Evening update, 10/20

Hey everyone. Player interviews have ended and, really, I have less to report than expected. It seems the Tigers' losing skid has prompted several players to skip out on interviews.

I'm fine with that and all. It just means less for you to read and discuss.

Here we go:

• Gus Malzahn on today's practice: ``We had a good, physical practice. The guys got after it and had a pretty good focus. Just trying to get back to basics, correct the mistakes. Obviously we made way too many in the fourth quarter that probably cost us the game. We're just trying to correct that to where it will never happen again."
  
  
• Malzahn, after saying passing problems were a team issue, on how bouncing a pass to Mario Fannin is a team issue: ``Yeah, there's certain plays, obviously, that the quarterback could have played better. He's played extremely well up until the last two games and even in the last two games, there's been things that he did well. What we've got to do is put him in some situations to be successful and make the plays."
  
  
• Malzahn on Chris Todd's shoulder: ``I think Chris Todd is fine. I think any quarterback in the country, Week 8, that's thrown a little bit is maybe going to be a little bit different than the first game and I think he's no different than anybody else."
  
  
• Joshua Bynes on tackling problems last week: ``Making a tackle has nothing to do with you being tired. It’s how you tackle them, the way you tackle them. We were just missing them. We were there. It was: how in the world do you miss them? Is it magic or something?"
  
  
• Lee Ziemba on crowd noise: ``I remember the loudest place I ever played at was Florida my freshman year. That was unreal. I've either gotten used to it or just zoned it out, but you don't really notice it. There's not a big difference between 104,000 and 92,000. It all looks the same and it all sounds the same. It's just loud and you have to concentrate. It's really not that big of a difference."
  
  
• Ben Tate on how the team is reacting to a pair of losses: ``There’s a lot of people upset. Losing two games back-to-back, that’s never good but we just see it as an opportunity. There’s probably not going to be a lot of people that expect us to go down there and do too much. But we can upset them and shock everyone and be talked about again.”

Photo credit: Todd Van Emst/Auburn University

Questions? Comments? Post directly to the blog below or email me at jgtate@gannett.com.