What Tennessee QB Joey Aguilar said following the Music City Bowl loss to Illinois

NASHVILLE– Tennessee quarterback Joey Aguilar met with members of the media following Tuesday’s playing of the Music City Bowl against Illinois from Nashville’s Nissan Stadium. The Illini won at the buzzer, 30-28 on a 29-yard field goal.

The following is a written transcript from the Joey Aguilar portion of Tennessee’s postgame press conferences.

On the disappointment of Joakim Dodson’s kick return not being the difference

“I mean, a loss is a disappointment all around, but that’s a lot of momentum. Good player, he went out there, got a shot, made a play and just built momentum on our side. And Illinois just went took advantage of it and made a play.”

On playing possibly his last game at Tennessee

“And then me personally, I just can’t thank Coach, teammates enough for believing in me and trusting me to lead this team. Obviously there’s a lot I think I could have done better, but it’s been a great year in this short amount of time I’ve been here. Made a lot of relationships with my teammates and coaches that’ll last longer than a 12-game season. It goes beyond sports but just super grateful for these guys for believing in me and trusting me to go out there and lead them.”

On what Illinois’ pass rush did to disrupt the offense

“I mean, they did a good job. We got to do better. I got to do better of identifying and getting to my reads faster, but I don’t got much more to say on that.”

On what happened that he lost his 200-yard passing streak

“Just allowing the run game to work and don’t go away from something that’s working. They didn’t want to get beat deep, so they just wanted to keep everything in front and drop a lot of people back. But just opened the run game and we didn’t want to force nothing, so we just let our running backs ease and went on from there.”