Everything Rhett Lashlee said after SMU's win over FSU

SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee met with the media after Saturday’s dominant win over FSU inside Gerald J. Ford Stadium. Here’s everything Lashlee had to say to reporters.

Opening statement: “Wow. Awesome. I just told the team, kind of, I’m in awe of them. I thought last week we set a standard for how we can play and we have to try to play to that standard. And I thought maybe they exceeded that tonight. Just was a really good team win against the defending champs, who have a lot of really good players and are really well coached. Whether it’s offense being balanced, running for over 200 yards and throwing for over 250 and not turning the ball over, and the defense. I don’t know what to say about our defense. They keep not even forcing (turnovers). Kobe Wilson’s touchdown run may be the best defensive play I’ve ever seen, like the whole play. He was supposed to be tackled or even fumbled from behind like four different times and somehow scored. It was incredible. Guys just keep responding. That’s what we want to do. We wanted to play physical again and we wanted to just keep responding and they did that. And so, it only counts as one, but we’re all fortunate and thankful to be 1-0 in our first ACC game and got seven more to go.”

On balance in the offense and Kevin Jennings emerging in the pass game: “I mean, last week, it wasn’t that we didn’t want to throw the ball. It’s just the way the game went, right, it was weird. I mean, we still only threw it, what did we throw it, 23 times this week. We’re going to have to throw the ball and we love to throw the ball, but I thought Kevin showed who Kevin is. I mean, he played really well. He made a lot of big throws. I think the first one he made on third down early in the game, where he scrambled his right and hit Jake Bailey. That ended up, I think, helping to score our first touchdown. I thought that was a big play because we don’t punt the ball to them, we’re able to score an our opening drive. First time we’ve been able to do that this year, it was big. We wanted to get to a fast start. Later he hits Jake Bailey on a big third-and-long. The touchdown throws to RJ were incredible. Some of the throws he made, what he did, he did a really nice job down the field of giving guys chances to make plays for him, and then obviously he could run the football. He played like we think he should play, and he valued the football. So when he continues to grow, and you could tell he felt like the game was slowing down to him tonight, and that’s a fast defense and he looked fast. But he looked under control. Hopefully this gives him a boost and I think he’ll just get better and better from here, hopefully.”

On starting fast: “I mean, first drives, obviously you want to score, but I think starting fast is important. Even if you don’t score, you want to move the ball and have some rhythm. So it’s important, in general, it was really important tonight. We wanted to start fast against them, just because we’ve been playing well, they’ve been struggling. You don’t want to give them a lot of momentum early. And so I think it was pretty important, really. I think it always helps settle down everybody’s nerves and if you have any of that, just human element of doubt in the back of your mind, it kind of helps subside that.

“It’s tough. Credit to them, credit to our coaches. I mean, you can have an idea or a plan, but someone’s got to go execute it. And our coaches do an awesome job in each one of their individual rooms and on each side of the ball of just coaching our guys. And we talked about this week, it wasn’t that we knew we were playing, we just talked about, ‘Let’s play to our standard to where we can look in the mirror and feel like, OK, we did our best. We did what we’re capable of.’ And if that’s not good enough, then fine, we think it will be. And to your point, like they don’t play emotion. They play with a lot of passion. I mean, they play with a lot of joy and love. I mean, I looked at our D-line when they had third-and-goal to 3 and then fourth-and-goal at the 2, and they’re just out there, just getting the crowd up, goofing around, whatever. I’m like, I’m a little more serious right now than you guys are, but they do. They have fun playing together. And it’s a great quality that I’m hoping is becoming a fabric of this team, because we’re going to need it. I mean, we’re about to go on the road, and go on the road in a conference like this is totally different and just a new set of challenges.”

On if he felt pressure going into SMU-FSU: “I don’t know. I didn’t think about it, you know? I mean, I wanted to win, you know, it’s an opportunity. I mean, this is a big moment for SMU and people have talked about a lot. We’ve been talking for 10 or 11 months, so I’m glad we can maybe move on from some of that. But it’s all been good. Eric Dickerson was in the locker room after the game and talked to the team, and he talked about, ‘Man, we’ve been waiting for this for 30 years.’ He’s like, ‘This is how we used to play,’ and ‘you made us proud,’ those kind of things. But it’s hard to put into words and a short answer of all the things that this means to just the SMU family and anyone who’s connected to the university past, present or will be. But it was a big moment. We’re back on the stage. We’re playing an ACC game against a national brand, the defending champs, and it’s just really humbling to be able to validate that we belong and to come through when we needed to. Tonight, again, it only counts as one, but we’re gonna enjoy it till tomorrow.”

