“It definitely hurts. Coming off the three-game win streak and the extra time to prepare and coming out and playing like this, it hurts, but looking forward to next weekend and righting our wrongs.”
— Georgia Tech A-back Robert Godhigh
“It felt like, when we got some things going, we weren’t able to build on that momentum and keep riding it. It was just (that) they had an answer for everything. Not so much schematically, but physically.”
— Tech offensive lineman Will Jackson
“He was outstanding. He played great. He’s a great player. You’ve got to do your job; you’ve got to get to him. We couldn’t do that consistently tonight, and that cost us. Boyd, he’s an amazing quarterback. He’s broken all the records here, so hat’s off to him.”
— Tech defensive end Jeremiah Attaochu on Clemson quarterback Tajh Boyd
“The first three-and-outs, I think it was probably a little bit of nerves from pretty much everybody. We didn’t get settled until after we were down by almost two, three scores.”
— Tech B-back David Sims on the team's slow start
“We just put ourselves in a hole, and Clemson’s a good football team. You can’t put yourself in a hole against them. They can put up points.”
— Sims
“We got our tail beat. Bottom line, they just beat us. They just beat us in all three facets of the game. We got off to a terrible start offensively in the first quarter. We started the game off kicking the ball off out of bounds, and then they go down and we hold ’em to a field goal and then we can’t catch the kick, take over on the 2. Very first series, we’ve got a third-and-short and pitch the ball and slip and fall and then the first quarter went downhill from there.”
— Tech coach Paul Johnson
“You’ve got to be able to play on the deep ball. What did they throw, one deep ball they didn’t catch? We were in position two or three times. You’ve just got to make a play.”
— Johnson on Clemson’s deep pass plays
“We really never got our running game going. I was looking here (at the final statistics), we rushed for 250, but that’s misleading because we never got into any kind of rhythm. It was hodgepodge stuff, big plays. We never could get anything going. We threw the ball OK, but we wasted the whole first quarter. I think we had probably 10 yards the whole first quarter. Looking at this, we ended up with 340 the last three quarters, or, actually 430, I guess, the last three quarters. But it really didn’t matter.”
— Johnson
“You know what, in all, I thought he did some good things. He made some plays for us. It was never really clean on the edge, but he made a nice play on the pitch to (Godhigh) on the one long touchdown over on our sideline. He threw some nice balls, converted a couple third downs scrambling, so he made some plays.”
— Johnson on quarterback Vad Lee
“Our defensive line owned the night. This was a dominating performance in the trenches. We had a lot of tackles for loss. To stop a team like Georgia Tech, you have to win at the point of attack, which is in the backfield. Our guys did their job.”
— Clemson coach Dabo Swinney
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