Appalachian State

Head Coach Scott Satterfield
Opening Statement
“First of all, proud of our guys and coaching staff. We had good preparation all week. Good energy in practice all week and that's why we played well. We had a good game plan coming in. The weather certainly didn't hurt us, but I told our guys you still have to black and tackle. It comes down to fundamentals. The weather played into our hands because we wanted to run the football and they were a team coming in that wanted to throw the ball. I'm especially proud of the defense. Getting a shutout in this day and age is hard to do.”

On the fake field goal at the end of the second half
“We prepared for it all week. We were in the right spot to go for the fake and our kids knew we were going to do it. We had it called before they took the three timeouts. Simms (McElfresh) did a good job getting it in. It gave us the momentum going into the half.”

On the wintry game conditions
“When we got back on the field after half time the field started getting white. It started clunking on their feet so the footing was a little bit harder. It was harder in the second half to put the ball in the air because it was tough to catch football. Obviously we tried to keep it out of the air. We ran a couple time on third down where we normally might throw it.”

On the Mountaineers not committing turnovers
“That's huge. That's another thing we stressed all week. We need to take care of the ball; two hands on it while you're running. Back-to-back we have we have done great in the turnover margin. That's key in this league. A couple of our losses this year were due to turnovers especially in the red zone. If you take care of the ball you have a great chance to win and we did that today.”

WR Simms McElfresh
On the fake field goal
“The timeouts didn't ice me. It kind of set it up perfectly. I was looking at their defense and they were rushing off the left side. We were running to the right and I knew it was going to open up. It caught them off guard.”

RB Marcus Cox
On his career day
“I take my hat off to our offensive line. They did a great job tonight. It seemed like every time I touched the ball I had a hole so it turned out to be a pretty big night. We had a game plan of running the ball this week even without the snow and we fulfilled that. We went over 400 yards for the second-straight game and that was big for our offense.

LB John Law
On the defensive performance
“It feels amazing. Last time we got a shutout it was against Campbell and they didn't have a very good game. We really tried to get a lot of turnovers so that was a big thing for us.”

On the weather conditions
“The snow and the wind had a big effect on the game because they weren't able to throw the ball deep down field. Watching them on film, they make a lot of big plays through the air and spread teams out but they were not able to do that because of the conditions.”

Georgia State

Head Coach Trent Miles
On how the weather played a factor
“Although the weather shouldn't have affected us, I believe it did mentally. Offensively, not being able to hold onto the ball affected our passing game especially. We have to be better than that. It was just as cold and wet for them as it was for us. However, don't make any mistakes about it, they outplayed us.”

On Appalachian's performance as a whole
“We were not very good on defense and we weren't very good on offense. We weren't very good at all. We had 62 yards of offense and averaged over 300 passing yards coming in to the game. They just played extremely well and we played extremely poor. We shouldn't have let weather affect us, but we did. Don't take any credit away from Appalachian State, they played an excellent game and they deserved the win.”

On Marcus Cox's performance
“Cox played very well. He is a really good player who has an offensive line that did a great job blocking for him.”

On the strategy behind the three-straight timeouts before halftime
“We figured they were going to fake, we even told our guys that they were probably going to fake because we were icing him. Yet, we still couldn't stop it. We have to coach every game and every play like it's a championship game. I had three timeouts and you don't get to take them into the second half. We wanted to ice him and try to get him to miss it, in order to keep it at a three score game. We told our players, during the last timeout, there was a good chance they were going to fake it because they probably were not happy that we were trying to ice him and he was standing out there for a long time. They were still able to execute.”