and a lot of
those guys are back, and if you watch the first half of their South Carolina
game, you see what you could be in for. Some teams, especially young teams,
play better at home than away, and we’ll be at their home and they’ll have a
comfort zone there. We just have to get after it because we have our own
problems. We have enough problems of our own.”
On Jarvis Jones being
able to play against Kentucky…
“We’ll see. We’re not counting him out yet. He had been
running on a treadmill underwater and did extremely well. We figured when we
put him on land, he’d hit the ground running literally, but he wasn’t ready to
practice.
If he’s healthy enough to play, we want him to play. There’s
no thought of holding him out this game so that he’s 100 percent next game. I
don’t know if anybody’s 100 percent this time of the year when you’re six games
in. Just about everybody has something bothering them, but if he gets the okay
to go, he’ll play this weekend.”
On the play of John Jenkins throughout this season and his career…
“Considering that he’s only been here less than two years
and he was a junior college kid that came in for the purpose of trying to make
us more stout up front in this 3-4 scheme, I think he’s done very well. He was
very productive in the last ballgame, and he’s been difficult to move out of
there. He’s put some pressure on the quarterback, and not so much with sacks,
but with pushing lineman up in the face and he’s been stout against the run. I
think he’s done very well, and he’s been a great team guy. He’s a pleasant guy
that shows up every day with a good attitude, and he’s fun to coach.”
On Josh Harvey-Clemons
being named a captain for this game…
He’s on three of our special teams, and every team that he
was on, each coach felt like he played exceptionally well last ballgame, so he
won the honor of being special teams captain for this game. It just doesn’t
happen very often that a true freshman becomes a captain, whether it’s offense,
defense, or special teams, but he’s got a lot of ability. He’s a great example
of a very talented guy that just needs more reps on defense for the coaches to
get comfortable playing him on defense on a consistent basis. But when he does,
and you add another year’s worth of muscle and conditioning and knowledge, he’s
going to be a heck of a football player. But if we threw him out there right
now it would be tough on him, no matter how talented he is. That’s kind of what
Kentucky’s been through a little bit. They’ve thrown some guys in there faster
than they probably would like to do.”
On the play of Malcolm Mitchell this season…
“Malcolm is playing more offense obviously, and getting more
opportunities. He’s still getting more reps defensively. Today the majority of
his practice will be defense, although he will get some offensive snaps today.
Certain things are being installed, and we want to keep him up to speed
offensively in case we have some issues with injuries because we don’t want to
throw a brand new freshman in there. He’s very good on the kickoff return,
although we think (Todd) Gurley is pretty good, too. Gurley can do it, as well,
but Malcolm will start the game there.”
On punt returns…
“Rhett (McGowan) and Malcolm (Mitchell) have been getting
the work at punt returns, but Rhett is our number one guy right now.”
On the play of senior
linebacker Michael Gilliard…
“Michael’s done very well for us. When (Alec) Ogletree
wasn’t playing (earlier this season), Michael and (Amarlo) Herrera did a lot of
the work, and Christian Robinson, too. You’ve got some guys that have gotten a
lot of opportunity. When Ogletree came back, it did take away from some of Amarlo’s
time and some of Michael’s time, but when Michael has been in there, he’s
played very well. We have some good experience at linebacker right now.”
Quarterback Aaron
Murray
On Kentucky’s young
team…
“Their young players are talented and capable of making
plays, but experience is big in SEC games. The more experience you have, the
more comfortable you feel out there. We just need to be ready for whoever they put out there. We know they’ll be ready
defensively, so we need to make sure we’re hitting on all cylinders.”
On the bye week…
“Obviously it’s great to have the bye week to get your body
feeling better, but I kind of wish we had a game this past week just to get the
bad taste out of our mouth [from the South Carolina loss]. We tried not to be sitting
around thinking about it for two weeks – we put that game behind us and
we know this is an extremely important stretch for us if we want to reach our
goals. We need to win our next six games.”
Wide Receiver Marlon Brown
On Kentucky’s young
defense…
“I feel like from playing in this league for a few years our
team knows what to expect in these games and has the experience. It’s tough for
a freshman at any position to step in there, but Kentucky’s players are doing
it so we’ll see on Saturday.”
On Michael Bennett’s
absence…
“We didn’t get a good chance to see how much we miss him vs.
South Carolina because it wasn’t a big passing day for us overall. I think
we’ll be fine as receivers – we’ve got guys with a lot of experience. Me,
Malcolm [Mitchell], Tavarres [King], [Rantavious] Wooten, we’ve all got
experience.”
On playing on the road
again…
“Playing on the road in the SEC is always tough. We’ll need
to keep focused and we’ll be alright.”
Linebacker Amarlo Herrera
On moving forward
after the bye-week…
“We’re ready to move forward. The off week provided us with
an opportunity to improve on a lot of things and a lot of people have been
working to get better. We’re just ready to work hard.”
On having the full
defense back…
“We should never have had excuses for anything, no matter
who was in or who was out. We’re ready to get back to the top defensive form we
were in last year.”
On the
miscommunication that has occurred on defense this year…
“Sometimes it’s something as simple as mixing up who is
supposed to be covering the running back and sometimes it’s more complicated
than that because we have a lot of things going on. If one person doesn’t
understand what they really have to do then it could mess up anything. I’ve had
one of those mistakes against Tennessee allowing the running back to score out
of the backfield.”
Linebacker Christian
Robinson
On the
miscommunication that has occurred on defense this year…
“I think a lot of the reason is that we might have a certain
coverage in and we aren’t communicating with each other about who needs to be
where. I think we have guys in the same position that aren’t executing until
the whistle. This bye-week has been huge in allowing us to talk things out and
fix these problems. A lot of the reason is that we’re putting new stuff in
every week. Because we’ve been in this defense so long we’ve been able to mix
things up and add in things but that can cause confusion sometimes.”
On moving forward
after the bye-week…
“I think we should perform a lot better moving forward than
we have up to this point. I think we could have been doing that a long time
ago, but when we sat down as a defense Coach Grantham pointed out on film that
if we just need to do our job. That’s where we’ve been messing up, guys have
been trying to do too much or they haven’t been doing the right thing at the
right time and that’s where we’ve lost games.”
On executing
assignments on defense…
“I think we all know what we have to do and how to do it, I
think the problem comes in actually going out there and doing it. That’s what
we haven’t done and if we can fix that then we will win and we will win big.”