A bowl game is a reward for a successful season, and yes, you enjoy the experience to a certain level, but I think it comes down winning the football game. That's the lasting impression that affects what's going on for you in the following year.

His ankle is really sore. Playing on that surface probably made it more significant.

Our defense was on the field too long. We played catch up with our offense and that was a difficult task.

Given our lack of success we've had against Washington State ... there's a lot of focus and motivation to continue the things that we are doing. This is a big road test, our first road test of the season.

It's more significant because from here on the games get bigger. We finished non-conference 3-0 with a win over a ranked team. We treat every week as championship week. Our next game against Washington is another big week. We treat each opponent the same, we want to go out there and put it all on the line.

We ran into a buzz saw. We had a great week of preparation and felt good about ourselves. It was just a point in time in the season, probably, that things weren't going to click for us as well as in the past. We saw some things that were uncharacteristic of how we've been playing all season.