- I really can’t even piece together how long the game was. It took every second of that overtime. On offense we had three possessions, defense got two stops. I challenged these guys to leave it all on the field and we’ll take care of you next week in this final game.
They did just that. The defense, I want to start with the defense — two stops in overtime. It was unbelievable, given the momentum change that maybe got us there in overtime.
For them to rise up and get those two stops and allow the offense a shot to go win it (is) big time stuff. Then offensively, these guys just keep moving.
How many punts did we have? One in overtime in maybe? Again, we had some fourth downs that fell short that hurt us where there were no points there, but I thought that overall we were pretty efficient.
I know that sack number is going to be high for us because we dropped back and threw the ball so much because we were having so much success. There’s a myriad of things there that were the reason why.
They’re a good rush front (defense) but we felt like we needed to keep putting the ball in the air to keep attacking them.”
Can you talk through the math at the end of regulation and how that kept changing for you?
“Yeah. Well, the injury (to halfback Chase Brown) changed everything. We were going to be able to, I believe, kick the walk-off field goal with about 10 seconds left and it’s no one’s fault. We were telling Chase to slide at the one (yard line) because we figured they were going to let us score there, which he did. He did a great job. Unfortunately, he got his ankle (hurt), so they charged us with a timeout,
so that changed everything. Now, you’re at second-and-goal at the one and you can down it and make sure they use their time out and then try to score a touchdown from there on third down and maybe kick it on fourth.
But you saw our low red zone against them. It’s tough all day. They’re going to play goal line against every personnel you’ve got. Nothing was easy for us, especially with the runs down there because they are just so overmatched with their personnel down there. So, we just ran a quarterback sneak and told Joe (Burrow) to score and if you score, great, if not, we’ll try something else and they’ll have to use their time outs.
(We) put it on the defense there to get the stop and unfortunately, they scored on the fourth-and-one, but then the defense rose up in the overtime and got it back for us.”
