Indiana football head coach Curt Cignetti, quarterback Kurtis Rourke, wide receiver Miles Cross, linebacker Jailin Walker, and defensive back Amare Ferrell spoke with the media following Indiana's Saturday night win over UCLA.
Below is their full Q&As, as well as a full transcript for Cignetti's conversation.
Cignetti: Good win – they’re all good. First conference win on national TV – one of the new teams in the Big Ten and I know that can get a lot of people’s attention. Proud of our guys, we went in there and wanted to play physical, tough and nasty, and we did. It’s a good win. We’ll enjoy it for 24 hours, and on Monday we are humble and hungry, and our eyes are on the next game. It’s a lot better to have to deal with success during a season than with failure, they both bring their challenges. And I talked to our team about that and they’ve got 24 hours to enjoy it, and then we are back at it with our next opponent.
Q: on this being a good sign of where he wants his program to be...
Cignetti: We have made a lot of progress. When you have the right people in your organization and you put the right things in their head, you know, they’re going to respond. Was there an unknown going in? Yeah, there was an unknown. I just thought, be competitive and win games. We’re capable of winning games. It’s still one win. We’re back at it next week.
Q: on the offensive line getting the protection that quarterback Kurtis Rourke needed...
Cignetti: I thought the protection was good. That was a concern coming in. Last year, they were excellent with pass rush, now they lost a lot of guys.
Q: on targeting penalties and if that's a product of playing a physical game...
Cignetti: I don’t want to comment about it too much. But I watched a few of those on replay, and I’m like, that’s targeting? You want your guys to play physical. So how do you make a good tackle and play physical?
Q: on what this type of win says...
Cignetti: It’ll open some eyes, it was on national TV. And that’s it. It’s one game. We acme out here and got done what we wanted to get done. And I’m not into labels. We’ll see what our resume looks like. But there is no one in our locker room surprised. No one in our locker room surprised.
Q: on Indiana's ability to respond, particularly in the fourth quarter in a two-score game...
Cignetti: Yeah, I thought that was really good. I really liked seeing that. They came out and kicked a field goal in the first drive of the third quarter and then we scored. I thought there were some good responses there.
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