Head Coach Robert Saleh, 10.17
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Brian Costello, New York Post: It seems like offensively, looking at the pass/run split, you guys have really flipped it on the head the last few weeks from where you were earlier in the year. How much of that was by design and how much of that is by the way the games have gone lately?
I think it’s a little bit of both, but I think more about the way the games have kind of ended up. Especially the last two weeks, we’ve been fortunate to have a pretty good handle in the fourth quarter where we could really try to grind out in four minute. I thought it was really good by our offense, especially in the fourth quarter yesterday, I think we had like 10 runs in a row or something like that. It’s more about the flow of the game.
Al Iannazzone, Newsday: I’m guessing you’ve seen the tweet, or heard about the tweet, from Elijah Moore not understanding why he’s not more involved. What’s your reaction? Did you talk to him? What can you say?
We’ve had conversations. He’s fine. He’s a competitive young man. Like everybody, when you’re a competitor like him, he wants to contribute. Sometimes, we can think that our contributions are from production only, when your contributions can come from a variety of different things in terms of the way you show up to the building, the way you lead, the way you communicate with your teammates, the effort that you put on the field. There’s a million ways you can contribute to this football team. He’s a competitor and all he wants to do is contribute. So, I’ve got no problem with Elijah. He’s one of our high-character individuals. I love him to death. Eventually, the production part of it that he’s hoping for will come. He’s just continuing to work.
Dennis Waszak, Associated Press: Robert, do you have to tell him to kind of keep that stuff off social media? Do you have that conversation with the guys about any little thing that goes out there can get blown up, as we’ve seen?
It’s social media. You’d love them all to be perfect. I’d love to be perfect. I’d love my family to be perfect. Learning lessons for everyone. I don’t think he has any bad intentions, I don’t think he has a bad bone in his body, but once you put it out there, it’s out there.
Connor Hughes, SNY: When you guys were in San Francisco you had, specifically with that 2019 season, you had three guys that were consistently touching the ball on the ground. You had a number of guys, big name guys at receiver who were consistently involved. Is there anything you can dive back to there where you had a lot of mouths you wanted to feed and you were able to keep them all fed?
There’s always that. You’d love to have perfect days where everyone is getting the football and we’re racking up 400-500 yards a game. Right now, we’re just trying to win football games by all means necessary. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve done a really good job of playing good, complimentary football. I know Mike (LaFleur) is always grinding. I don’t know if there’s a lot of guys that work a lot harder than he does in terms of trying to find ways to get everybody the football. The opportunities will come. I can count eight guys off the top of my head right now where they’re all deserving of the football and they’re all deserving of production when you look at it from a fantasy value standpoint. I do know that those eight people I think about also provide to this football team in a way that can’t be seen, can’t be charted unless you’re in the all-22, grading it from a coach’s view. All eight of them do such a phenomenal job in their roles. They’ll all get a piece. We just got to continue grinding, keep the main thing the main thing, which is doing our best and finding ways to get better and contributing to the team in ways that we have control over.
Mark Cannizzaro, New York Post: I know it’s just six games in here into your second year with the program, so to speak. Can you speak a little bit to what you’re seeing here? Are you starting to see signs of that culture that you want to bring in and the confidence you’re trying to cultivate with this group?
The one thing we talk about is our style of play. Our style of play is effort, technique, and violence. Those are the three things that we feel as players and coaches that we have control over. The best way to show that is when the lights are off and it’s one person watching tape, there’s no sound, there’s no announcer, there’s no replay, there’s no still shot. It’s my eyes looking at your tape, and it’s dark and it’s quiet. What am I seeing? What are you telling me off of your tape? Our style of play is everything and those are the three things we want jumping off the tape. We want to see guys playing with great effort, playing with precision, and obviously playing with violence. There’s more ways to play with violence than just hitting people. Violence in your movements, violence in your get off, whatever it might be. I feel like, especially the last two weeks, it feels like that part of our game is getting better and better and still has a long way to go. It’s heading in that direction. Credit to the players, they’re doing a great job of handling things they got control over.
Brian Costello, New York Post: I think it was the Ravens game you were commenting after and you felt like you guys had lost that game with some of the mistakes you made. Do you feel like you guys have done a much better job than that, basically since the fourth quarter in Pittsburgh, in terms of not committing those mistakes?
Fourth quarter so far, knock on wood, has been very good for us in our four wins. You could argue one fourth quarter we were lucky. The Pittsburgh game, we just seized the opportunity there with two possessions at the end of the game, score back-to-back to take the lead. Then, the last two games, really seized the moment and really shut the game down in the fourth quarter. Three different ways of attacking that fourth quarter, but either way, the mindset to just stay with it, do right longer, it’s a big thing that we say around here. Again, got that from Kyle (Shanahan) back in San Francisco. If we just do right longer, eventually we will win a football game or the other team will lose it. I feel like we’ve been able to do that the last couple of weeks, especially.
Connor Hughes, SNY: Is it positive for you too, Robert, because you mentioned the other team will lose it? For awhile, you guys were the team that was losing it, and that seems like it’s getting further and further from what you guys do.
Again, 11 games left. There’s still a lot of football left, and there’s still a lot of learning opportunities left. Even in the game yesterday, there’s a lot of things that happened in the fourth quarter that we can be better at. There’s a lot of things we could’ve been better at in Miami and same thing can be said about Pittsburgh. It’s traditional throughout football. You look at games around the League and you’re like, ‘How the heck did that team comeback and win?,’ And you go back and watch and it’s like, ‘Look at the mistakes the other team made.’ You could just see it. Very rarely do you just kick the ball off and go 60 straight minutes of absolute butt-kicking. It’s very rare in this League. That’s why the saying goes, old ‘Smash-Ball’ (Dan Shamash), he talks about it every Friday, ‘Games are lost, not won in this League.’ So, how do you avoid being the team that loses football games? It’s true, Tony Dungy, I was part of a team that had Tony Dungy speak to our team about eight years ago and he said the same thing. It’s no secret around the league. It’s just, how do you avoid losing football games? I feel, like you said, it’s been good, and still has to get better.
