Butch Jones spoke to the media at his weekly press conference earlier this afternoon. After reiterating that he was disappointed in the loss and commenting that the team’s will to win was derailed by details, he laid out the plan for moving past it:
“We all hurt. We’re angry. We’re pissed. All the above, but now it’s what you make of it. How do you become better because of this. Sometimes there are situations like this that you suffer the adversities of a long football season, it can also galvanize you. It can bring you closer together as a football team. And again, we have to get back to work. UMass is not going to feel sorry for us. Nobody is going to feel sorry for us. So again, we have to get back and we have to go to work. That’s part of being a mature football team. It’s a long football season. Maybe people don’t want to hear it, but it is what it is. We have to get ready to play the next snap, the next play of the game, the next game. We have to move forward. Again I’ll tell you, the details will not be ignored. I can promise you that.”
The way that game ended has to rank right up there as one of the most disappointing conclusions to a game in the history of the program. The emotions are still running extremely high on Rocky Top this Monday afternoon, but the only thing Jones can do about it right now is to make sure that his and his players’ minds are right and to get back to work.
Part of that work has to be figuring out how to prevent the things that went wrong from going wrong again, of course, but that can’t be done until you get your attitude right, and it’s good to hear that Jones is not going to let the team linger in a negative mental state that would make things worse.