“We were not doing a very good job. It was like popcorn. One guy you’d get fixed, then the other guy would mess up.”
– Johnson on Georgia Tech’s blocking
“He’s played better, I guess. There’s got to be guys around him helping him, too. But probably wasn’t one of his better games.”
– Johnson on quarterback Justin Thomas
“Sometimes when you’re winning and you’re winning big, you hear the corrections and you hear people talking, but it doesn’t register. Sometimes it has to take one of these to register.”
– Johnson on his message to the team
“I thought right from the start, we kind of got rattled a little bit. When it wasn’t going good at first, we didn’t respond very well. We got young guys, skill guys. We just didn’t play very good. I think you have to give Notre Dame some credit. They had something to do wiht that.”
– Johnson
“I think our defensive plan was outstanding. I think our team executed it up until maybe the last couple of minutes where we probably lost a little bit of our focus. But, all in all, just a tremendous performance by our football team.”
– Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly
“I think we were probably as aggressive as any defense that we had watched on film. Being very aggressive was an important element within the plan itself. We wanted to show different looks. They had to use a number of timeouts as you obviously saw.”
– Kelly on the defensive game plan
“The structure was to run the alley and get the ball out (from Thomas), certainly. But you’re put in a position where you’ve got to fight through some blocks. We felt like we were going to put a little bit more pressure on (defensive linemen) Isaac (Rochell) and Jerry (Tillery) so we could get to the quarterback. We needed to get to the quarterback. He’s a game wrecker.”
– Kelly on trying to conceded the pitch on the option
“There just wasn’t a lot of running room, whoever had the ball. It’s just something you have to go back and watch and correct it.”
– Thomas
“We’ve just got to learn from these mistakes. I mean, it’s early. If you’re going to make these kinds of mistakes as a team, better early than later from what I can see. Just watch the film Monday and make corrections.”
– Cornerback D.J. White
“The biggest thing for me is just missed opportunities, both sides of the ball, even special teams. We’ve got to capitalize on opportunities. You just can’t keep turning the ball over, you can’t keep missing chances on defense against a good team like this. They’re going to make you pay for it.”
– White
“I knew it was third down and I kind of let him get behind me a little bit. He just made a play on the ball.”
– Cornerback Chris Milton on Notre Dame wide receiver Will Fuller’s touchdown reception
“You go in and clean it up Monday and then move on to next week. You can’t dwell on it. Last year, we lost at Duke, I think it was to Duke, and then we went to North Carolina flat, and it was like two bad weeks back to back. You’ve just got to clean it up and flush it. That’s all you can do.”
– Defensive tackle Adam Gotsis
“Good opportunity to kind of put some good stuff on film and we did the opposite. We put a lot of bad things on film. All we can do now is move forward, flush it, learn from our mistakes and put a better foot forward next game, next week.”
– B-back Patrick Skov
