UNIVERSITY OF TULSA FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 1, 2021

Philip Montgomery

Press Conference

Houston - 45, Tulsa - 10

PHILIP MONTGOMERY: All right. Taking nothing away, I congratulate Houston. Good football team. Did a nice job tonight, I thought.

Very disappointed in the way we played. I didn't think we had enough energy about us. We didn't execute at a very good level in any of the phases. We're a much better football team than what we performed like tonight. I've seen it. I've seen us do it. But tonight it was not there.

And we got to get healthy. We got to get back to work and we got to get some things corrected. A tough night all the way across the board and we got to learn from it. We got to move on because we got another tough one next week.

THE MODERATOR: Questions for coach.

Q. What do you attribute the lack of energy to?

PHILIP MONTGOMERY: I mean, I'm not going to make any excuses. We had some stuff go on this week from an illness standpoint. We played a tough schedule. They played a lot of snaps. But that, again, that's, I'm not making excuses for it. We just, tonight we didn't have the energy that we needed and we have got to play inspired football. That's what we've always played. That's what we have to play. And I think the game kind of got away from us a little bit early and we struggled with it.

Q. When your team is not living up to its potential in a game, how frustrating is that when you feel like the game is slipping away?

PHILIP MONTGOMERY: I mean, obviously you're frustrated. I mean, they're frustrated. But you got to go make a play. You got to go make a stop. You got to go put a drive together. Jace makes the interception there in the end zone, kind of late in the first half. We end up getting a little something going, end up getting a field goal out of it.

But you got to create that. You got to create that momentum and we did not do a very good job of creating momentum tonight in any phase.

Q. It looked like your offensive line struggled. Is that something you thought might happen this game with their defensive line? What were you expecting from them?

PHILIP MONTGOMERY: No, I was expecting our offensive line to perform the the way I know they can. I mean, we got talented guys up there. We've got to play at a better rate. We didn't -- we knew coming in we needed to control the line of scrimmage and we did not do that tonight, whether it was in our run game or in our pass protection.

So we have got to get better there. I think between the penalties and the way that we have played, especially tonight, I mean, I know those guys can play better than that. Tonight, obviously, they didn't.

Q. Obviously it's difficult in the first half when you don't have Jaxon out there. Did you feel like if you guys could just get to halftime and things be okay, it might be different in the second half?

PHILIP MONTGOMERY: Well, I mean, when we went in to half, it was all about coming out and just winning the second half. I mean, put drives together, get stops, build some momentum, build some positive things that were going on. That was our focus coming out.

Getting Jaxon back obviously helps because he's such a tremendous player for us and a tremendous leader. But it wasn't just because Jaxon didn't play the first half. I mean, it was -- we got to play better ball than what we played tonight.

Q. You talked the other day about pride and effort when it comes to special teams. I mean, how much does that come into play in the second half of a game like this?

PHILIP MONTGOMERY: That's what it's all about. I mean you, got to battle. You got to have pride about what you're doing. And we get 60 minutes to play. We're going to play every second of it. And that's what we continued to harp on as we got into the later moments of that game.

But you got to battle and the pride about what you do and how you do it and the way you play is vitally important.

Q. When you have a game like this that doesn't at all go the way you planned, how do you take lessons from it and not get too caught up in everything that went wrong?

PHILIP MONTGOMERY: Well, I mean, that's, we talked to them about that downstairs. We get a little bit longer weekend here and get a chance hopefully to get some rest and recover, but Sunday take all the blinders off. We'll look at this tape, learn, adjust, understand.

Monday get up here and start watching tape, and then Tuesday when we hit that practice field we got to be locked in and focused. And it's still 24-hour. Learn from it, move on, win or lose.

Definitely got to do that this week because you can't let this one just nag at you, gnaw on you. You got to learn from it and you got to move on.