Adam Gase – December 26, 2018 (Conference Call)
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Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Head Coach Adam Gase Conference Call with Buffalo Media
(Watching the Bills the last few weeks, what do you see in their passing game and how it has maybe changed the second half of the season?) – “I feel like Josh (Allen) is getting way … He’s so much more comfortable ever since he’s come back from injury. Now that he’s kind of realized that he is a big man for a quarterback, he does have speed to be able to beat people, him being able to run really can tighten a lot of teams up because the last thing you want to do is keep giving first downs up to him as a runner. Now what that does is those passing lanes become a little cleaner. It’s tough to always look, especially when you play New England at their place to say, ‘Why wasn’t this the same as it was in the previous games?’ They’re always tough to play up there. (Patriots Head) Coach (Bill) Belichick always does a great job of taking away your strength and making you beat them a different way.”
(The Bills have dealt with this a little bit in terms of third down and red zone. I know every coach wants to run away from excuses, but your third down and red zone, the precision and the timing that’s required … Obviously, on third down it’s been tough for you guys. Your receiving cast has been a revolving door. It makes it seem like it’s going to make it very hard to be precise on third down. Would you agree with that? How much of a struggle is that?) – “I would say this: I think a lot of our struggles have come … When we struggle in third down, it’s because we’ve struggled on first and second down. We put ourselves in a really poorly manageable position to where it’s third-and-7-plus. When you get third-and-7-plus in the NFL nowadays, the defensive coordinators are so creative. They’re causing so much chaos and havoc. Pass rushers know that you’re not running the ball. Those guys are coming off the ball with one intent and that’s to get to the quarterback. When you at least stay third-and-5-and-manegeable, and I’m not saying everybody does this, but at least there’s the threat of, ‘What if they do run an inside zone? What if they do run outside zone? What if they run zone-read?’ There’s at least that possible hesitation to where now that rush isn’t as dynamic as what it is third-and-7-plus. Plus, your quicker-game-type routes come into effect when you’re in third-and-shorter and some of your rub routes and type of things like pick plays to where you can spring guys open and have a short throw and get a conversion.”
(The flip side of that on defense, having only seen three or four of your games including the Bills game, you’ve got quality corners and an ability to take away quick, easy throws. Not take away, but defend them reasonably well. Would you say that’s been a challenge there on defense not getting into enough third-and-longs?) – “Right. When we’ve had success … The previous two years, we’ve had … In 2016, we did a really good job of teams were in third-and-7-plus so much. I think we were ranked seventh or something like that in third down. Where last year we moved way back, but the year started out right to where the first six games, everybody was in third-and-long, we were getting off the field and we weren’t taking advantage on offense. This year it’s been we haven’t done a good job on first and second down. The opponent’s run game has been able to do way too much against us. We’ve been trying to get that fixed for basically the entire season because we’ve allowed way too many explosive runs, which has allowed teams to basically go first down, second down, first down so much. And then when we’re getting to third down, it’s third-and-short. And when it’s third-and-short, that puts the advantage to the offense.”
(Today’s practice, CB Xavien Howard and S T.J. McDonald practiced today? Were they limited or what was their status today?) – “Howard was limited and T.J. didn’t participate.”
Xavien Howard – December 26, 2018
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Wednesday, December 26, 2018
CB Xavien Howard
(How do you feel in terms of returning from the knee injury?) – “I’m feeling good. I’m trying to push it this week. It really just depends on how I feel this week at the end of the week. I’ll go from there.”
(In terms of the progress, what have you been doing to make progress with the injury?) – “I’ve been doing a lot of rehabbing. These last two weeks, I’ve been trying to get on the field. More on the field and grass and just try to go over the stuff that I do as a DB.”
(How important is it for you to finish the season on the field?) – “It’s very important. I want to go out there and be able to help my team win. At the end of the day, I just want to finish where I left off at and show them that we still can get the job done.”
