Weekly Press Conference Quotes

Deion "Coach Prime" Sanders

Opening Statement
"I appreciate all of you tremendously for your love, support and your consistency. Defensive lineman JJ Hawkins, athlete student of the week, sociology, sophomore from Miami. Brandon Miller as well, exploratory studies, freshmen from Littleton Colorado. They are the student academic athletes of the week. We like to just give that note because that's tremendous as well."

On if he feels the love on top of the hate
"Oh, yeah. First of all, hate comes along with the territory, you know that. The love has been tremendous like I reiterate every week. Just walking into a packed stadium, seeing the pandemonium around the city and your friends and family members just coming in and explaining to you what it's like to come through the airport to Denver with all Colorado apparel on. And driving into the stadium for myself seeing all ethnicities in unity, I love it. So the love nationally, even from the celebs that you see and the ones that are in the luxury boxes that you don't see, it's tremendous. And the faithfuls, I have the absolute utmost respect because they believe and you all believe and the group here as well. Not all of you in here believe but, you know, maybe 85% of you believe."

On being battle tested the first five weeks
"Every game is of value. Every game is that you learn something from that you glean something from or a player allows you to know who they are good or bad or indifferent. Coaches reveal themselves also, as well as guys who are trying to earn a position on special teams so we learn and we glean a lot every week. It's up to us to put these players in the right situations and to take what we learn and we glean every week to put it on top of this week's game plan and prayerfully do right by it. We got to do right by it. We can't just do the same old stuff we've been doing. We got a receiver who went for almost 200 yards, Omarion right. We gotta get him the ball, right, we gotta get 10 the ball, we gotta get 5 the ball. Dylan, come on, we gotta get Dylan the ball. We got to do the things that help us win and put our defense in the right situations as well. But those guys gotta make plays."

On Travis Hunter's injury status
"Travis is doing well. He was out at practice today coaching his butt off. He's one of the best coaches we have. And, shoot, he's on Cormani, he's on his butt. He's on his butt day in and day out. And Travis is, I'd say, maybe two or three weeks out. It would be my dream and desire for him to stay out until after the bye week, but I know Travis he's gonna want to come back because he's gonna see Shilo most likely. There's a chance, a possibility, a prayer that you may see Slusher. You may see several starters of that secondary that's supposed to be in there. And I know he's gonna want to join, but I would love him to be out until the bye. That gives him like three extra weeks."

On Cam'Ron Silmon-Craig
"He is balling, man. I've coached him since high school. He's nothing but a classy individual. He does his schoolwork. Yes sir, no sir type of guy. He comes from a great home and a great family. He loves his siblings. I mean he's a good football player and a good person and I'm so proud of him. He's a dawg. He's a go-getter. He doesn't play hurt, like if he's hurt, he's hurt for real because you got to pull him off the darn field. He always wants to practice, he works his butt off in the weight room as well. Just a great kid. He's when you say smart, tough, fast, disciplined, with character. He is all of that. He checks every box. And I'm proud of him."

On history with Kenny Dillingham
"Yeah, we got great history. I don't know if he'd want me to tell this story, but I was assembling a staff once upon a time. I'm not gonna tell you who or for what, but he was a part of it. We communicated quite a bit and I was happy with every step that he's taken because I know he's that guy. I know he's been more than capable so when I saw him get this opportunity, I was ecstatic. Then I saw him at one of the other Pac-12 meetings and that embrace was awesome to me because I know his climb and I know what kind of man he is. And he's great for their program, he's great for college football. He's a tremendous mind, offensively, truly tremendous mind, but he's gonna be a great head coach, man, so I have the utmost respect and love and admiration for him because we were going to work together at one point."

On ASU Film
"They play tough, they don't give up, there's no quit in them. Of course, that's who he [Kenny Dillingham] is. Just like us, they're building something that's going to be tremendous. You just got to keep watching the story and see how it unfolds, but you can't take a team like that lightly, whatsoever. The gate directorates and the gate, all that nonsense and understand this team is building something and they're gonna be phenomenal. I believe in Coach Dillingham tremendously."

On Self-Imposed Bans
"My mama used to hand out whoopings back in the day, right. So, if I did something stupid I was like, mama, you know what I don't even want to go to the game tonight. I'm not even going because I know that would lessen the whooping. So if that's what they're doing, I understand because I've done that before."

On Clock Management
"We had one timeout because we had exhausted on foolishness of personnel, special teams personnel defense. I'd rather take a timeout than risk six points not having 10 people on the field. So not having enough time, I understand that because in those moments, the now is more important than the future. Because if you don't take care of the now, you're not gonna make it to the future. So that's how I went about that. But it's foolish. Foolish stuff. There's things that we went over this morning in our team meeting. We can't dismantle ourselves with that foolishness of personnel. We got to know that. We go over that stuff every Friday. If somebody goes down it's the next guy up. But we can't have the coaches going to find somebody. When that guy goes down back in the day when little Timmy is at the end of the bench if he wanted to play he was ready. If that guy went down he ran out there and we're sitting out there waiting to be located. I don't understand that. You gotta want that stuff."

