| Opening Statement: “Obviously, going through the tape here last night and this morning with the players. (There’s) a lot of things in the tape that we have to fix, we have to correct. Certainly from ownership, from a coaching standpoint, also that needs to be better from some of the things that we’re teaching and coaching – just trying to improve that to be consistent. That was my big message this morning, just trying to be more consistent as a team. I think everything right now reflects that we’re not very consistent in some of the things that we’re doing. From our – just all around, our record to our game to the week right now — just have to try to tighten everything up and be a little bit more consistent so we’re not putting ourselves in some of those situations at the end of the game when we have to make those got-to-have-it-type plays in order to win. I think we have opportunities early in the game to do things a lot better, that would help us out, and certainly we have to improve those first.” On being nominated as the Lions Salute to Service nominee and an update on TE T.J. Hockenson’s injury: “Thank you for that congratulations. I appreciate that. The men and women in the military are very important to me. I think that’s a great reminder of just how fortunate we all are to be here on a Monday morning worried about football when a lot of brave men and women are overseas worrying about a lot worse things than we are right now. As far as T.J.’s concerned, he got hit really kind of in the middle of the back, I would say, the upper back. I think for the most part it was just a good clean hit, a solid hit. He went down on the turf and for the most part just really, obviously took the breathe out of him. It was a good hard hit, and maybe initially just kind of when he was coming off the field was feeling that. We went through the evaluations very (inaudible) and it was really just a hit in the middle of the back and really that was it. Everything else checked out normal, checked out fine. He’s pretty sore, but other than that he’ll be OK.” On an injury update on G Joe Dahl: “Nothing right now. We checked him out this morning. Obviously, just some treatment here before we take off, and then we’ll see how he does on the flight and all that from that standpoint. But nothing that wouldn’t be just day-by-day right now.” On what percentage of defensive plays are called by him or Defensive Coordinator Paul Pasqualoni: “That’s more coach ‘P’ (Pasqualoni), he calls the defense. Certainly, there are situations where he and I have either talked about calls or there might be calls that I feel that we want to make in certain situations, but the good part of being the head coach is that you can make those calls in any three phases of the game. Obviously, a lot more of it that can and will happen on defense, but coach Pasqualoni is doing a great job trying to get all that organized.” On if he considered taking more control on the defensive play calls: “I think the whole team has done a – again, I’m concerned about the entire team. Certainly, I spend a lot of time on the defensive side of the ball, and I have the utmost confidence in (Defensive Coordinator Paul) Pasqualoni and the defensive staff to get the calls and the communication and get the game plan put together the way that we want to do. I’m certainly involved in trying to help that and get that orchestrated. From that standpoint, I think it’s important for me to continue to try to do my best as the head coach to manage the game and make sure I’m paying attention to all three phases and things that I see as the game goes on that needs to be either corrected or adjusted or just kind of confirmed or handled. So, I don’t really see any of that changing right now.” On plays from opponents that the team cannot defend consistently: “I say it all the time, this is a copycat league, and there’s certainly going to be plays if you’re not doing a good enough job of stopping those plays, you are going to see them. Right now, we’ve seen a lot of that, I would say, in the run game. There has been certain types of run systems that we see, and the one that we saw yesterday in particular, had a couple plays that we had seen in previous weeks. Actually they had a couple new schemes that were really good schemes that we hadn’t seen before. That I would say, for us, we’re always trying to coach those up to be consistent with the hits and we’re certainly, obviously, doing everything we can to change what we do to make sure that we’re in front of that from that standpoint. I would say, just in general, for the coaches and the players, it’s difficult when we see plays that we’ve seen before and they still have success. But for the most part, I would say let’s just give the Raiders credit for executing those plays in that situation. I don’t think there’s anything that – again, from a running standpoint, we have to do a better job of executing on the field when we see those situations. But, we do quite a bit to change week-in and week-out. We run a lot different schemes and a lot of different coverages when we feel those will help us from that standpoint. Again, give the Raiders credit for executing in those situations. It’s not that we’re seeing entire games repeated. It may just be a play or two here that (inaudible).” On why the linebackers have not been performing up to expectations: “I think the defense as a whole has a lot of parts that fit together and the linebackers, I think, Christian (Jones) and Jahlani (Tavai) wound up leading the teams in tackles. So they had good production yesterday in general. I think each week it’s different based on the attack points of the offense and where they decide to attack us defensively. Sometimes it goes toward the linebackers, sometimes it’s toward the D-Line, sometimes it’s toward the perimeter. So, from that standpoint, we’re just trying to make sure that all those guys are consistent, and certainly there’s some things in there that we have to improve on, and we have to coach better and just get them to see that stuff a little bit quicker. We understand some of those are good. Some of those plays we do a good job with and others we’re not right now. We just have to be consistent with those.” On OL Oday Aboushi’s role on the final fourth-down play of the game: “Yeah, so one of the things about that play is that it actually gives us a couple of different options out on the edge. They were able to get inside really off the edge of our offense there pretty quick before we were able to kind of seal off the edge and try to get Oday and the quarterback outside on the perimeter in that situation. They kind of got on us a little bit faster than we had seen before. They made a good recognition on the edge. Everybody else inside was pretty much stuffed up on the run action, so we had some good action there, which drew a lot of the attention. It was just a really good play by the defensive end to recognize it and get vertical. I would say, he is probably the one guy who just read the play really well.” |
