For the first time in program history, the New Mexico State Aggies football team beat a SEC opponent on Saturday.

But the Aggies didn’t just beat a SEC team, they dominated a SEC team as New Mexico State stunned Auburn in a 31-10 win from Jordan-Hare Stadium.

The win game New Mexico State its seventh-straight win, while snapping Auburn’s three-game win streak.

Here’s everything New Mexico State head coach Jerry Kill said after the big win.

Opening statement: It’s unbelievable what these kids have accomplished and what they continue to do. The credit goes to the kids, the assistant coaches, and our fans. You don’t get many opportunities like this. We’re playing a Southeastern Conference football team, and we dominated the football game most of the time. We killed ourselves in some penalties, but our kids played with relentless effort. Some were hurt. In the last play, (Gabe) Peterson summed it up. He fell down and got back up to sack the quarterback. Relentless effort by them and this has to go down as one of the biggest wins that New Mexico State has had in a long time.

On where Saturday’s win ranks for him: As you said, I’ve had a lot of great moments, but I’m not going to take this lightly. It’s a huge win and it goes down as one of the greatest wins that I’ve been part of.

What was the mentality given being such big underdogs? I said the same thing I’ve always said and I didn’t preach that we were underdogs, I didn’t say we couldn’t beat Auburn, I told them we were going to, this is how we’re going to do it… I followed the same principles. And if you do that, again, you don’t turn the ball over, you win. And we didn’t turn the ball over.

On how the Aggies stuffed the Tigers’ run game: We were prepared. We’re prepared. We prepared up to when we got on the bus today. You know, we’re trying to outwork people. We spend endless nights. People don’t understand we don’t spend two or three hours preparing for a football game. We’ll be preparing tomorrow for the next one. We just don’t stop. I just think it’s the hard work and you know, watching the film and doing what you need to do to beat them, scheme them up and do your job. They (defensive coaches) got our kids doing their job tonight. Had good pass rush, our kids really played hard.

On when he felt like New Mexico State was in a good spot to win the game: Really the last snap, you know, until it’s over. That’s just how I play, but when we got the onside kick, you know, I was relieved. That’s for sure. Because if they got the ball back, you know, that couldn’t happen. Our guy that got the ball is a walk-on kid. It couldn’t happen a better kid, you know. He’s 5-foot-8, 205, you know, walk-on player and we trust him. And he got it done.

How healthy was QB Diego Pavia? Well they’re all hard discussions and hard decisions. He prepared during the week, got a lot of treatment. Our trainer, there’s a lot of people who worked on him and you know, I don’t know, I think he had a twinge in the first quarter or first half and he came to me and I wanted to maybe take him out and he goes, ‘Coach, I ain’t going out.’ But we’ll have to use some real proper judgement in the next one because we’ve gotta have that kid around. He’s the toughest kid. He’s the toughest kid I’ve ever seen playing quarterback… There isn’t anyone I’ve coached that’s tougher than that kid.

On the decision to go for the fake punt: We put it in this week and because we knew they were going to try to offset and get us on the rush and they only had three people over there and we’d been working on it all week, worked on it Friday. And you know, we had it to where… well, I don’t want to give everything away but you know, we had a situation and we could’ve got out of it but here’s the deal, I ran a fake punt to beat Purdue back when I was at Southern Illinois, I think. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. And in a game like this, you’ve gotta keep momentum and I just felt that it was a great time to call it and the coaches trust me and it ended up being a big play in the game.

On the Aggies’ defense: Our defensive line. It all starts up front and the defensive line played very well. We had pressure on the quarterback, we could bring four and get pressure on him, we didn’t let him get comfortable, got him off the spots. And we didn’t play very good last week. Nate was pretty upset about the way we played last week and I knew we were going to come into this game and play good defense because, let’s put it this way, our defensive meetings and on-the-field work was very intense.

On the locker room celebration: We walked in, and I probably shouldn’t say this but life’s short and I may not be here tomorrow, so I walked in and said, ‘Hey, we just got $1.7 million to play a (Southeastern Conference) team. So how about $1.7 million and winning the game.’ So the kids, they’re all fired up wondering when they’re going to get it. They want it to all be NIL money.

On the effort of his team: I can’t remember ever facet, I’m getting old. But I would tell you that from the start to the end, our kids felt and they were going to win. And when we left the locker room, I could tell we were ready to play. I think you can talk about schemes, you can talk about all you want to, but our kids were ready to play. And all I did was ask them to play hard and they played hard. They played hard. You know, Coach Freeze would talk to me a little bit and he goes, ‘You kids play hard.’ And I said, well, that’s credit to the kids. But we’re just playing hard right now. We’re not playing perfect, but we’re playing hard.

On Diego Pavia getting flagged for slamming Nehemiah Pritchett: I didn’t like it. So that answers that question. I don’t need my quarterback wrestling. He wrestled enough in high school He doesn’t need to be wrestling now. I already know how tough he is, he doesn’t need to prove it anymore.