On the scene with pregame festivities and if he got to take it in: “Yeah, you don’t get to enjoy it in the moment as much. I did get to see President Bush out there, which is always cool, and have so much respect for him. But no, I didn’t get all caught up in all that, or get to enjoy it, either. But it’s worth it to get to enjoy that locker room I just got to enjoy. Guys, they can feel it and our fans have answered the call this year. Our student section, when they were trying to score before half, it was 14-7 inside the 5-yard line, it was loud. It was loud like a big-time college football stand’s supposed to be loud when you’re at home and make it tough on the opponent.

“Our guys feel that. They love that. We love that they’re there when the game starts, from the students to the fans to the people in the boxes we can’t see, it makes a difference. Now, what we have to learn and what we want us to grow to is, we have to stay till the end of the game. And we beat the dog out of TCU last week and we just beat Florida State, it should be packed at the end of the game, celebrating, going crazy. So that’s the next step, I think, for us as a family, a fan base, a team. But they make a big difference and our players feel that. We can’t thank them enough.”

On what happened on SMU’s safety: “Yeah, we snapped it over his head by, it looked like 4 or 5 yards. And I was mad at first because they told me they hit our deep snapper, which you’re not allowed to do, but they didn’t. I mean, look, Will’s been awesome. That’s we told them at halftime, we got beat on the left side on the field goal, between our left wing or left tight end, that can’t happen. And then we had the bad snap and then we had the fumbled snap. So, we had some critical errors in our teams. I thought we covered kicks well, their kicker’s so good we knew we weren’t going to get to return any. Roderick’s usually really reliable, you could tell he was struggling a bit tonight. But we told him at halftime, man, you guys have snapped a ton of punts, we’ve kicked extra points and field goals forever. Just go and do what you know how to do. Forget that, it happened, but it wasn’t good when it happened. I was probably a little conservative, backed up. I was trying to get to the half. We weren’t able to run it at the level we wanted to. They did have two time outs and shoot we may have saved a point because their kicker could have made it from anything inside of the 50.”

On SMU RB Brashard Smith: “Oh, it’s huge. And you see the versatility he has. He can run in between the tackles, he can run outside, he can catch the ball out of the backfield. We flexed him out thinking we get the matchup on the linebacker, but because we had already, we scored a touchdown and RJ, got him matched up on a linebacker and did a few other things throughout the game. They they said no more of that. So the safety went out and covered him. He was like 10 yards off. We ran a double-move thinking we were going to match him up on a backer. There’s a safety and it didn’t matter. Now, Kevin made a great throw and he made a great catch, but that’s a big-time catch and that’s a running back. You see some of the catches he makes that are high. It’s a weapon for us. It’s a weapon for our run game because our O-line’s blocking really well. But to be a good running team your running backs have to get one. They have to make somebody miss. You can only block it so well and if you only get what it’s blocked for, you’re always just going to be OK, no matter how good your O-line is. So he’s allowed us to be explosive in the run game, which is going to continue to allow our offense to be explosive. He’s definitely a weapon. And I can’t say enough about Roderick Daniels guys. He’s a receiver that went and played running back, carried it 15 times against Florida State tonight. He’s just a winner.”

On Smith’s growth: “I have seen him grow. He’s growing in past protection. He’s grown in the overall grasping of it. Some guys, God gave the ability to when you hand them a football, they know how to run with it. That guy knows how to run with it. So hand it to him.”

On SMU’s defense: “Everything. It was dominant. That was a dominant. That was a dominant defensive performance. They ran 60 plays, under 300 yards. They were 12-of-34, so they threw us 1/4 as many as they completed to themselves. And 75 yards, that’s two weeks in a row, it just shows, and that’s what we’ve been preaching, we have to run the ball and stop the run to be able to compete at this level. I think our defensive staff, I mean, Scott Symons and that staff deserve so much credit for the consistency and the confidence our guys are playing with. And they’re not just stopping the run and getting off, they’re scoring points and they’re setting up the offense. This is what we had hoped for and envisioned at SMU, to win a championship or to get to this, we have to be able to play offense and defense. And so they’re playing with a lot of confidence right now and I’m not going to tell them they shouldn’t.”

On Kevin Jennings’ big-game characteristics: “I think one of his biggest big game characteristics is, I don’t think he knows it’s a big game. I don’t know. You’d have to ask Coach Todd at SOC about the state title game, but like Tulane and even the bowl game in the rain and then these last two games. He just goes out and plays. And I think he has a great quality that a lot of great players (have), he doesn’t take himself too seriously. A lot of times people do and I don’t know how you teach that, but he just doesn’t. He’s in the moment. He trusts his teammates. He loves the game. He has fun. He has a short memory, so he’s able to go on to the next play. So hopefully it’ll help him continue to grow.”

