Brian Kelly appears on the Paul Finebaum Show

After a fiery press conference on Sunday night in Las Vegas, a much more reserved Brian Kelly appeared on the Paul Finebaum show on Tuesday. Here’s some of the highlights:

On the USC loss

Brian: It was a close, hard fought game. The guys played with great effort. I think it comes down to the last 8 ½ minutes of the game. Up 17-13, we come up with a pretty good stop defensively…and we didn’t take advantage of it offensively…We would’ve hoped that in that situation we could have sustained a drive and then put ourselves in a good position to put the game away. Subsequently, we punted the football and they went down and scored…[Later] tied it up, 20-20 and then with 18 seconds to go on the game, 2nd and 15 from midfield, they hit a cover two hole shot and effectively ended the game.

On playing a tough neutral site opener, does that help or hurt your football team?

Brian: Look, I want to develop our football team. And I’d much rather do it with a win however, winning a game 73-0 against an opponent that really you are overmatched does not tell you anything about your football team. We know a lot more about our team. We know what our strengths are, weaknesses are and we can now move forward and know where our personnel issues are and where we need to be better as coaches…This team prepared very well. But preparing to play the game and actually winning the game are two different things. So now what do we need to do to win games? Some of that is personnel. Some is in play calling. Some of it is in execution late in the game. And that was the case here. We can work on those things and know going into week two, it will be a better football team.