Opening statement
"First off, our thoughts and prayers should be down in Texas again. You assume on a Sunday, you go to church and that's a safe haven of worship. Unfortunately, that's not where we are right now. We just have to pray and hope that they can make it through a tough situation. On a closer note too, you won't see [defensive coordinator] Hardy Nickerson around here this week as his mother passed away unexpectedly yesterday evening, so he won't be here today and we'll work around his schedule. Moving on to football, when you've lost as many games as we have, and you move into the third quarter and fourth quarter of your season, you're just trying to look for some bright things to keep the players motivated and keep us all in a pretty good frame of mind. When you look at the [Purdue] game, it's been the story of the last few weeks we've played pretty good football for moments at a time but not being able to put together a full four quarters of football has really hurt us. Right up until the fourth quarter you see we were in the football games, but some things that we're doing won't allow us to finish the game. We have to find a way. We have three games starting this week with Indiana to try to get these things corrected. Cam Thomas took a step. There were a couple passes we'd like to have back, and all weren't his fault. He gave us a chance with some of the things he did running the football, passing too. We need to do a better job up front. Kendrick Foster did some good things. Defensive side, I thought our defensive line, especially our two inside guys, did some good things. But, not good enough and we need to move on. Hopefully, injury-wise, we'll get some of our players back. We're a little banged up right now, but no one wants to hear about that. Indiana is in a similar situation as they've lost a few games where they've been in a lot of the games and haven't been able to finish the football game too. I'm glad to be back at home playing again here, and hopefully we can finish a game."

On the resilience of the young team
"First off, the reality is it's no fun losing. How you respond to it? It should hurt; it should feel bad when you lose and you work for ways to correct it. We're getting a lot of practice at this, but when you're a young football player, and you haven't been in this situation, they're resilient. They've been bouncing back fairly quick. These guys are excited about going to practice and having a chance to improve on things. When you're young I think that's the way that you respond. And, as a coaching staff, you have to keep to moving them in that direction. We had lost quite a few games before this last one and the guys still showed up and were plugging away but just couldn't finish. We're seeing the same type of fight in them."

On Kendrick Foster's reemergence
"Kendrick Foster is a team player. Everything you're looking for as a coach, what you want to see in a player, I think he has. He worked extremely hard in the offseason, has done everything we've asked of him. As a football player your role will change. When you have more than one player at a position, roles can change at any time. The true team players, whatever that role is, embrace it. That's what we've seen from him. We saw that in week one, and throughout the tough time when he wanted more time we saw it. If you just hang in there, eventually get the chance to do what you want to do, and that's playing running back right now. He did some good things this past week, and he'll get more opportunities this weekend."

On Cam Thomas' improvement
"It has to help when you have early success. He has a strong arm. There were a couple balls that were incompletions that I wouldn't say were his fault. He protected the football for the most part. Some of the plays where we had success came from him breaking tackles. Hopefully he'll take another step this week. I like where he's headed."

On Jamal Milan's growth in the last few weeks
"If you stay in the game, keep plugging away, and keep going to practice, doing things right, correcting mistakes, eventually you get over the hump when you're a talented player. Jamal Milan has a lot of ability and it's been about a three-week period where we've seen steps each week of him doing some things. I think he's a legitimate inside defensive linemen. We'll need him to continue to play like that. He's been banged up a little bit, but hasn't been complaining about any of that stuff."

On the matchup this weekend against Indiana
"Talking offensively, they spread it out an awful lot, throw the ball. The last month or so, we've played teams that are more running teams that can pass. Indiana is more of a passing team that will run. They'll spread it out; throw it around quite a bit. But, they also have a pretty good running attack. They've lost a lot of close games, so it'll be a challenge. On the other side of the ball, they're active, rely on taking the ball away and playing hard. That's the type of team we'll see coming in here. Two teams that are desperately needing a win."