On what this win means for SMU: “I don’t know if I can speak for the whole program, because I’m only on Year 3, but this has to be one of the bigger moments for our program, right? Look, last week was great, it’s a rivalry game. This is different. We beat a national brand, the defending champs in our first-ever ACC game to to just at least validate we belong. Now, again, it’s not going to score us one point or gain us one yard next week or the next week or the next week, and there’s a lot of good teams in this league, so we’ve got our work cut out for us. But I do think it validates that we feel like we can add value to this league. But just for so many people from that have been SMU fans from all the way for 40, 50 years and gone through the last 40-year journey. I think it’s probably a lot of validation for them and that, like Eric said in the locker room, we’re proud of you guys. We want to have a program that the SMU’s family is proud of. We’re not going to win every game, but we sure want to make our fan base and our alumni proud by how we play and what we do. And so I think, for those reasons, this is a big game. It’s a big moment and we’ll look back at the end of the year, or whenever, and probably realize it. Right now, we don’t have a lot of time to reflect, but I do think it’s a big deal, yeah.”

On the long stretch of SMU road games: “Six weeks before we get to be here again. I mean, only three games, sounds a little more dramatic. But I mean, we want to be in this kind of conference and compete. We’re about to find out because we’re about to go to one of the best venues in our league to play and then we’re going to go as far west as you can go and far east as you can go back-to-back against three outstanding coaches. I know two of them very well and have a lot of respect for the other. But we’re going to enjoy this. I mean, they have not given up over 29 points as a defense in 17-straight games dating back to the beginning last season. If you don’t count the Georgia game, that’s a caveat, but the whole team opted out. So all 12 regular season games, then Louisville last year and four this year, they’ve not given up over 30 points. They’ve been playing really good defense. And then the stat I was told this week, all the way back to when Utah and TCU went to the PAC 12 and the Big 12, and then the four schools last year, those six teams were only 1-5 in their first-ever game in a conference and none of them have ever had a winning record in the first year in a conference, winning conference record. We don’t have one yet either, but we’ve got one win. We’re a step in the right direction. So we know the uphill battle we have ahead and it starts with going on the road to Louisville. Fortunately, we did go to OU last year. So hopefully those kind of moments, went to Maryland the year before, hopefully those kind of venues will help us for that setting.”

On recruiting impact of the win: “Yeah, it’s good. I mean, we sold out our ticket allotment for recruits for the first time ever tonight. We had to, like, tell people sorry, if you walk up we don’t have a ticket for you. That’s never happened. There was a lot of really good players here. Look, I said, I think, last week, winning is the best thing you can do for recruiting. We’ve got a lot of momentum behind the program, the conference piece I think for recruits to be able to come to Ford Stadium, see the Weber EndZone Complex, it’s impressive guys for no matter where you are, and then see the atmosphere in our stadium now and how it changes things. To see a brand like Florida State across from us, and for how that turned out, I think it’s all very, very helpful. But, again, you’re only as good as your last game, so we’ve got to play well to keep the momentum going.”

On what he learned about his SMU team: “I think I learned that they’ve got a lot of confidence and belief in themselves. So sometimes there’s a lot of things we got to do as coaches to lead them and guide them. Last week we asked them to be physical. They were physical. This week we asked them to still be physical, but respond every (play) and they responded. And so, as as a coach, it’s like, how do you just put them in position and get out of the way? Not mess with it. They’ve got good culture, good continuity, offense, defense, teams, together. Winning helps. If you’re 4-1, it’s a lot easier than if you’re 1-4, you know what I mean. But that’s how you build confidence. You’ve got to accomplish confidence. We’ve accomplished confidence the last few weeks and together, as a group, they’re playing that way, with confidence and belief. So we definitely don’t want to throw cold water on that. We want to, we want to build on that and help that continue to grow.”

On RJ Maryland setting an SMU record: “It was really important. We had a bunch of options for them that some they took away. We felt like their length at corner was, we weren’t scared of them. We had guys make plays and after being on the field with them, I feel like our guys belonged. But we felt like they had length and speed at corner, but between RJ and Jake Bailey and the running backs, we could match up on safeties and linebackers and have some success. We had some other opportunities that didn’t come to fruition the way we wanted and some we didn’t call. But I think a great example is, the first touchdown to RJ, we went in a three tight end and one receiver package, which we hardly ever do. Well, they match personnel. There was one corner on the field covering Jordan Hudson, put a linebacker on RJ Maryland, it’s really good for us.

“So, those kind of things, but yeah, to get him going, I think he broke the record tonight, I’m assuming, because he was one away and he caught two. So that’s pretty cool, not even halfway into your third year. But no, he’s a player. He’s a playmaker for us. And getting him involved is got to be a big part of what we do. And I think he deserves a lot of credit because even after the first game, he hadn’t caught as many, maybe, balls as he and we would have wanted and he’s practiced just as hard or harder every week. He’s been physical in the run game when we asked him to be. He’s been the Ultimate team guy and I think you saw what he can do tonight and Kevin gave him opportunities.”