(How important is it that you guys try to go out there and push this win for the coaching staff and everybody, considering things are a little bit on the unstable ground?) – ‘We just want to finish strong. We just want to go out there with some of the guys in the locker room and coaches as well and just have a good last game. Like coach said, 8-8 sounds better than 7-9. We just want to finish strong.”
(Being voted team MVP, what’s your reaction and thought on that?) – “It’s great to accomplish those goals. I just really want to build from there and keep going.”
Adam Gase – December 24, 2018
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Monday, December 24, 2018
Head Coach Adam Gase
(Have you gotten any indication from Owner Stephen Ross if you’ll return as coach next season?) – “We haven’t even had a discussion about it. It’s been business as usual for us. I just keep doing my job until somebody tells me different.”
(Do you look at it as you’ll be really upset if you don’t get a chance or do you look at it as this is life in the NFL and I’ll handle this unemotionally? Do you have any feeling?) – “I’m going to worry about this week. Those types of things I don’t really worry about.”
(How do you think you’ve done during your time here?) – “I’m still here. I don’t need to lobby for my job. I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about Buffalo.”
(When will you talk to Owner Stephen Ross about that?) – “I don’t know. If he says there’s an issue, then I’ll know. But every conversation I’ve had with him, we’ve just talked about what we didn’t do and what we need to do going forward on our week-to-week conversations.”
(What is your biggest regret about this season other than the obvious that you’re not making the playoffs?) – “I mean I wish everybody wouldn’t have gotten hurt. That would have been nice.”
(That can’t obviously be glossed over. You have lost a lot of significant players. All of that being said, without asking you to throw anybody under the bus, do you believe that you, General Manager Chris Grier and Executive Vice President of Football Operations Mike Tannenbaum overestimated the talent here?) – “No. We lost good players. You know we don’t have a 90-man roster, right? There’s 53 guys. It’s not like you’ve got a minor league system where you’ve got a huge stable of guys backing up the starters. It’s thin rosters. Every team is. You’re hoping you can stay as healthy as possible. We’re living in a little bit of a fantasy land now thinking there’s a whole bunch of guys waiting in the wings.”
(Do you feel that it has really caught up to you, especially in the last couple of weeks?) – “I thought yesterday, we knew the game was going to be like that. We knew it was going to be low-scoring. We couldn’t turn it over. We did twice. We had an opportunity on a short field when they fumbled and we didn’t take advantage of it. We had a really bad series, then we missed a field goal. We knew the game was going to be 13-10, 14-10, somewhere in there if we were going to win it. Everybody looks at Jacksonville’s record and forgets they were in the AFC Championship last year and forgets they’re a top 10 defense. We knew what kind of game it was going to be. We did, the people that actually study this stuff. Outside of that, most people don’t realize that.”
(You were addressing the depth a minute ago and the fact that you don’t have a 90-man roster, but looking strictly at your first-stringers, was there any overestimation of them?) – “The guys that are or aren’t playing?”
(The guys that you had at the start of the year, for example.) – “I mean there’s a reason why we started 3-0, because all of those guys were there. Then when we started losing guys throughout the season, we’re trying to patchwork things. We had a little time there where we’re trying to get really used to the guys that are playing, so we were shuffling some lineups. That’s what happens. Then we kind of had some good games where guys were starting to gel a little bit. Then we have another wave where we’ve got to switch some things around. We just kept trying to adjust with what was going on.”
(You’ve been one of QB Ryan Tannehill’s biggest fans and it’s not all on him. But just your disappointment that he’s not maybe where you’d want him to be at this point in his career, especially in your system for three years?) – “Really, for us, the biggest thing is just our consistency as an offense. It’s like we’ll have the New England game and then we’ll have yesterday. We’ll have Minnesota. We haven’t found any consistency in the entire offense. Everybody is always going to blame the quarterback. We just need everybody doing their job and then you can really evaluate the quarterback. We really haven’t had the consistency we need on offense to even look at what is Ryan, really. Nobody helps him and then he starts to try to do more than what he should and then that hurts him.”
