Idaho State head coach Charlie Ragle had a lot to say after his group’s 43-3 loss to UC Davis Saturday night. It was the Bengals’ worst loss all season. Ragle spoke over the phone with this newspaper after the game, and not all his quotes made our game story, so here is everything he said.

Idaho State Journal: What were you most frustrated by in this one?

Charlie Ragle: Where do you start? I think probably the most frustrating thing, like I was just saying on the postgame radio show… Like I told the kids: If you go out and you just get beat and they flat out beat you, I can live with that. You lost. They're better than us. There's no doubt about that. But we go right down the field on the first drive, we're knocking them off the line of scrimmage, we're throwing it, we're making connections. And they schematically didn't do anything different the rest of the half. And we couldn't seem to generate any offense.

Our defense played lights out. Like I said to Jerry (Miller) on the postgame show, very seldom do you give up 43 points and say that, but I mean, they played on a short field the entire night. And we didn’t perform at the quarterback position (Hunter Hays started). Not just there. I mean, all the way around offensively, we couldn't conjure up anything to emulate anything that looked like a drive, other than that first drive.

ISJ: What changed after that drive?

Ragle: I don't know. If I did know that, we would have fixed it. They didn't do anything different. I'm gonna take 45, 50 guys to Weber (State).... I feel like I’ve got a pretty good idea already because I feel like that's what I did, just sit in the box and watched it, that are going to strain… If I’m gonna lose, I’m gonna lose with guys it matters to. When I’ve got coaches so pissed off at halftime that they've got tears in their eyes, and they're impassioned, trying to get the most out of these players, and it means more than the coaches… It matters more to the coaches than it does to the kids, and we’re not the ones playing. So again, these are growing pains that you go through in Year 1, and they brought me here to fix this. But as I told them: Some of you guys are gonna be done because you’re seniors. The rest of you are gonna be done because you're not playing here anymore. And that's just the reality of it.

'We're not a very good football program': ISU drops 43-3 decision to UC Davis

Ian Hershey is a phenomenal kicker. He hasn’t had many opportunities to prove it this fall, …

ISJ: Is it fair to say kicker Ian Hershey was one of your better players today?

Ragle: I don't know about today. I think you look at him on the year, he's been one of our better players. The thing about Ian is he's just pretty consistent. He didn't have a great kickoff on the one kickoff, and he hit a couple of punts that weren't great. Now, he hit one that took a nice roll for him. But he's consistent. And again, when you're starting a true freshman, and he's kicking and punting, that's a lot of work on him. But over the course of the year, as a true freshman, like I said, he's definitely one of our better players.

ISJ: You mentioned that it seems like this is more important to coaches than it is to players. Is there a way to change that? Are you trying to change that? Or, this late in the season, have you just accepted it for what it is?

Ragle: Well, I mean, if they haven't figured it out by now, what do you think? (Laughs) I mean, we’ve got we got 14 days left of college football, and as I told them, God willing, I’m gonna coach probably another 15, 20 years. I've been doing this a long time. This is my 23rd year of coaching high school or college football. I'm gonna probably coach 20 more years, 15. And you know what? They're running out of games. And if you've ever played this game, you know it’s not something you can go down to the park and play some rec league basketball or get into beer league softball and have some of that kind of stuff. Football, when it's done, it's done, man. There's nothing to emulate it: The camaraderie in the locker room, the trips, the brutality, the physicality, all of that is something you either understand because you're played it and when it's been taken from you, you wish that you could go back and do it over a million times.

I feel that way because that's obviously why I'm coaching, and the guys that are in my coaching staff, they feel that way. That's why they’ve chosen this as their profession. The problem is, ithey don't feel our passion… I don't know how you don't feel our passion. If you spend an hour around our program, I don't know how you don't understand and feel what we're trying to do. But you’ve gotta understand where we're coming from and where we've been.

And again, I'm trying to be respectful of the coaches, because I am a coach of things that have been here in the past, and I don't want to get into any of that. But we’ve got a lot of guys on this on this football team that haven’t won a lot of games, and so they don't understand the strain and the sacrifices and the willingness to give up some things so that you can taste the glory on Saturday night and Saturday afternoons. There's major sacrifices that have to be made to do that. And we just don't have enough guys right now that understand that or want to make those sacrifices.

ISJ: Do you think that was reflected in the players’ effort tonight? That’s something you were unhappy about after the NAU game.

Ragle: I think attitude reflects leadership, and it starts with me, and obviously being gone the last seven, eight days (because of surgery last week). I've been in the building, but not being involved certainly didn't help matters. But, as I said to them, we had a good game plan. They practiced hard all week, but this is what they do. When things go tough on these guys, they don't know how to respond. When they get themselves in a pinch, they don't know how to look at each other and say, OK, we got this — because they haven't done it before. And so at some point, you have to break through the cycle of losing, and that's what I talk about all the time: How do you do that? I mean, there's a lot of different ways. I could give you hours of dissertation on that, but we're trying to work through that right now.

But at some point, there has to be tangible things that they put their hands on, i.e. winning, and that allows them to understand, like you do all of this for this. I thought that after we beat Cal Poly, that feeling would resonate and would mean so much to them that they would play at 10 degrees higher than they did the week before against NAU — because that was easily a winnable game for us, at home against NAU. And they didn't do that. They just reverted back to their old ways, because it's habits.

Changing just for the sake of change rarely happens. We're creatures of habit. That's what human beings are. That's why there's so many fat people in the world. They get into their habits and they become obese, and they don't change their ways, and it’s comfortable. I'm not knocking fat people, (shoot), I'm overweight myself. But the reality is, at the end of the day, man, if you wanna change, you gotta change. And what happens is, it isn't until you become so miserable that the misery changes you. These guys aren't miserable enough to make a change. They're just comfortable, and this is what they do.

I'm uncomfortable. I've been in Pocatello nine and a half months. I'm miserable. I told you that the other day. I am miserable and uncomfortable. Part of it is because I'm not healthy. I'm getting healthy, but I'm tired. I'm ran down. It's tough, man. This is tough. And we’ll get it right. I'm firmly convinced of that. I'm not worried about that. But to change the culture, it doesn't happen overnight, and I think we all want it to. And it's just not the case.

ISJ: Xavier Guillory played, but he didn’t start. Was that at all related to the incident last weekend (when he was charged with DUI)?

Ragle: No, not at all. Like I said, we're gonna wait till we get all the information back. Just like when I assess anything that has to do with my football program, I want to get all the information before I make a decision. We do not have all the information from law enforcement. We're waiting on the final piece to get back from the labs before we make that decision. So he plays just like normal. There's no penalty on him right now. We're gonna wait till we get all the information and then make the right decision for everybody — the young man, Xavier, and our program once we have all the information.