McNeese State Head Coach Matt Viator
On what this means for McNeese going forward: You know in the short term it’s our first win over a BCS conference team. We’ve beaten some Sun Belt teams and stuff, but I mean to come in here in a venue like this short term it’s huge, no doubt. You know long term it’s one of 12. You know we’ve got a game next week and we obviously have to regroup and correct some mistakes. But in the short term this is really exciting for our kids.
On exploiting USF’s defense: I think the no-huddle helped us. It really did and we’re not a no-huddle team. We thought about it, obviously we have a senior quarterback who handled it really well. We thought it could help us because we really didn’t have any idea what they were going to run.
On getting big plays on defense and special teams: Well I thought it helped. We were obviously very scared of (Aaron) Lynch and the other end. I mean they’re big time players. I thought what we did was we were able to kind of slow them down a little bit, and kind of keep them guessing a little bit. We felt like going into the game that was our best chance. Because we knew what (Defensive Coordinator) Chuck Bresnahan did when he had an odd man front team at the Raiders, but yet they were listing even man people. We just didn’t know. But we felt like the no-huddle, he backed out, we could look at the defense and call the best play against what they were doing, and I thought that that was good for us.
On senior QB Cody Stroud: I thought he did good. He obviously made mistake in the first half. He threw into double coverage. But after that I thought he really handled himself well and managed the game really good for us.