(As you look ahead, are you comfortable with the idea of QB Ryan Tannehill as your quarterback, say, next season?) – “I’m not looking ahead to anything right now. I’m looking at Buffalo. That’s the way the league is. I can’t worry about next season, offseason, all of that type of stuff. We need to finish this season out the right way, which is we’ve got to go on a road trip, go play a team that knows us well, that we know well, and it’s going to be a tough game because they’re going to want to play well in their last home game and we have to be prepared. We’ve got three days to get ready and we’ve got to go to work.”
(I know you said you’re not going to lobby for your job, but do you think you’d be inclined to give Owner Stephen Ross a plan of how to fix what went wrong?) – “Yeah. I mean, we’ve been talking about it for three years. It is what it is. We had a lot of good things going on. We lost some players. It happens. It’s the NFL.”
(You mentioned after the game yesterday regarding the battle in the trenches. You said that Jacksonville was more physical than you were and then you added, ‘We knew that coming into the game.’ Outside of changing personnel, is there anything you can do to rectify that other than changing personnel?) – “We didn’t play the way that we needed to play for that game. We didn’t play as physical. We needed to make sure that we played at the top of our game against what those guys were, that defensive line. We had to go out and we had to run the ball a certain way. We had to make sure our double teams were good. We couldn’t get moved on those. We had to make sure we were the ones moving them. And we started out the game better than what we finished the game. Like, we executed our double teams. When you’ve got two guys hitting one guy, you’re going to get movement and then when we’re kind of taking bad angles and we’re getting split because we’re not hitting at the same time, then it was bad. And it cost us because our running backs were getting hit in the backfield. A lot of times, I know you want to say it’s personnel, but really a lot of it is fundamentals, techniques, things like that. That’s what can help you. That’s what helps you overcome when you’re playing guys that might be a little more talented than you, but we didn’t do that yesterday. That’s why we won some games here is because we’ve used the things that we’ve talked about in practice, in meetings and sometimes we don’t always do it.”
(For the Buffalo game, will it be business as usual as far as who plays?) – “Yeah.”
(And how you use your players?) – “Yeah.”
(So QB Ryan Tannehill will go?) – “Yeah.”
(Because obviously injuries were a big factor, if I’m hearing you correctly, do you believe that without question you deserve a fourth year as coach?) – “That’s not my choice. I do my job until somebody tells me different.”
(Your 15-game snapshot of the season?) – “I don’t know. I’ll tell you know after the next game. We’ll do a 16-game snapshot. (laughter)”
(A couple of player things on a more uplifting note: CB Jalen Davis had some good moments in his first extensive action. What impressed you about him, and is there anyone else you’d throw into that group of guys who maybe caught your eye?) – “He’s one of those guys that you watch him in training camp practice and he is one of those guys that just gives you everything he has. He’s not afraid of anything. He’ll go out there, he’ll execute the defense, he’ll play aggressive. He’s not the biggest guy that we’ve got, but he’s aggressive and he can make plays. He can tackle, he can get PBUs (pass breakups), he can get picks. He has really good ball skills. He plays multiple positions. He was a guy that we were excited to see get an opportunity. It was good to see ‘Steph’ (Stephone Anthony) and Mike (Hull) get out there and play with that group of linebackers. We had a lot of guys that had to step up yesterday on defense because ‘X’ (Xavien Howard) and Kiko (Alonso) not going, it kind of was unfortunate. I know Kiko tried. We didn’t feel good about it.”
(With CB Xavien Howard, had you felt going to the stadium yesterday he would play?) – “We felt better about it on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday than we did Saturday and Sunday.”
(And what do you do with CB Xavien Howard this week? I know you said business as usual?) – “I mean, if we can go, he’s going to go. We’re going to try to win the game.”
