Recap | Final Stats | Notes
New Mexico vs. Utah
Thursday, October 19, 2006
University Stadium – Albuquerque, N.M.
New Mexico Head Coach Rocky Long
“I thought Donovan (Porterie) played pretty well. He played a whole lot better than he did last week. I thought the offense as a whole gained their rhythm and played really well, except for the turnover.”
“Donovan played pretty well, but he’s going to have some rough days in the future. He’s still a rookie, but played well today. He has a lot to learn. He’s an outstanding athlete who throws the ball and he played with a lot of confidence tonight.”
“The defense played really well except for one drive in the first half. We allowed one 95-yard drive and that’s terrible. You should never allow anybody to go 95 yards. All the other points were real short fields. The kicking game wasn’t very good tonight and the field position battle we lost dramatically in the first half.”
“Utah’s a man-to-man cover team and the hardest route to cover are the crossing routes because you have to chase a guy clear across the field. The only way to prevent completing those is to get pressure on the quarterback and I thought the offensive line played really well tonight.”
“Our teams never quit. The last five or six years in this program, you’ve never seen a Lobo football team quit. We’ve gotten beat and sometimes we get beat bad, but you’ve never seen a football team quit.”
(on Brian Urlacher’s presence in the stadium tonight):
“He played in one outstanding comeback and got to see another one tonight. I wish he’d be around more often. I was thinking about putting him in uniform since we couldn’t stop him in the first half.”
New Mexico Wide Receiver Travis Brown
“In the first half we had a few of down points. We came in (at halftime) and talked it over and we went out and executed just like [offensive coordinator Bob] Toledo planned all week. We ran a lot of crossing routes this week because we knew they played a lot of man (coverage) and we wanted to get a lot of guys freed up.”
New Mexico Wide Receiver Marcus Smith
“They just started throwing it my way. I came open and I told the coaches ‘they’re funneling me inside.’ They were letting me run free on the inside and I had (Eric) Weddle on me on the outside. So we ran a couple of slants and crossing routes that gave us the inside. That gave me a step in front of them and I just took the ball and ran with it.”
Utah Head Coach Kyle Whittingham
“We played a decent football game, especially in the first half. We came out in the second half and they took it to us. We gave up 24 points in the second half, only got one touchdown and that was set up with a short field. They came out and thoroughly out-played us.”
On the touchdown to take the lead back in the second half:
“We got the lead and now all we had to do was get a stop to get the victory but their freshman quarterback (Porterie) threw for 350 yards and what else can you say. That’s a heck of a night and he tore us up.”
On changing momentum before half time:
“We gave them momentum, and then they carried it in through half-time, they did a nice job in the second half. We have to correct our errors. We lost our tailback and our defensive tackle, and we have Vegas (UNLV) coming in 9 days.”