Willie Young Postgame Interview: NC State vs. South Carolina

Senior Captain Willie Young had a strong opening performance last night with 8 tackles (1 for loss).

Quotes from Willie Young

"I don't think we were consistent enough. If the defense kept them out of the end zone, and held them to three, we would have been better off. It's tough playing a good team like that."

"You never imagine or think about a loss. The best team won tonight."

"We are one team. One unit. It's like the defense is the offense and the offense is the defense."

"There is nothing that happened tonight that we can't overcome or that we can't fix. We beat ourselves clearly. It's as simple as that."

When asked what he thought about South Carolina controlling the clock Willie said:

"The way I look at it the longer the defense is on the field, the more time you got to build your stats up. Nothing that I look down on."

"We didn't capitalize when the opportunity presented itself. We were playing against a good team. Spurrier's got every thing under control over there, he's a great coach and he knows his stuff."

"You can't dwell on a loss. You have to take what happened and run with it. You learn from your mistakes. You take your job serious. We have a lot of young guys that haven't lost a game yet. We just have to go back and critique ourselves and make sure we don't make the same mistake twice."

"I didn't see a lot of heads hanging, because we know that the outcome of the game was all on our actions. It wasn't like we felt that we couldn't stop them or that we couldn't compete against them. The score was what...7-3, I think that's a pretty good ball game. The outcome just didn't favor NC State."

"If I had to choose a game to lose, I would rather lose the first game. For one it's not a conference game, and it's an opportunity for guys to see early on in the season that we can lose. I don't care how much hype you have coming into the season, talk is...talk. But going out and leading by your actions is another thing."

"No doubt we're a great football team. There's nothing that happened tonight that we can't fix. There were simple mistakes. Turnovers. Adversity struck, and I don't think we handled it to well at first. I feel that we came back and really answered to that adversity that we had to deal with."

"We've got some young guys coming in filling some spots. I think they experienced that things can go wrong. Just because you come out and practice well and don't have any mistakes in practice, doesn't mean that mistakes won't happen in the game."

"I feel that the defense came out and played ok. If the defense was playing at 110%, then they wouldn't have scored. The best they should have gotten was 3. The score would have been tied. That's the best they should have gotten. When we let them in the end zone, that was on us. It shouldn't have happened."

When asked about Nate Irving:

"I took his celebration move and used it on a big TFL I had. I guess it was a signature for Nate Irving."

When we asked if he was going to claim the move the rest of the year...

"I tell you what...what do you think?"