MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Following its 27-21 setback at West Virginia on Saturday, Virginia Tech football head coach Justin Fuente met with the media for a postgame press conference. Read what Fuente had to say below.
HEAD COACH JUSTIN FUENTE
Opening statement:
"First of all, congratulations to Coach [Neal] Brown and West Virginia. That was an incredible football game. A great atmosphere. Obviously, it was a pretty tough locker room. There was incredible fight to find a way to have a chance to win the ball game. We did not play well in the first half and I'm not taking credit away from Coach Brown. They did some things that put us off-balance on offense and defense and dominated the first half. Our guys came in the second half and really scratched and clawed. So, our guys are crushed. We're all crushed. I'm proud of our players and disappointed in my ability to have them play better in the first half."
On the red zone failures and if the team lacks a go-to player in that spot:
"It centers around running the football and we were up-and-down running the football today. When we were behind, there was a time in there when we didn't have the luxury of being able to run it. To me, it centers around that and being able to run the ball. We missed a couple of plays to get touchdowns."
On how deflating it was not scoring in the red zone to end the first half:
"Yeah, I mean, we had a chance to be either down 10 points if you score a touchdown, which I thought would've been a miracle, to be honest with you, with only being down that much. Then, having to settle for a field goal and still, if you punch that through, you don't let it get away as much. So, to not have that, it even speaks higher of our players. To have that disappointment, suck it up and go back out there and compete. It speaks a lot to our kids and the investment into what we're doing."
On the difficulty of finding chemistry among the offensive line, given right tackle Silas Dzansi's injury and moving players around:
"We had a couple of false start penalties at one spot and that kind of led us to moving it around a little bit. Those two defensive linemen [WVU's Akheem Mesidor, Dante Stills] are incredible players now. So, it's a tough matchup for everybody. You should've seen the film of them last year. They played a lot thinner in the box than they played us today and still held up the run game. We knew that they were going to be tough."