Alabama / Northern Illinois postgame interviews with Mike Shula, Antwan Odom, Freddie Roach, Shaud Williams, Wesley Britt, Brodie Croyle

These comments came following the Northern Illinois game as Wesley Britt answered questions from the press pool ...

Wesley Britt – I put it on my shoulders to correct the mistakes I made and the line made. We will play better than we played tonight. Anything that could have gone wrong did go wrong tonight. We just have to get things going our way. We need to come into practice with the attitude of finding ways to get better. That’s something we have to do is get better as a whole offensive line. We will evaluate the film and figure out what to do.

Press Pool - Did missing Justin Smiley break up the chemistry and flow of the offensive line?

Sure it hurts missing Justin Smiley. He’s a great football player. But Atlas Herrion is a good football player also. He stepped in and is doing a great job. You can’t take anything away from him. It’s a different offensive line without Justin Smiley, but he’ll be back and we’ll fix some things. As I said, Atlas is a great football player and he’s doing a great job.

How hard is it to swallow this game right before you get into the meat of your SEC schedule?

We’re still going to be ready for any SEC opponent. We going to play and fight to the end in every game we play. Sure, we don’t want to lose this game. Maybe 9 times out of 10 we would beat NIU. But we’ve got to find a way to fix this. This is awful. We will find a way though.

We feel like we played an awful game. We’re embarrassed at the football game we played, but we’re still happy to be playing football at the University of Alabama. We can fix those things and we will win some games for Alabama and for us.

What do you expect from an Arkansas team that you went up there and physically whipped last year?

Oh, they’re going to be gunning at us. They’ve got something to prove to us since we did win the game last year in their stadium. They’re going to come to Tuscaloosa ready to play football. And we’ll be ready too, you can guarantee that. We’ll be ready to fight for four quarters, for 60 minutes of football next weekend.

Of course it was an issue. Anytime our quarterback gets hit it’s an issue. That’s a huge part of a football game. In that area, we’ve got to find ways to fix that and it will be fixed.

We’ve got to watch the film and learn from the mistakes we made tonight. We made some mistakes and it was an embarrassing loss. But we’ve got to find a way to fix the mistakes we made. We’ll do that this week.

That’s nothing for us. We were calm and collected the whole time. No matter where we are on the field, we got to put it on our shoulders to get it in the end zone. We’ve gone 98 yards before and we know we can do that.

Was there a sense that you just didn’t get any offensive chemistry going tonight outside of that first drive?

It kind of does feel like we just didn’t get in the flow and keep a flow going. We’ve got to find a way to do that. We’ve found a way to get a flow going, but tonight we didn’t. We’ve got to fix that.

Were there some defensive plays that they kept running where they were able to find some success?

They did some stunts and blitzes that were working for them. They were successful in some of their blitzes that we have got to pick up. We usually do pick those up. But as I said, tonight things weren’t flowing like they usually do for us and we’ll fix that.

They’re a good football team, but we didn’t play to our top notch. They’re a really good football team and they came to Tuscaloosa ready to play against an SEC opponent. They beat us in Tuscaloosa, in Bryant Denny Stadium. That’s something that we can’t let happen.

Click on the name for parts of their post-game interviews ..
Coach Mike Shula (Alabama Crimson Tide Head Coach)

Antwan Odom (#98 Jr. RDE, 6-5 277 lbs. Bayou La Batre, AL - Alma Bryant High)

Brodie Croyle (#12 So. QB, 6-3 200 lbs. Rainbow City, AL - Westbrook Christian High)

Michael Turner (#32 Sr. RB, 6-0 228 lbs. North Chicago) and Josh Haldi (#10 Jr. QB, 6-2 202 lbs. Madison, OH)

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