Zack Rosenblatt The Athletic: Robert, yesterday, Will Parks was talking about how he saw something when they were punting that he told to Brant Boyer and then Brant Boyer made an adjustment. How important is it to have that open dialogue with your players, too, where they’re seeing something out there and then they’re coming to the sideline and being like, ‘Hey, maybe we try this on the next play?’ And, how positive is it that you have guys that are seeing things like that and able to communicate it to you?
Will (Parks) is a veteran. So, he’s seen stuff, so you trust those veteran voices. Not that we don’t trust the young guys either, but they’re the ones that are having bullets shot at them. They’re the ones that are in between the whites, they feel something, they’re feeling something so the player intuition is always its strongest. It’s no different than the, revisit the Quinnen (Williams) thing from Cincinnati, like he’s feeling something and when you’ve got a guy who has so much experience and he’s so good and he’s so demonstrative and he’s so convicted on what he’s feeling, you give it to him. As a coach, to be able to give it to him, just show him confidence in the player, it’s a team thing, it’s not player-coach, coach-player. We’re all in this together, and so we’d be remiss if a player came up to us with a thought and we didn’t at least give it a shot or think about it real hard.
Mark Cannizzaro, New York Post: Robert, in wins, obviously some of the stuff that you don’t do well will get glossed over. Not to you guys because you’re watching it on film and using it as corrections and stuff like that, but obviously the passing game yesterday wasn’t where you wanted it to be. What did you see in Zach (Wilson) yesterday and was it about Zach? Was it more than that? What did you see there?
Green Bay’s got a very talented backend, a very talented backend. I thought Joe Barry and his staff did a great job with regards to changing up what they had been showing throughout the week and really just knocked us off course just for a little bit before Mike (LaFleur) was able to get us back. Mike LaFleur and the entire group got back together and really made the adjustments we needed to make in the second half to get rolling. Either way, I thought they did a great job, I thought the players did a great job adjusting, along with the coaching staff. I probably give more credit to Green Bay and the way they attacked it, especially in the first half. As far as Zach (Wilson) is concerned, there’s always going to be things. We’re always going to look at Zach. He’s the quarterback, he’s always going to be judged the hardest, he’s going to be graded the hardest, and he’s going to be the one that’s under the microscope. I thought he did a really nice job with handling the second half, I think he completed his last four passes, he only needed to throw six times but each of them were really good, big throws that impacted the game in a positive way. I thought he did a really nice job, he did what he had to do and when we have to go jump on his shoulder, I still think he’d be able to handle it.
Mark Cannizzaro, New York Post: It did seem on that one drive, when he had those couple passes, the one to Corey (Davis) and what not, that the passing game did seem to come alive a little bit there and then after that you had the blocked punt with the touchdown then you obviously shut down the passing game a little bit there. So, maybe you kind of found something there on that series and, if you had to pass more, maybe it would’ve been better?
We felt very confident that we would’ve been able to, had we needed to. But like you said, we got to that two-score lead and it was getting deeper in the game and our run game started clicking and it’s like, again, easiest thing to do in football is run the ball when you can. So, we just rode the o-line.
Connor Hughes, SNY: Robert, yesterday, I know you made a comment about, it kind of took on wind there in Green Bay, with the body blows remark in terms of kind of how you guys were able to pull out a victory over a pretty good team in Green Bay. Could you just expand on that a little bit more? I think it kind of got lost in the shuffle in terms of everything else that’s been going around.
For us, just going in from a game planning standpoint, you’re going against a team that had a lot of travel, I mean a lot of travel. Going to London and then coming back is not an easy task and we felt like if we could just lean on them a little bit, that travel would start to show up. It’s hard, it is hard to try to do all that stuff, but credit to them. They came out spirited and fought their absolute tails off and we were fortunate in the fourth quarter to be able to get in a situation where we can continue doing what we were trying to get accomplished, with the blocked punt and getting the two-score lead and all that stuff. So, credit to them, I mean it was an absolute dog fight in the first half and even going into the third quarter, but really it was just more of a mindset to see if we could take advantage of all the travel that they have had over the last couple of weeks. It was fortunate that happened the way it did.
Connor Hughes, SNY: I don’t know if the relationship that you guys are building with the UK over there might have the Jets playing additional games in London, but seeing how Green Bay may or may not have struggled with playing a game right after going to London and not taking that Bye Week, has it maybe changed the way you guys might think about that? Where, you know, it’s a Bye right after the London game?
There’s a lot of studying. Last year, we took the Bye Week. A lot of teams, more often, are starting to not take the Bye Week and there’s studies, there’s analytical studies, our performance team is gathering all the information on whether teams are struggling in the second half, just trying to get information to see how we can prepare ourselves. The league is gathering information, that’s why we’re having these options because those London games, they’re not going away, they’re only going to expand. It’s a big, great part of our league and it’s something that I think we all enjoy doing. So, there’s a lot of information still coming in, especially what the difference is between taking a Bye and not taking the Bye to continue playing in terms of how to get our players to be able to play and continue on and stay as fresh as possible, so that’s a good question. There’s still a lot of information being gathered by the teams that are opting not to take the Bye versus taking the Bye.