At his weekly press conference, Illinois football coach  Bill Cubit  reflected on the team's first loss at North Carolina and looked ahead to this Saturday's home game against Middle Tennessee (3 pm CT on ESPNews).

Selected quotes from Monday's media session are below. 

Opening Statement:
"After the game, you're never as bad as you think you are and you're not as good as you think you are. I think there are things out there, if you look at the box score, you'd probably sit there and go 'that's a pretty close game'. When you break it down the biggest things to me were the missed opportunities by the offense. We dropped nine balls and, really, that's been a little bit of an issue; we've got 21 already in three games. I've been in places where they didn't have 21 all season, so, we've got to fix that. Our tackling was not as good as it was the first two games. Some you're going to have to attribute to North Carolina; give them the credit. Then our special teams and our coverage were not very good. They were the negatives. We had ourselves get back in the game, we got down to the one yard line, we had a holding penalty and then we got down there, threw a touchdown pass and we dropped that. If it's good, it gives us a boost. It just seems that in the couple of years I've been here we've let things like that kind of snowball. If you look at it in the end of the third and the end of the fourth it just became one touchdown after another. I think mentally, we've got to do better than that. We know this is an issue and we've got to fix that."

On what the team did well vs. UNC and what they aim to improve:
"We ran the ball well; I thought our offensive line played probably about as good as we've had it. They were physical. I thought Fergie (RB Josh Ferguson) was really a good player and gave everything he got. We didn't have any sacks again on Wes (QB Wes Lunt), which I thought was an improvement. We just didn't make plays. We were 9-of-20 on third down you say, 'you know what, that's not bad' but we just didn't make plays when we needed to. There's nine dropped balls, that just stops drives all the time. I think we had three pre-snap penalties and that put us behind – one was a third-and-one; all of a sudden it's third-and-six. One was a third-and-seven and it became third-and-twelve. In defense, we broke the coverage, it was not a breakdown, it was just bad technique. We just didn't take away the inside. I thought we wore down a little up front where depth is a little bit of an issue, so hopefully with Joe (DT Joe Fotu) coming back that will help us out in the back with some depth. We're playing Clayton (Fejedelem) and (Taylor) Barton, really a lot of plays, so getting (Caleb) Day back hopefully will help us out there; give those guys some rest. We've got to catch the ball a lot better and just prevent the big plays."

On Middle Tennessee:
"Any time you're averaging about 51 points a game I'd say that's something. We were recruiting the quarterback at the last place I was at (Western Michigan), he's crafty, smart, a coach's kid, runs the whole show. He's fun to watch even though you're on the other side; he's a fun to watch kid. He has great grit, a lot of guts; he just runs the whole show. They've got a couple wideouts I think are pretty good up front. They do a great job. Defense, we watch them a lot more. They fly around. They play with a lot of emotion. Watching them against Alabama, Alabama was struggling early and Middle Tennessee just hung in there really well. We kind of have our work cut out for us, but it's fun."

On Overall Morale After the North Carolina Game:
"You know what, you're disappointed after the game but you're never discouraged. As coaches, you go in there the next day, you watch the tape, you point out the good things and try to get the bad things rectified. Then you move on and that's just the only way you approach it. We're upbeat and we're looking forward to this Saturday. We've got good kids. The bottom line is, we didn't tackle and we didn't catch the ball and we didn't cover our kickoffs, so fix that. I'm not going to lead these kids on and make them think there are not issues. There are and we've got to fix them this week during practice and hopefully we'll show up on Saturday."