Nov. 23, 2002

Kay Dalton - UNC Head Coach

On the quick CMSU start ...
"Oh sure I was taken aback, I wasn't discouraged because I felt that once they ran out of their bag of trick plays we might be alright. I think they had something there, and actually were very successful today, give them credit for that. I don't know why our defense should be able to react to those kinds of things once they got done with those and started to play football with us we started moving the ball well and I think mainly, but I have always had great faith in this football team."

"This bunch of kids I have are very competitive, they wanna win badly and give all the credit to the players they showed some championship caliber. I think and as Allison may say, true grit which is true, and they did come back."

"I am a little disappointed in special teams, they got a blocked punt on us for seven and they also got a punt return for seven, so fourteen of those points were from our mistakes on special teams. But I also think too, we talked about it during the week about players and the ball getting started I don't think we had any turn overs on offense I think we got a least one interception on them on offese, and we didn't have a lot of foolish penalties. I think we had one for offsides one time, we talked about the fact that we were strong on first down, which I thought we did offensively and defensivly we know that we take care of the football, which I think they did and this is the cailiber play that I want."

On Adam Matthews ...
"Adam is a heck of a running back. I asked him yesterday if he could show up that running back (from CMSU), I asked him if he was up to it, and he said he was."

UNC senior DE Steve Frye

On the adjustments made after being down by 21 points ...
"No we didn't make any adjustments, they had a trick play that caught us by surprise with a big time running back. We wanted to keep the running back bottled up, we knew he was fast, and averaged about 5 yards a play and we managed to hold him to 3.5 yards a play, but we all did our assignments, we were able to settle down, and focus on our game, and we were able to stop him."

UNC Freshman DB Reed Doughty

"Coach Dobbs said stay deep and we worked on our passing game, you know I made a mistake that first play and luckily we didn't let it happen again. With their offense they have a good running back and receiver, we thought they would just come out and try to establish a running game like most people, it definitely caught us by surprise and they took advantage of it. We couldn't take the points off the board after it was 21, the special teams hurt us today but we wound up taking care of the run."

UNC Senior QB Mark Passard

"Twenty-one points is a big deficit to overcome, but we stuck together, we were a team, the defense held them when they needed to. I have never been so mad at a team in my entire life after that first play, I can honestly say I hated them worse than any other team we played, I was so mad, that the first touchdown after I was scoring out of anger than anything else."

UNC Junior RB Adam Matthews

"We just knew coming in we were gonna have to run the ball. We're a great team, we have great coaches on this team, we all looked in each others eyes and said hey we gotta turn it up."