(Along those lines, QB Jay Cutler, I guess you could say last year made a business decision the final game…) – “No, that was my decision. We talked about playing young guys and all of that stuff, but I’ll never do that again because I’m not going to hear about 6-10 again. I’d rather go 8-8.”
(So QB Ryan Tannehill starts?) – “Mhm.”
Laremy Tunsil – December 23, 2018 (Postgame)
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Postgame – Jacksonville
Miami Dolphins LT Laremy Tunsil (transcribed by Anthony Gutierrez)
(The success you guys did have on the road, looking towards the future, do you see the pieces here to turn this around for this not to happen next season?) – “We’re just going to go in the offseason and just work. I don’t know. I’m going to leave that up to the coaches to make that decision. But the people we have here now, we’re going to come in the offseason and work.”
(What is the message to the team going into this final game, because a lot of times these guys are just playing for jobs. I know you’re out here every week playing for a job.) – “Play our ass off, plain and simple. Don’t worry about the next thing. Worry about the next game and play your ass off.”
(How disappointing is it to lose a game like this?) – “Of course nobody wants to lose a game like this. It was a tough game, definitely when you see on the opposite ball that the defense is playing their ass off like that, and we come out playing like the way we did on offense, it’s kind of disappointing.”
Bobby McCain – December 23, 2018 (Postgame)
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Postgame – Jacksonville
Miami Dolphins CB Bobby McCain (transcribed by Paige Jefferson)
(Tell us what happened.) – “We didn’t do enough. It’s a tough pill to swallow. It knocks us out, with the little hope we had. Now we know we have Buffalo up. The only thing we can do is finish out strong. This was tough. We didn’t do enough.”
(Was there a message after the game? Did the players talk?) – “No. I didn’t feel anything different. We called it up, we had our words and then that was it.”
(Considering the road record when you look ahead – I know you have one more game left – but it seems like there are pieces here that could make this a successful franchise and make a playoff.) – “There is a lot of talent in this locker room. There are a lot of good players – really good players – on all three phases of the ball. Us putting it together as a team, as a unit, that’s what we have to do. All year we haven’t played collective football. We haven’t played together as a unit –offense, defense, special teams, playing off each other. There were some games with some spurts here, some that’s down. There’s too many ups and downs. Just like today, there’s too many ups and downs. Like I said, we didn’t do enough.”
Raekwon McMillan – December 23, 2018
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Postgame – Jacksonville
Miami Dolphins LB Raekwon McMillan (transcribed by Daniel Chavez)
(This team had been so successful at home up until today and you had so much on the line, where did things go wrong?) – “We’ve just got to finish the game. We went in, I think it was 7-7 at half or whatever it was. We’ve got to come out in the second half and make plays and we we’ve got to keep them out of the end zone.”
(Even though the odds were against you guys being able to make the playoffs, does the realization hit now that there will be no playoffs?) – “No. I don’t even think about that. I’m going to take it one game at a time. All I wanted to do is win this game and see how things panned out. We didn’t finish it in our end, so we’ve got to get back to the drawing board and go back to work.”
(Is there a sense on the players’ part that there could be a lot of change, given that you guys missed the playoffs?) – “No, we don’t worry about that. All we can control is things that are going on on the field, and things that are going on on the practice field.”
Minkah Fitzpatrick – December 23, 2018 (Postgame)
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Postgame – Jacksonville
Miami Dolphins S Minkah Fitzpatrick (transcribed by Anthony Gutierrez)
(This is your last home game as a rookie for the Miami Dolphins. Can you summarize your thoughts about your first rookie season with the Dolphins?) – “It’s not over yet. We’ve still got one more game. It’s been good. (There were some) up’s and down’s. I’ve been learning a lot and growing as a player. I’ve been moving around a lot so like I said, I’ve been learning a lot, having fun. I’ll definitely use this year as a learning experience, as a humbling experience. This offseason, we’ve got to do what we got to do as a team, stick together, train together, and do what we have to do to improve and just use this season as a stepping stone to where we want to go.”