On if he would change the play calling on their final drive
"Shedeur. Quarterback rating was 441 -- leads the nation. [In the] Fourth quarter, he's completing 79% [of his passes] Quarterback rating at 222 and you think I'm going to change anything about him? No. I will take the good and the bad. I take it. He knows what he needs to do. He knows what he needs to work on."

On what noise he listens to from the media
"If I listened to that, I'm gonna have to listen to this. You can't choose that and not accompany it with this. So either I'm gonna be in it. I'm gonna be out of it. That's a wonderful gesture. I love it. But I'm smart enough to know and old and wise enough to know that that can flip on you instantaneously. A fan only goes when you hot -- my mama said that not me. If y'all want to be mad, get mad at my mama."

On WR Omarion Miller
"We see a lot of things recruiting but you have to understand this is a tremendous transition from a high school guy being the guy and everywhere he walks in the hallway people are clapping. Ain't nobody clapping here unless you do something. That's just the nature of the game and the nature of the land. The thing those young guys have going against them is you gotta pro quarterback that's not going to tolerate foolishness and not going to tolerate drops and not running the route at the right distance and not getting all the checks. That cripples young kids. I mean, you rarely see youngsters that are prominent with a -- I would say veteran but a poised quarterback. Even in the NFL. That's tough, but for him to step up, even though he didn't practice for the darn last week -- to step up. I challenged him yesterday and I got a dear friend who called me and summoned me to get him on the phone to FaceTime, wanted to talk to him and wanted to let him know that he has a tremendous gift. I don't know what the conversation was but I know I just handed him the phone and said 'somebody wants to talk to you'. He looked at phone like 'Oh my God'. Yeah, it was Snoop [Dogg]. Snoop wanting to talk to Omarion. He wanted to challenge him and I challenged him about it. It's one thing when when they don't expect anything. Now you expect something so you're going to be on his own his butt -- on his back, your hands around his throat like come on. We want to see what we saw against USC. So to prepare with the expectation is tremendous. That was our Word of the Day -- expectation. We defined that. We've talked through it. I made a point that is not the expectation that others have of you, it's the expectation that you have with of yourself that should matter the most. Thank you."

On how he coaches character
"Well, you recruit character and you try to lead by example, with character. Many people wore the bracelet years ago, 'What would Jesus do?'. Even though you don't have it around your wrist, you should have it in your heart. You have to think of that person that you really look up to the most. What would they do in that situation? Hopefully that's parents or grandparents or loved ones. We recruit character, we try our best to recruit character, but sometimes we miss and then we have to dismiss character and you guys get upset about it and you guys get all flustered about it, but you don't understand. It's not just talent, oftentimes it's character. You have to get those kids out of your locker room or they will poison the whole bunch. Like I pay attention to everything. Like when we get our butts kicked on that sideline. I want to see who wasn't winning. Who wasn't in it. Who had already given up. Who had already shut it down. Who was ready. Who was standing up to the challenge. Who was ready to go get it. Who was ready to fight. I watch all of that, because that tells you more about your team than anything they could do in the field. So I look for those types of intangibles. Great question."

On if it matters that they're not playing on National Television this week
"We could we could care less I mean, we're gonna be on somebody's television. I promise you that. We're gonna go somebody's television and we have to go out there and exceed expectation. We really do. It doesn't matter if we on a national stage or not. We were national. We people understand that we're here and we understand that we're coming and they understand what we're building. So we just got to have a consistency and a continuation. Especially early on the challenge and the goal this week, we have to win the first and second quarter. That's the challenge and that's the goal. We have to win the first and second quarter."

On Travis Hunter coaching players while he is injured
You expect 'dawgs' to be 'dawgs'. That's just who he is. I don't know if you watched -- you guys are not in practice but Shedeur after a pass play or whatever, he's always coaching the receivers even sometimes in the game saying this, this and this. So those type of guys, that's who they are [and] that's what they do because they want everyone to come up. When everyone comes up, we're better as a whole. But Travis just took it upon himself to do what he does. That's what he does. When he's on the field, he's challenging that other corner because he know the other corner is gonna get a whole lot of balls [thrown their way]. They really are, but I'm loving what I'm seeing man. When Cormani [McClain] gets his thing together in totality, and mentally, ready to compete every single play and Travis [Hunter] and Shilo [Sanders] -- shoot [Myles] Slusher will be back. I mean, come on, man. Come on. This is something it's gonna be something to behold in the secondary."

