University of Tennessee Athletics
Postgame Quotes
October 01, 2000 | Football
Tennessee Head Coach Phillip Fulmer
I have to give a lot of credit to the LSU players and their coaching staff. I owe them a tremendous amount of congratulations for their efforts tonight. They played exceptionally well, were well-coached and ready to play in this game.
This goes to show how much of a factor emotion plays in this game that we call football. I also want to complement our kids for their second-half efforts. The way that we got back into the game and tied it up; I thought that showed a lot of character.
It was definitely a great football game tonight. From our standpoint, there were enough mistakes made to lose three ballgames. We have to go back to work; I have to coach the team better, and listen better. Youth is not an excuse.
The game was a great experience for our players who had not been in this kind of setting before. We are going to play a bunch of these types of games before the season is over. We will grow from this game tonight as a team. This is our second really tough loss of the season already.
With the right type of character, and the right type of coaching, we can learn from our losses. We will get better, and I expect that we will. We ran into a very motivated team tonight. This LSU team had their pride hurt last week by UAB when they lost their Homecoming game to a team that shouldn't have beaten them.
LSU
Head Coach Nick Saban
"I'm
awfully proud of our players; they played their heart out today. They worked
awfully hard, and they made a lot of progress. I'm really proud of the way they
played. I always say for 60 minutes, but I guess we had to play for a little
more today. And they did it.
"There were times out there when things didn't look good, and we made big plays.
"I feel really good about the state of Louisiana and all the people who support us. The fans out there today were fantastic. It was really an emotional lift for us to have a crowd like we had today. There are a lot of people in the athletic administration who work to help the program be what it is. Those people sometimes get overlooked, and I just feel like there a lot of people in Louisiana that deserve something like this.
"We had a lot of players play very well out there today. Tennessee has got a lot of good football players. I told the players at halftime that when you beat a team like this, like when we beat Michigan and Ohio State, those players never die. They believe they can win, they think they can win, and they are going to keep playing. And we are going to have to keep playing.
"That's the way the game went. We just out fought them, and I was really proud of our players for doing that.
"Our ability to overcome adversity and do some tough things certainly got challenged tonight. And I'm really proud of the way our players handled it."
PLAYER QUOTESTennessee Players
Defensive Back Teddy Gaines
"They weren't doing anything unexpected. We came out kind of flat. It took a couple of plays for us to realize we had a ballgame on our hands. I guess that is just how it goes sometimes. They just kept converting third downs on us."
Wide Receiver Eric
Parker
"It
hurts you in your heart. But that's the nature of football. You win some; you
lose some. We showed a lot of maturity being down and coming back like we did.
We came up short again like we did against like Florida. We have to capitalize
and take control of the games. The mood at halftime was that there was another
30 minutes of football to play. It's still a long season; anything can happen
in college football."
LSU Players
Punter Donnie Jones
It was great. Everyone played
hard for 60 minutes and beyond. We're going to celebrate for 24 hours and then
get ready for Florida next week.
Defensive
End Kyle Kipps
It was unbelievable. The crowd was right on the sideline. It was so loud you
couldn't hear yourself think. We got after them and made the play to win. We
worked on that all week. They were doing a lot of three-step drop. Every chance
we could, we made some plays when we needed to. We were just after it as hard
as we could. We've been doing that all season, but it just seemed to work out
for us this week. We need to keep doing that all week. Tennessee had a young
quarterback and we knew that we wanted him to make the decisions to win the
game and try to take the ball out of Travis Henry's hands and make the quarterback
win the game.
We got it done. We got the W. We played with a lot of emotion. We knew that we had to come in here tonight and it was do or die. We wanted to get a victory in SEC play. We thought that would help us get back on that winning track. Our confidence is really high and we are looking forward to next week.
