Quotes from Alabama's coach, players
• "We're certainly happy to win but we also put on a clinic today for how to keep the other team in the game," Alabama Coach Nick Saban said. (From The Associated Press)
• "They never gave up and we never put them away, and we had some chances," Saban said. (From The Associated Press)
• “We were ahead 14-0 at the half, had 253 yards to their 60, so we must have had something,” Saban said, responding to a question about his team’s “lack of energy.”
“The problem in the first half was that we didn’t score points to match what we had done. We missed a field goal, we fumbled in the red zone and we left some other plays out there because of penalties.” (From Tuscaloosa News)
• “We can’t have those kinds of letdowns,” Saban said. “We need to play with consistency. I thought we played hard in a very physical football game. Kentucky is a good team.
“Our team has played very hard over the first six games to get here and we should give them a lot of credit. But we do have some things we can go back, look at and correct after this game.” (From Tuscaloosa News)
• “That’s not something we usually do,” Alabama quarterback John Parker Wilson said about being penalized 10 times for 92 yards. “We take pride in our execution. It was very uncharacteristic for us.” (From Tuscaloosa News)
• "I don't know how the ball went out of bounds. The guy was right there," Wilson said, shaking his head. "It's fun to be lucky." (From The Birmingham News)
• "When I think about what I've done today, all I think about is the fumbles," Alabama running back Glen Coffee said. "The fumbles come to mind first. The fumbles affect the whole team." (From The Associated Press)
Post-game comments gathered by RollTide.com, the official Web site of the University of Alabama athletics:
NICK SABAN:
"We're certainly happy to win, but we also put on a clinic today on how to keep the other team in the game. We had 253 yards in the first half, so you can't really say we didn't play well. We didn't finish drives. We fumbled the ball inside the 10-yard line, we missed a field goal, so we left 10 points on the board. The defense did a good job in the first half and scored on defense, which was good. We had a season-high number of penalties, 10 for 92 yards, which is not indicative of our team. I think all those things lend itself to the fact that this was our first chance to go out and play after the team had been recognized on a national level, and that's a different kind of psychological management to handle success, and I would say that we didn't handle it extremely well today. When you get satisfied you lose your intensity, you lose your focus, you get more penalties, you miss more assignments, you don't finish things and you don't do things exactly right. When you don't do that you don't play as well, and we didn't play as well today, because we didn't finish things and we didn't put the other team away. I think it's outstanding that Glen Coffee had over 200 yards rushing. I think the offensive line had to do a very, very good job. There's a lot of lessons for us to learn today, and it's great to be able to learn those lessons and not have to lose. Our focus needs to be on how we can get better as a team and how we can play with more consistency, but I don't want to take anything away from Kentucky's team because their defense did a great job and they kept competing in the game, and they never gave up, and we never put them away."
On Kentucky's late touchdown:
"We were playing zone. We were playing two-deep zone. You really try to re-route the inside guys running down the seams; they run four streaks which is their most common pattern in two-minute, and we didn't do a very good job of re-routing the guy down the seam. The quarterback looked at the tight end so the safety kind of bit and the guy ran over the top. It was a mis-execution by the half safety on that side, but it was also a mis-execution by the re-routers and the people underneath. In a case like that you have to play over the top of everything, tackle and make them drive it through. It's not the points; it's the clock. If they score on the last play of the game to make it 17-14 then it doesn't matter, but to give them an opportunity to get an onside kick and maybe run a few plays, because you didn't play properly is not what we want to do and certainly something we need to correct."
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