Matt Baker Quotations

When we heard that Hadrian wouldn't be playing, we knew we had a fighting chance.

I got hit on my left leg, and my hips got opened up a little bit, so the ball sailed. I was aiming to throw outside to Mike because the defender was inside. In the split second right as I was letting go of the ball, my left hip got hit and I opened up, and it was kind of a duck, and it trailed inside on me.

Getting butterflies I don't think is a nervousness that's unnatural, ... If you don't get butterflies in a game, I don't think you're excited, you're not ready to go.

He's a big, punishing back who can get you those yards inside the red zone, and especially inside the 10.

He was hurting, but he was able to communicate,

I thought we did pretty good defensively, ... We sometimes messed up on some of our keys. The second half, we picked it up and everything was almost perfect.

Past Carolina teams may have folded when we get down like that. Not this team. No one got down. We just got down to business.

Some of them were communication problems. We had a lot of holdings. I haven't seen exactly what they all were, but there were too many to win a football game.

Someone got in there and hit my left leg, ... That opened up my hips and the ball tailed and was a duck. I wasn't hit hard, but it's those little things.

Mostly they're coming in the passing game, in blitz pickup and protections and check-downs, ... He's got the running game pretty much covered. He's in the right place all the time.

We could have won the game. We knew we were in position. We took a shot and lost on it.

We didn't have a good practice at all yesterday morning. But we came back last night a little bit and there was definitely a spark there today.

We didn't have a good practice at all yesterday morning,

When the field compacts you have to be precise. If you're not precise you run out of room. We've gone inside when we should've gone outside and there's so little room for error. When one person is off it bunches up someone else.

You can look at those last two drives, but it comes down to ... penalties, dropped balls and bad throws, ... We were not very precise today as an offense.

To have Miami in there now, just the name alone kind of changes what people think of the ACC when it comes to football.

We talked about it in practice Wednesday. Ronnie isn't going to win the game for the team. He'll probably mean an extra 40 rushing yards. Hopefully we'll play well enough that we won't need those 40 yards.

You get that feeling, ... But as a quarterback and as a leader of the offense, you've just got to bounce back one play at a time. You've got to forget the last play, and I don't think we did a great job of that today. I think it kind of did snowball on us. We weren't able to bounce back, and there's no excuse for that. You've got to be able to come back when bad things happen.

There's just such a mass of hotels that just want to give the service away for free. When that's what you're competing against, it just gets harder.

The time and effort he put into it was downright impressive.

That's why I stuck around, to go out and win football games. It's a tough loss to know it was right there until the end. You can look at those last two drives, but it comes down on offense to missed assignments, dropped balls and bad throws. We were not very precise today.

That's what I've been waiting for, why I stuck around -- to win football games, ... And it's a tough loss, to know it was right there at the end.

you're not going to win games like that, when you go dead for a whole quarter.

They played great. Hats off to the defense. We apologize to them. It was the offense today. We didn't make any plays. Again. The defense played unbelievable today.

This past weekend was also the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that killed so many of our fellow citizens.

There really wasn't any discussion until after the fact, ... To a lot of my constituents, it just seemed to not be correct. Yeah, it's a lot of money to forgo, but my constituents and myself felt it was the right thing to do.

I took a shot, ... and we lost on it.

It's not so much adjusting, it's making better throws. I pulled it together.