On the special teams struggles
"We haven't been special. It's just a little play here and there, a little bonehead play. [Alejandro] Mata was supposed to kick that field goal, you all know that. You know how much I loved my Mata he hasn't missed. He had an extra point blocked but he hasn't missed as well as the punt. We just got to punt the darn ball. We don't need to rugby style that thing, punt the darn ball, their top returner wasn't even in the game. So those are just little things that we can fix, but we can fix those instantly we just got to fix them."

On expectations
"Last week wasn't about expectations, last week was about winning. This week it's more about expectations than many of the other weeks, because that's the expectation that we have of ourselves to go in and win this game. You want to win every game but I mean, you really expect to win some games a lot more than others. This game we expect to run the football we've shown that we could last week. We expect to throw the ball successfully. We showed that we can in its totality during the whole season. We've shown that when we take something away let's dedicate to taking something away we could stop the run. Yah they got a couple of bounce outs and the guy made an incredible run that was incredible, other than that, you take away those yardage we did a pretty good job stopping the run. Expectations are to shut the big plays down, scramble plays, where they break contain. The kid {Caleb Williams] did a great job. That's why he won the Heisman Trophy last year. But if we stay in our zones and stay with our man, that doesn't happen. So the expectation is to do your job for the four to five seconds that that play involves you. So our expectations of ourselves are a lot more lofty than the expectations that you may have of us. But we have tremendous expectations for this season, and we are just getting started."

Shedeur Sanders, QB, Jr.

On preparation for this week
"We really focused on this past week and learning from the mistakes that we made during the game and just getting out to fast starts. And I feel like we're now settling in with the offense with everything that's going on with the nuances of it. Whenever we went through real test together as a team and in the system, now we know what we don't like and now I feel like this is the second half of the season. We're really comfortable."

On making sure everyone is set in a two minute drill situation
"That's the best thing possible we can do as an offense. I just didn't want to waste plays on that. And that's just honestly something to take to the chin and a learning experience from that. Be more manageable with time. Understand, okay. This is the situation: how are we gonna go about it? That's the main thing and anything that we're very unclear with in practice or anything, we're gonna make sure we get those extra reps there to be able to be very fluent with it."

On old clips of reality TV show
"I seen a couple of them. I didn't know what people was talking about at first because I'm not on social media during the week, I'm locked in on football and managing my time the right way. I don't really know how much is out there you know, but I just see a couple of clips out there."

On Omarion Miller working into the offense
"Just being consistent each and every day, then that's the main thing and that's just how I feel like here you're gonna be able to get playing time and just the most consistent players gonna play."

On if he's ever starstruck by visiting celebrities
"No, because I know everybody's a regular human. So it's not. I'm not really fazed by names or anything like that. It's just, they come here to watch the game, for entertainment purposes. So we got to go out there handle business because all that stuff could go away quickly. My mindset on everything is to take everything with a grain of salt to it like it's cool, but things don't work out the right way. Then they will remember you for a bad thing. So you'll never really want to have those guys be the focus of that. I feel like that's more important. You know, being able to witness history is better than being able to see what's never been done before. In person live and then get to be able to tell their kids one day I remember when this happened."

On if his ankle hurts frequently
"No, not reoccurring. I am fine. After the game there was that soreness a little bit, so I sat in an ice bath almost an hour after the game and I'm fine now. So I feel great."

On if NFL QBs are giving advice on recovery
"No, not really. Even Coach Pat will tell you the best quarterbacks stay healthy. That's the main thing, just investing your time and into things that matter, which is your health and just doing the daily things to make sure you'd be proactive and not reactive."

On mindset ahead of road games
"I don't really understand what a "Get Right," game is we approach every game with the mindset to go out there and dominate, taking everything play-by-play. So on the road, it's not really different than being at home. The game is the game at the end of the day, every field is 100 yards, and we just got to go out there and execute."

On growing as a QB
"I'm having fun playing this game, and each week we're faced with different battles and really is just getting comfortable within the offense and going into the sixth game I really know the ins and outs of the offense. I feel like we're improving as a whole and I feel like this is the second half of the season and you'll be able to see what this offense is."

On realizing what he can and can't do
"Of course, when you go back and watch film. It's a couple of reads you missed or a couple of throws you miss or you got quicken up and you know, just understand the pieces you got around you and use them to the best ability. That's the main thing that you go back and do but I don't think no quarterback in the world just had this a perfect game and says they can't improve anywhere."

On talking with Terrell Owens on the sideline before the fourth quarter
"I can't even recall that specific moment. It's a lot of mental battles you're going through with yourself during the game and you're analyzing different things that happen. So I can't really remember."

On what the team has learned from the last two losses
"I feel like every game is valuable. I don't think it's this team or that team or whether it's in the top 10 and ranked or unranked. I feel like every game is valuable and having another experience and going to battle with your guys. You need that to happen, it was cool and I have enjoyed all the weeks this far. We are just ready to lock in and be explosive as a team like we are supposed to be."

Colorado University Athletics

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Shedeur Sanders

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