If you haven't read Dave Boling's Thursday column you might want to check it out. Boling talked to Falcons linebacker Keith Brookings on the Wednesday press conference and Brookings had lots of interesting things to say about former coach Bobby Petrino and Petrino's early exit this season. Here are the transcripts in case you're curious:

On this season: “I don’t know if I can really put it into words. Tough season is probably an understatement. But it’s been quite a season, there’s no doubt about it. As the season progressed, it seemed like every few weeks we were getting bad news. About the eighth or ninth week of the season I was thinking it just absolutely can not get any worse but then obviously with what happened a couple weeks ago it did. That proved me wrong. It’s been tough, there’s no doubt about it."

On how he feels about Bobby Petrino: “For me, speaking from a personal standpoint, I was one of the guys that guys on this team joke with me all the time. They say, kind of jokingly laughing, that I’m a company guy. That’s not the case at all but I feel like my responsibility at a professional level and what I’m paid to do is to buy in to what my head coach wants to do. That doesn’t mean I agreed with everything that he did or he wanted us to do and I talked to Coach (Bobby Petrino) about some of those things and he did a pretty good job of trying to change a few things. He kind of catered to us. That’s part of my role as a leader on this football team and I felt like the quicker that everyone bought in to him, if you have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope the more chances you have at being successful at winning ball games. I know football enough to know that. You have to have everyone buy in. You can’t have a few guys not believing in it. My goal, my responsibility was to try my best to try to get everybody to do that and that’s what I did. I believed in him.

I didn’t agree with some of it and I talked to him about that but as a leader I had to go out here and work everyday and show everyone, hey, if we do it this way we’re going to get this thing right. Then we have that mentality and to do everything in my power to do that as a player, as a leader of this football team and then to have him back out on me like that and quit and go against everything that he talked about, shoot man, it floored me. It hurt me bad. Betrayal came to my mind; coward, quitter, so many things. It was tough. I’ve never had that happen. I can’t explain it. I can not put it into words what would make him do something like that. In saying that, it’s probably not right for me to say that because as a man I shouldn’t judge anyone. I don’t know what was going on with him and his family. Who knows? I don’t know but at the same time I still think about all that and I try to create scenarios and I still can’t believe that he would do something like that with three weeks to go. If you do do it come in and look us in the eye and tell us. There’s so many things that run through my mind. It absolutely shocked me. I was pissed off.”

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