SPORTS

Transcript: Al Golden on Miami's loss at U of L

Jeff Greer

@jeffgreer_cj

Miami head coach Al Golden gives his team instruction from the sidelines as they take on Louisville on Monday at Papa John's Cardinal Stadium. (By David Lee Hartlage, Special to the C-J) Sept. 1, 2014.

On freshman QB Brad Kaaya: He's a tough kid, courageous. It was a tough environment for him to open up his career. I don't think we did a good enough job protecting him. Obviously he made some good throws and some that, clearly, he would want back. So again, it's a tough position for him to be in, but I think he's going to make a lot of progress in the next four or five days. Again, we didn't do a good enough job protecting him. Period.

On the offensive line: Again, we go back to the offensive line. There's more to it than that. There's a multitude of reasons: The running backs, the offensive line, sometimes maybe just calling a different play. As I just told the team, we had too many errors against a good team. Everyone has to be accountable, starting with me. We'll watch film and not make any excuses.

On U of L stacking the box vs. Duke Johnson: We knew it was coming. Obviously they were going to go after Brad with that. We were starting to find some cracks in there, and we just didn't finish good enough. They started to get the lead and move ahead. Defense got us the ball twice within the 10 and we didn't convert there. Then we had an illegal man downfield on the play that Duke gets us inside the 5, then they return a kick. It's tough to overcome those errors.

On "squeezing the playbook": There are no excuses. They played better than we did. What's disturbin to the head coaches are just the errors that we haven't seen, like the illegal man downfield on the Duke pass. On Brad's lateral throw, he's a very bright kid, so he just saw a man uncovered out there and kind of rushed the pass and ended up throwing it backward.

On third-down conversion problems: It's just a totally different team now, so I think we need to focus on what we are doing with Brad. And I thought they were just doing an excellent job of stopping the run early in the game, and forcing us into some third-and-longs. Then we got behind and we had to play catch-up. It's hard to convert in those situations. Again, no excuses. We have a lot of things we need to fix, starting with me and the coaches. We still start on that here tonight on the way home, and get with the guys on Wednesday.