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.”
