Dana Holgorsen Teleconference

West Virginia Head Football Coach Dana Holgorsen held his weekly teleconference with the media on Sunday. The head man didn’t have much to say, but he wanted to maintain the teams focus heading into Homecoming Weekend against Bowling Green.

On his biggest concern after Saturday’s game

You always have to be worried after a loss. We would have had the same feelings had we won the game. There was a lot of energy and anticipation. As a coach, I talked last week you don’t really have to get your guys up when playing in a game like that because they are going to be up anyway. There is a natural little hangover that comes with that whether you win or lose.

On what he saw from the film
We were pretty much right on. Offensively and defensively, we played down in and down out pretty good. We didn’t play great. We played good enough to win if we didn’t have the four turnovers. If we would have gotten a couple turnovers defensively, we talked about the turnover thing. We talked about the field position thing and what we did special teams-wise. Their punter put on as good of a punting performance as I have seen in the last 12 years. He pinned us in there multiple times inside the 20 and a bunch of times inside the five.

On fielding punts
Tavon does a great job, and he is fast enough to get there. It is a deal where he has to make a judgment call about running into traffic, or doing the Peter-Peter call to make sure it doesn’t hit us.

On self-inflicted errors
Along the same lines, I give those guys credit. They are a really good football team, and they are good on all three sides of the ball. They outperformed us on special teams, clearly. They had something to do with the turnovers that we made. Tyrann Mathieu made two defensive plays that were as good as I have seen in a long time. Defensively, we need to have that kind of effort and playmaking ability in order to create those plays. It is frustrating, but we have to make plays like they did.

On what he took away from Saturday’s game
I thought our effort was good. Our effort and energy were as good as they could be. Our physicality was really good, and we knew it had to be in order to compete against those guys. From an effort and play hard standpoint it was good, but from the smarts side it was tough with the penalties and the turnovers. The good stuff is playing hard and with effort and being physical football team.

On LSU’s defense
They are a good secondary, and they are a good defense. We knew what we were up against, and they made plays.

On Matt Lindamood
He hasn’t practiced in about a month.

On improving mistakes
Time will tell on that. We were a disappointed football team tonight and today. We watched the tape. When guys do things well, we tell them and try to build on it. When guys do things wrong, we tell them to do it this way or that way then move on. We will focus on the things we need to get better on. We want to keep the positives and continue to move in that direction. If we do that, then we have a good chance of being a good football team.

On reports that locker room was broken into during the game
That is an internal matter, and we will deal with that internally