Auburn Post Game Luke Deal After Auburn 14-21 Loss to California 9/7/2024

you expecting uh today was it not at all not at all I want to start off by uh just telling you guys what I told my tight ends what I've told kind of the offense is um when you experience something like this the first thing you got to do is look at yourself so uh jarquez is fumble one of the five turnovers we had uh he's pretty beat beat up about it but I'm I'm going to be man enough to sit here and say I missed the block on that so I'll take that and be accountable to that one so um he has nothing to hang his hat on um he's a great back uh he's probably taking it pretty tough right now but five turnovers won't win you a football game it won't and uh that offensive performance definitely will never win you a football game and proud of our defense the way they fought but uh man it's just embarrassing uh offensively whenever you work so hard and uh your defense works so hard your culture works so hard to remain together and um you just put a product out like that and that's just something that we're just extremely embarrassed of and something we got to flip very quickly because we're getting into uh SEC ball here soon why don't you think that was any rhythm in the passing game uh just we always talk about staying on schedule uh staying ahead of the chains a bunch of our RPO stuff you know that a lot of that has to do with downhill running game but also um whenever they give us things in the passing game off those rpos just being able to hit those and um I just felt like whether it was that or whether we were um we were penalized a couple times again it's on us it's not on the referees it's on us but um couple penalties set us back um so a couple of those things are real Drive killers and uh especially in in the first half our defense kind of had a couple Drive Killers with some penalties as well but like I said they played really good and we just couldn't stay ahead of the chains and we were kind of off schedule all day look as a captain do you feel like it's your responsibility to help keep this team together as you talked about absolutely absolutely that's why I'm here um I've been here this is my six year and I have had a bunch of mediocre seasons and that's not what we're trying to get accomplished this year so um anything less than what our goal is and what our expect expectations are whatever we put out there on field anything less than that is uh that's on me that's on the other captains and the guys who drive this culture what were some of the things you saw in practice that did transfer well to the game um our defense obviously the um they kind of got hit in the mouth early we saw that they were in Rhythm cow's offense was in Rhythm and our defense came back and fought fought like heck man in the second half and uh that was something that I thought was really really good at times our our Run game could be explosive like I said we just we never really got on schedule so we did it we did it whenever it was backed up or we did it and then we followed it up with a penalty or a sack or this or that so um I felt like at times we had some explosive plays especially in the Run game which usually is kind of Hit or Miss but um just didn't get just didn't get it done though Luke how how was pton he was obviously pressured a lot had some interceptions there how did he handle it how are his teammates handle it yeah uh Payton's a strong dude he is he's he's a competitor he's been playing football for a really long time uh college football is a tough sport um he's been doing it for a while so I have no worries about pton um everybody has uh certain days certain things that don't go exactly as planned but um just told him just keep his head up and I know he will he's a very good leader on our football team and we have full trust in them