“They played better than we did. Probably coached better than we did. I’ve never seen so many mistakes. It seemed like every series that we had the ball on offense, we either jumped offsides or had a penalty.”

Coach Paul Johnson

“It was a comedy of errors. Even some of the plays we hit, (like) the big pass play we hit to Robbie (Godhigh), the B-back goes the wrong way. When we ran the option, we turned the corner loose and then defensively, it’s hard to gauge. We gave up a 95-yard drive, actually, I think 90-something (91). Special teams was awful. … It seemed like every time we had the ball, we were inside the 20-yard line and against a good defense, if you’re going to make mistakes, you’re not going to be very successful. You’ve got to play better, coach better. Bottom line.”

Johnson

“I told you all along, we’re not very good with the option. We’re terrible, in fact. And it showed. We’re not going to throw the ball 25 or 30 times and win very many games.”

Johnson

“For whatever reason, it seems like we self-destruct (against Virginia Tech). … The first (series), we fumbled the ball, which we had practiced that about eight million times with that guy coming in there (on a blitz) and the second one, we’re driving the ball down there pretty good, we’re changing up the snap count, we’ve got them to jump two or three times and we had two receivers who are on the (darn) backside of the play who are offsides. Just a total lack of concentration. We got our right guard to jump, what, two or three times, (on) 3^rd and 3, 3^rd and 2. We’ve got to do a better job coaching.”

Johnson

“That was probably not the smartest decision in hindsight. It was pretty dumb in hindsight, but we got of that unscathed because the guy missed the field goal. The ball was at about the 35, I think, with, what, five minutes left, six minutes, 4^th and 2. I thought we had a play that would work, and it didn’t. They stopped it. The defense went out there after giving up the one pass play, stopped ’em and the kid missed a field goal. It worked out.”

Johnson

“I’m confident we’re going to get better at it. We’re either going to get better at it or we’ll have other people playing.”

Johnson on the option

“That’s not necessarily (quarterback) Vad (Lee). Vad can’t stop the guy popping in the B gap all day when you’re supposed to block down on him. The guy’s (Derrick Hopkins) a good player and he was timing the count pretty well. So you have to alter the count and if you can’t do that, then you just kill yourself.”

Johnson

“I thought we did an OK job in the second half (on defense). The quarterback was 19 for 25 and he comes in completing less than 50 percent. So that’s not real good. But points are what are important and we held them to 17 and that should be good enough to win the game.”

Johnson

“We were definitely ready to go. We knew what they were going to do. They did exactly what we practiced. We knew what we were going to do. We had a great game plan. We just kind of didn’t keep our composure then didn’t execute how we needed to.”

A-back Robert Godhigh

“We just tweaked a couple things, that’s all. It wasn’t anything special. We just tweaked a couple things. Everybody communicated, everybody did their job and played better after that second touchdown. We played better the whole time.”

Outside linebacker Brandon Watts

“They had some pretty good defensive tackles. On the cut blocks and stuff, they  were staying up and they were just flying around. They played with a whole bunch of energy the whole game. They executed better than we did.”

Lee

“Because we knew how they were going to play. We knew some of the stunts and stuff that were going throw at us so going on two would allow them to show it and allow us to actually block it properly. Unfortunately for us, we false started on like at least four of them.”

B-back David Sims on changing the snap count to go on two

“It’s frustrating, but it’s just one game in a big season. We can’t let it bring us down. We have a lot of things in front of us that we can accomplish. That includes an ACC championship. As a leader, I can’t be too down about one loss. We have to be able to look at Miami, get back to work and really encourage the guys to be upbeat. Football is a game of ups and downs. Week to week, situations can change so we’re just going to go into next week ready to beat Miami.”

Defensive end Jeremiah Attaochu