Aug. 30, 2001

Recap| Final Stats| Notes

Toledo Head Coach Tom Amstutz:

"It was a great feeling at the start of the game when we started out so strong. You never know what can happen at the start of the game. I was hoping that nobody would wake me up."

On the team's new spread offense:

"There are still some things we need to work on offensively. We still have more things to put into our offensive package. There's more to this offense than what you saw tonight."

On the strong performance of the team's defense:

"The defense played well tonight but they can still get better. Our players are well conditioned, and the defensive coaches did a good job preparing our players for tonight. We have a very dedicated group on defense and they believe in themselves."

On Tavares Bolden:

"He did an excellent job tonight. He has done a great job adjusting to this new offense, and I respect all of his dedication he has to football and to this team for all the preparation he put in for this game."

Toledo senior Andy Boyd:

"We wanted the shutout real bad tonight, but sometimes you can't have it all. We'll just have to go out and correct our mistakes maybe we'll get the shutout the next time.

"We thought they might throw deep more, and we were prepared for that. That might have made them throw the short ball more."

Toledo senior Chester Taylor:

"The offense really didn't change that much from last year. We ran a lot of one-back sets last year. The big difference this year is that I'm going out more on passing routes."

"I knew anything was possible tonight. We just wanted to go out and play the best we could."

Toledo senior Tavares Bolden:

"There were a lot of question marks coming into tonight's game in regards to our new offense. I think, though, we put on a pretty good display tonight. At the beginning, I thought we were all nervous. The fact that we went down and scored right away, really gave us a boost. This win is great for this team. Everyone did a great job, especially the guys up front."

On the performance of Chester Taylor:

"He is a great back. When he can get into the open field, I think he is the most dangerous. Tonight, I think he definitely proved that. "

On the equal distribution of passes (Six different UT Players caught at least one pass tonight):

"This offense gives us the opportunity to spread out the defense and find at least three or four possible targets. On defense, you really can't focus on shutting down just one receiver. If you do that, we can beat you with possibly three other players. It is fun to see what the other guys (receivers) can do if a team does try and set its focus shutting down one player in particular."

Minnesota Head Coach Glenn Mason:

On his young defense:

"It's a challenge for this whole football team. We are young across the board. We don't have too many seniors playing. These kids have worked hard and things can only go up, you can't get any worse. One thing we can't do is push the panic button and we just have to go back and evaluate."

On Chester Taylor:

"He is a hard running back and a hard runner. A number of times we had him in the backfield and he just escaped. Plus any guy that breaks the records he did tonight, he's a darn good back."

On stopping the Spread:

"It was awfully hard tonight. Lets face it, it's all the rave now everybody is going to do it. It's not all about the system. It's about the execution of the system. And for Toledo picking up this new system up so fast, I thought Toledo did a great job."