Sept. 12, 2009

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Notre Dame Head Coach Charlie Weis

On his message to the team … “They win together, and they lose together. There were plenty of opportunities on offense, defense and special teams to win that game. We can’t pout and say we should have won the game. We had a chance to close it out on offense and on defense. But we gave up a home run on special teams. Basically it’s time to say where you’re going from here.”

On Notre Dame’s last offensive drive … “We ran it first of all and then we ran again. But what they decided to do after that first run was load up the box and not let us do that. We saw that on the second run. They had a change of mentality, and they weren’t just going to sit back there and let us run the ball. So we went to a quick, three-step drop — the same pass we had been hitting all day. But then we threw an incomplete pass, and now it’s third-and-long. So then you have two choices — you run the ball just to make them use their timeouts or you try and win the game. When it got to the third-down call, we threw the ball over to the right-hand side over to Shaquelle Evans, and we were just a little off on it. He was open, and we had an opportunity to pick up that first down and try to run it out from there.”

On the last play of the game … “The plan was to try to get the ball to about midfield and get out of bounds so we could take a shot at the end zone. Of course [Golden Tate] could have fallen down and we have one timeout left, so of course I’m yelling, ‘Get down, get down.’ But as an athlete in that situation he’s thinking that he might have a chance to take it to the house right there. It’s just one of those situations that you practice. If you have one second left you have a jump-ball play and try to throw the ball into the end zone because we had a timeout left that we were trying to spend right there. The clock runs out — there was zero or one second left and you’re not going to get that with it being so close.”