(This loss seems a little more frustrating than most, just by the mood in the locker room. Does it feel that way to you?) – “Yeah, it’s very frustrating. Some of the games didn’t go the way we wanted them too; but this one, we needed to win this one. It was our next game, our most important game. So this was kind of like that blow. It just hurts.”
(Did you get a sense that you guys were playing for your coaches jobs today?) – “I think every game is like that. I think one of your goals is one, to make sure your coaches keep their jobs because that depends on our play and two, that they get promoted. When they get promoted, that means you’re doing something right. It’s a business. It is what it is; but like I said, you just have to keep playing hard. We’ve got one more game. (We have to) finish up and that’s it.”
Cameron Wake – December 23, 2018
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Postgame – Jacksonville
Miami Dolphins DE Cameron Wake
As you probably know, the team is eliminated from playoff contention. Do you see this as a player or coaching issue, the inability to be consistent?
CAM WAKE: It’s a Dolphins issue. Can’t really separate the two. It’s not like the players can go to playoffs and coaches stay or vice versa. It’s either all or nothing. We work together cohesively as a unit and we share failures, we share successes. It’s on everybody.
Do you think major changes are needed here?
CAM WAKE: It’s the NFL. Every years changes. There will be changes this year, just like the year we went to the playoffs. I’m sure the ’72 Dolphins had some changes. It’s just the nature of the beast. The team will never be the same. It’s year-in and year-out.
I guess that was broader. Do you think the team that’s in that locker room is close to being where you need to be?
CAM WAKE: I learned a long time ago, you are what your record says you are. Would that make us one game out of the playoffs? I definitely think we have the ability to win another game this season, and we’ve seen that we have the players, we’ve made plays, we’ve played teams, beaten teams. But I’ve stood here many times and said we can’t play lights out one week and then kind of drop the ball one week, lights out, drop the ball. Then you end up like wherever we are now. The games were we played well, you have to continue to play that way. It’s not a can’t. Again, it’s a didn’t.
Do you guys feel like you were adequately prepared for what they threw at you?
CAM WAKE: Sure.
The pass rush seemed to have a really good day today.
CAM WAKE: Yup.
How do you feel about the other side of the ball not being able to help you out?
CAM WAKE: I don’t really look at it that way. We’ve been put on the field and our job is to get off the field and get the ball back to them. There are plays to be had that we didn’t make. We were on the field at the end of the game, we could’ve given the ball back to them for another shot. As a defender, put the ball down wherever you put it down. Our job is to get the ball back, no points on the board. That’s the only way you can look at it. Again, it’s not offense, defense, it’s not coaches, players, it’s the Miami Dolphins.
All season, I guess you all play for the playoffs. What is this next week like?
CAM WAKE: I think that’s not wholly accurate. There’s a lot of things guys play for, so that’s one of the things off the table, but everything else that you would typically play for is on the table. Everybody else is play for pride. I’ve been playing for pride since the day I put my pads on. It’s not anything different. There’s a lot of things to play for, it’s not just only that.
Do you get a sense going into next week that this team could be playing for coaches’ jobs?
CAM WAKE: I assume every week you’re playing for your job. I’m assuming every week the coaches is coaching for his job. I don’t think that’s new next week. I think that’s the case every day. It’s an audition. It’s a league with a short memory, what have you done for me lately, and that’s not exclusive to coaches or players, it’s everyone, again. And there are players who are going to have to – or should have and should – think that way. It’s not next week is your make-or-break. It’s you’ve got a resume and every week you have to put up because there’s somebody knocking on the door to take your job day-in and day-out in this league, coaches, players, whoever.
What do you think your lasting memory of this season will be?
CAM WAKE: That’s probably a question for March. It’s a little fresh now. Obviously, it’s been a lot. It’s been a lot going on this season, a lot of ups and downs. But again, just outside looking in, it’s not really a good place to be.
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