In an interview with the Virginian-Pilot, George Allen offers his first public explanation for why he lost in November. Sort of.

“When you lose a game by one point, you can go through every play in the game and say, ‘If we didn’t jump offside, if the referee makes that call, if we caught that pass, if we didn’t fumble, we could have made a difference,’” Allen tells reporter Warren Fiske. “If you do something like that, you don’t move forward. I’m looking to the future.”

What future would that be? Allen isn’t providing much of an answer to that question, either. He says he’s just a month out from losing to James Webb and will wait until the new year before giving any serious thought about what comes next.

As for the fall campaign — the one in which he called S.R. Sidarth “macaca,” struggled with the revelation that he’s got a Jewish heritage and stood accused of making frequent use of the “n-word”? ” “Everyone, including myself, could have done a better job,” Allen says. “I have high standards and high expectations for myself. I could have done better.”