Opening statement…
“Disappointed. I hoped we were further along. I knew this would be a good test for us no matter what people said. They are a very senior-laden football team, played extremely hard and are well-coached. Their quarterback played lights out in the first half. The positive I guess if we could take anything from it is that our defense, I thought, really, really improved as the game went on. In the second half, they gave us chances. Their special teams played really well in the third quarter and kept us pinned. But you cannot turn the ball over five times and expect to beat really anybody. We never got in any kind of sync offensively and that’s very disappointing and frustrating to me, and I’ve got to figure that out for us.”
Payton Thorne, QB
On what he saw with the turnovers and how he plans to fix those mistakes…
“Yeah, you know there are some different situations that happened throughout the game. Obviously, no matter how a turnover happens or occurs, you don’t want those, so we’ve got to do a better job of protecting the ball, and that starts with me. I touch the ball every play, so we’ve got to do that and like you said, head back to the drawing board a little bit. You know, we aren’t going to abandon our offense, but we just have to be sharper.”
On field positioning due to the pressure the defense was giving…
“I thought our defense really played well today. They had a short field on an interception. I don’t know, I think that was first half. Yeah, did they score on that one? I think they did, so that’s not on them. Then, we just didn’t do a good enough job on getting first downs when we’re backed up the field. Obviously, field position is an important thing in this game and at this level. So, like I said, I thought our defense played really well today and we weren’t able to do enough to help them out.”
KeAndre Lambert-Smith, WR
On his postgame thoughts…
“Think about how disappointed you would be if you lost. Nobody likes losing, but we are just going to get back to work, look at the film, correct our mistakes and prepare for next week. “
On how Cal’s play differed from the scout…
“I feel like they stopped pressing as much or manning up and press then bail. That’s about it though.”
On correcting mistakes as a team…
“That is when we have to watch film to figure that out. I’m just worried about what we are doing when the ball is in the air. We will make corrections, watch film and make corrections.”
Jalen McLeod, LB
On adjustments made on defense in the second half…
“We had a plan put together. Like we were fighting, facing adversity. So we all came together and we knew we had a battle. We knew we had to give the offense a chance. We see what we got to work on now, though.”
On the early loss and the message for younger players…
“We have to buckle up. We’re playing football like we got to. We really have to hone into our craft and not be messing off and playing around in practice. We’ve got to really focus on this. Everybody wants to come up and come at us. Y’all saw what happened today. Maybe it comes from practice.”
Keldric Faulk, DL
On the loss…
“It’s a learning lesson for us as a team. When we face adversity, we have to come together more. Whenever we are facing adversity, or even if we have a bad play or a bad drive, we have to come together and make sure that we are ready for that next one to come up.”
On the improvement of the defense…
“I think that our communication in the first half was not as good as it should’ve been. When we came out in the second half, we overcommunicated. We were in our right gaps. We covered our right man. We were just honed in on our keys.”
Jerrin Thompson, S
On the message to the younger players after a loss like this…
“The biggest message is, when you play D-I football, you will face adversity. We just have to respond the right way and that’s just come together.”
On adjustments made defensively in the second half…
“They (Cal) did not do anything that we wouldn’t expect them to do. At the end of the day, we just had to line up and play our ball – our style of Auburn defense. That’s really all we did. We just actually locked in. We came together. We played our style of football.”
On co-captain Payton Thorne…
“Talked to him just a while ago after he got out of the shower. I told him to keep his head up because we’re going to need him. At the end of day, he didn’t have the game he wanted, but the way he responds is going to say everything about Payton (and who he is as a leader).”
Luke Deal, TE
On why there wasn’t any rhythm in the passing game…
“We always talk about staying on schedule, staying ahead of the chains. A bunch of our RPO stuff, you know? A lot that has to do with downhill running game but also whenever they give us things in the passing game off those RPOs, just being able to hit those, and I felt like whether it was that or we were penalized a couple times. Again, it’s on us. It’s not on the referees, but a couple penalties set us back and a couple of those things are real drive killers and especially in the first half, our defense kind of had a couple of drive killers and some penalties as well, but like I said, they played really good and we just couldn’t stay ahead of those chains. We were kind of off schedule all day.”
On being a captain for the team and feeling a responsibility for the loss…
“Absolutely, that’s why I’m here. I have been here — this is my sixth year, and I have had a bunch of mediocre seasons and that’s not what we are trying to get accomplished this year, so anything less than what our goal is and what our expectations are and whatever we put on the field, anything less than that is on me, it’s on the other captains and the guys that drive this program.”
Austin Keys, LB
On what adjustments the defense made in the second half to really slow the Cal offense down…
“You try to get the ball back. We didn’t have many turnovers, so the big thing was trying to flip the offense and defense performance. Coach said we needed to lessen their third downs, and we needed to get some more conversion on third downs.”
On the growth of the freshmen on the defensive side during the second half…
“It was crazy how they came in and just seeing how they had first-half adjustments and going back in for the second half and fixing it. It was surprising to see, but we needed it.”
Transcript via Auburn Athletics.
