PJ Fleck: First and foremost, you’ve got to give UCLA a lot of credit. My goodness, what a football game. This is what the Big Ten is all about. There are no easy games in the Big Ten, period. And I’m not saying this was easy for them, it was easy for us. I’m not saying that. I’m saying there are no easy games.

Look at the scoreboards as as we go through the week. SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, it’s unbelievable. You have no idea. Jim Tressel said it best, you have no idea who’s going to win. That’s why he coached college football, had no idea. I mean, today went back and forth, back and forth.

Probably one of the worst halves I’ve ever been a part of as a head coach in the first half. We’re writing that part down, and we probably should. But what was amazing is you get 60 minutes to play football, and I always equivalent that to like, 60 years of your life. It’s just done in 60 minutes and three hours of football.

There’s so many life lessons that our players learned tonight. And they, it’s not that they learned it, they have it in them. That’s what I tell you all the time. They’re gonna be great husbands, fathers, dads, uncles, grandfathers. This is a life program.

You’re all going to judge us all wins and losses, I get that. But my goodness, even when we were down 17-14, I’m walking up and down, I wrote down in my notebook how proud of the team I am. This is unbelievable. Their resiliency, their resolve. We said it was just going to come down to come down to us, period.

We gave them an analogy of boxing this week. You’ve got a team backed into the corner who played four top 20 teams and lost, and those records are 20-1. This team was a good football team, at their place, all the way across the country, with all the stats that everybody’s writing about. 1-8 (across) multiple time zones. We just countered that all week.

We just had to keep swinging and keep swinging and keep swinging. They came out swinging, and we knew we were going to get some shots taken at us, but we had to be each other’s cornermen. That was the whole mindset. We have to self talk. We have to do it better.

I’ll be honest, halftime, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to a team like that at halftime. It was real honest. It was real honest to every single position group. And it wasn’t negative, it was pumping confidence, belief into all of them, including coaches. Because that wasn’t very good in the first half.

But that’s football. That is college football. How many people are going to have a press conference, 67 teams that lost, and say we didn’t play our best football? It’s coach talk, it’s cliche, I get it. But we didn’t, and they took advantage of it.

We came out in the second half and played better football. Did we still play our best? No. That’s why I love this team. They can keep growing and getting better. We won the turnover battle, which was incredible, three to nothing, I think that’s the difference in the game.

I can’t tell you how proud I am of this football team, of our administration. Mark Coyle, our administration allowed us to be able to travel out here the way we needed to travel, that was going to be able to make the trip worthwhile. And with lots of people coming out, multiple two airplanes, that takes a lot for an administration in times like this to be able to do that. We needed that in the second half.

I can’t thank all of our fans. There are 15,000 plus in the Rose Bowl. They made the trip out here. In fact, we gave them a game ball. I’m not giving out 15,000 game balls. I’ll get the bill for that one. Consider it an IOU. But what we’re going to do, just as good as money. Some of you know that movie, some of you don’t. But we’re going to keep a game ball that says the fans on it from this day.

I hope everybody who came here for the reasons that they came here for, of family memories, moments their grandfather told them about, had a glimpse of that. I know it’s not the Rose Bowl bowl game, but I’ve never been here. This was special. Special for our program, special for our fans, because of the venue, where it is, the memories back in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.

I’m just proud to be the head coach of that football team in there. Mark McElroy, our officer, gave us a great speech this morning. He played here as an offensive lineman here. He gave an unbelievable story this morning at our captain breakfast. We gave him a game ball too. He sacrifices every Friday and Saturday in season to come spend time with us as a police officer. That’s what’s so cool about an organization. And you’re all waiting to ask questions, but this is called stalling, because I really want to talk about the people that mean so much to this program.

It’s one win. It’s 1-0. This isn’t a championship, but it was a one game championship, and if the goal of the week is to win, there are no bad wins. Hard losses, they teach you a lot. This is just a tremendous win for our program. And you’ve got to give UCLA a lot of credit. They’ve got really good football players that played their tail end off, and Coach Foster should be congratulated for that.

So with that, open up some questions.