Transcript: Petrino reviews Syracuse win

Bobby Petrino, once again, was happy his team won. He was happy with his team's defense. He was happy with his team's running game.

He was also unhappy with the penalties and some of the other miscues that dotted Friday night's rather ugly affair at Syracuse.

Here's the full transcript from Petrino's postgame chat with the media:

Opening statement: That's a good win for us. It was a hard-fought game. Our defense played extremely well. They did a great job stopping the run and putting pressure on them. I thought our offense hung in there. We were patient. We wore them down. We ran the ball. We made plays at critical times in the game. The play to Milton in the third quarter was huge for us and then the throw to Eli (Rogers) coming in here to score to basically put the game away was a great play for us.

What's working so well with the defense? We're fast. We're physical. We have a good understanding of what we're doing. Guys don't hesitate. They play extremely hard. They understand our scheme. They did a great job of communicating tonight.

On Gerod Holliman: That was a great interception right in front of our bench. He got his feet down before the official on the sideline knew he got it. He did a great job breaking on the ball.

On Brandon Radcliff: He hit the holes really hard and he hugged the walls. He does a really good job pressing, and then comes out of it with good speed. He broke a lot of tackles. When you break tackles, it allows you to get in the end zone.

Was the progress of the offensive line what you wanted it to be? We got better. It'll be interesting to watch the film, but I felt like we were controlling the line of scrimmage and we took it over in the fourth quarter, which was good to see. It reminded me a little bit of the Miami game that we felt real confident that we could keep our defense on the sideline and run the football.

Did Louisville wear Miami down? I did. We wore them down. Our guys are big and physical and I thought we ran the ball well in the second half.

On red-zone defense: It keeps points off the board. Guys made plays. We ran through the backfield and made a big play. We got lucky on one when they ran a reverse pass and dropped the ball. That's always good. Our defense just played fast and did a good job executing in the red zone.

On Reggie Bonnafon: I was happy with him. It was tough. It was hard going on third down. They were gonna blitz everybody on third down and try to outnumber us, and we were trying to keep them out of that package with some of our personnel groupings on first and second down. I thought Reggie kept his poise. He missed some things early, but he came back and hit Milton across the middle and did a great job of running the zone-read stuff.

Was there any point where you wanted to give Gardner a few snaps?

Uh, no.

How close was he to being ready tonight? He was available. He was available to play.

On John Wallace: That was awesome to see. I'm really happy for him. He worked extremely hard all week. To be able to come in here and knock it through from 51, I'm really happy for him.

On penalties: We're working on it. We're continuing to work hard on it. We had a couple holding penalties tonight, which I don't feel like we've had before, so that's something that's a concern. We were a little bit better on our cadence. We were a little bit better at staying onside. But it probably cost us two drives just because of penalties.

On Clemson: It's going to be a great challenge. It'll be fun.