NORFOLK, Va. – Following its game Friday night at Old Dominion, Virginia Tech football met with the media for a press conference. Read below for what head coach Brent Pry, quarterback Grant Wells and linebacker Dax Hollifield had to say.
Head coach Brent Pry
On if he was surprised the lack of polish from the team:
"I am surprised. We were sloppy. Felt like they pressed. Attention to detail did not show up in the last scrimmage a little bit. There were more penalties than previously. We came into a pretty good environment. They wanted to make plays and they played hard. You don't want to have five turnovers and 14 penalties. You want to make people earn it, and I'm not taking anything away from Old Dominion. They got a nice-looking football team. They got good coaches and a nice environment here. I got to do a better job of coaching the team through that."
On what the message to the team was to put this behind them and regroup:
"I told them that there are so many good things. I've been around good football teams. And there are so many things that we did that represent a good football team. But then there are these things that we did that you can't win. You can't win when you do these things. The positive thing is that they are correctable. We can fix those as coaches and players. We're able to run the ball. We're able to do things. We got a solid football team. We just have to keep investing and clean up our mistakes."
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Quarterback Grant Wells
On how there was a lot of penalties committed by Tech:
"You always expect some penalties in Week 1. Guys are antsy to play and your technique might get away from you. But we had too many of them and there is no excuse for that."
On how running back Keshawn King played:
"He played fantastic. He showed how hard he is to tackle. When he gets out in any sort of space, he is hard to beat."
Linebacker Dax Hollifield
On how the defense executed the game plan:
"We played really fast tonight. At the end on defense, I'll have to go back and look at the film to see what happened. But ODU made some good plays and I will give credit to them. They showed up in critical situations. That fourth down, we got to make that stop. We had a chance to win the game right there and we didn't."
On his frustration level with not starting the season off with a win:
"I'm pretty frustrated right now, but you can look at it two ways. One is you can be down and just fold up and fall apart as a team. Or you can look at it as a positive and understand that this doesn't impact our goals of going undefeated at home, win 10 games and compete for an ACC championship."