Adam Gase – December 26, 2018
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Head Coach Adam Gase
(Any more clarity on CB Xavien Howard and whether he’ll go this week?) – “He’s going to go through practice this week. He would have to feel … He would really have to push me for me to let him play.”
(CB Xavien Howard would really have to push?) – “He would have to tell me he absolutely, 100 percent, wants to play and feels great. We’re not going to put him out there if he has any kind of pain.”
(Do you have any feelings about CB Xavien Howard playing in the Pro Bowl?) – “I mean I haven’t even thought that far ahead. We’ll see wherever his health is at the time. If he’s healthy and wants to play in it, I don’t see why we would hold him back.”
(So CB Xavien Howard is still coming back a little bit from the knee injury?) – “Yeah. I just don’t want him going up … If he has any pain, turf … We need to be smart with that.”
(With the situation in regards to LB Kiko Alonso, what went into your decision to play him and not play him, and how did you think the defense did without him?) – “Here’s what happened with that. We worked him out before the game. He wanted to go. A lot of us weren’t really sure because he didn’t look great. It wasn’t like he was ‘this close.’ There was still a little hobble and he looked a little stiff. We didn’t really have anybody else to put up. We had a couple of linemen that were healthy and Isaiah (Ford). We just felt like if there was an emergency and we needed him to finish a game, he was there. We didn’t think it was the right thing to do to put him in the game.”
(The growth that you’ve seen from LB Raekwon McMillan and LB Jerome Baker, they’ve both had moments in games where they’ve looked pretty decent but then they’ve also had issues where they’ve struggled – misfits, not exactly sticking to their assignments. What is the hope there that the seasons you’ve invested in them is going to do what?) – “Well, I think they’ve improved as the year’s gone on. I can see Raekwon, his leadership, has really showed up for us. The way he practices, the way he plays in games … When things have gotten tough, he’s been the guy that steps forward. ‘Bake’ I think is one of those guys; he just plays ball. There might be some times where maybe there’s some undisciplined thing that he does but he ends up making the play. That’s the fine line in defense sometimes, where you can go off the reservation slightly but when you are fast and you’re able to tackle, you can make up for that and you correct it when you get to the sideline. I do feel like those guys are trending in the right direction. Those guys play as hard as you can ask guys to play.”
(You’re near the end of Year 3 here in your relationship with QB Ryan Tannehill. There’s been many ups and downs and injuries and so on. How would you describe your relationship with him at this point?) – “I think it’s a good relationship between player and coach. I want him to have success. I want him to do the things that he wants to accomplish individually but as a team as well. At that position, you take a lot of the bullets. Sometimes you don’t get all of the credit when you might deserve it. I think we’ve just been so all over the place. One game we’ll do well on offense and then we’ll just be non-existent one game. That’s where it can help at the quarterback position. You make an off-scheduled play or you do something where it just sparks the rest of the group. Sometimes we have that and sometimes we don’t. I think this whole last couple of years, we’re healthy and then we miss a season. Then we get him back, we play well in a couple of games, then we had a couple of rough games and then he gets hurt and he’s out five weeks. Then he comes back and plays pretty good and then we’ve had a couple of rough games of late.”
(Is it the rough patches that in some ways make the relationship stronger? Is that where the bonding really happens?) – “Yeah, I mean that’s … You’re under fire all of the time. Between the head coach and the quarterback, you’re not missed. Everybody knows where you are and what you’re doing and how you’re handling things.”
(I guess QB Ryan Tannehill was named the team’s Ed Block Courage Award guy today. Thoughts on that?) – “Yeah. Watching him come back from that knee injury, he was excited to get out there and get going this season. Whatever he had, he gave it. To see him come back and look good moving around, running and all of those things, there were just no limitations.”
(What’s the next step for QB Ryan Tannehill next season?) – “The biggest thing is stay healthy. It’s hard for me to get too down with the injury he had against Cincinnati because he was loading up to throw a ball down the field and a guy got him right in a bad spot. That’s what got him for that period of time. We always just have to keep working on pocket, anticipation, getting the ball out on time. (We can work on) making sure that when things don’t go right, how do you avoid adding to that mistake? I think we’ve had some games where we’ve done that and some games where we haven’t.”
(As far as QB Ryan Tannehill being 30-years old with three injury interrupted seasons, what are the odds he will have a healthy season?) – “I don’t know. I’m not a great odds maker. I just know when I got here, (people were saying) ‘He never misses a game. He never misses any snaps.’ Then it flipped really fast.”
(A lot of people are making an issue about you sitting on the sidelines while the defense is playing, to draw, script up or look at film. It’s not something people generally see from head coaches. What are you trying to get accomplished there?) – “It just depends where we are in the game. Just remember, it’s not hard to see that I’m on the headsets with the defense. I can hear everything. I can see what’s going on. There’s pretty big screens on the field. It’s not like I can’t see anything. I hear everything going on. A lot of times I’m trying to get the next series ready so I can tell those guys ‘Here’s what’s coming. Here’s what I’m thinking going into the next series.’ And then I’m just trying to make sure I’m aware of what they’re doing on the other sideline. ‘Here’s what they’re doing down-and-distance-wise. Here’s what they’re doing personnel-wise.’ You go through all of those pictures and you get a feel for how they’re calling a game. That’s important to play calling. I’m not the only one that does that. The guy in L.A. does it a lot (Sean McVay), and they’re all right.”
(Can you talk about the positives and negatives of spying a quarterback and the challenges of keeping Bills QB Josh Allen in the pocket? Because he got outside the pocket a lot in the last game.) – “A little bit. (laughter) It’s good when you have somebody that can catch him when he escapes the pocket. The only thing that can hurt you is you have one less rusher or one less guy in coverage. If you’re using a linebacker and he’s sitting in the middle, he’s just watching (the quarterback) and all of a sudden guys start running across the field and he’s not paying attention to that stuff, so you lose a guy in coverage where you can take some things away. If you get into that whole quarterback spy game, you don’t have that.”
(Didn’t you guys have a spy last game?) – “Every call is different. It’s not like you go ‘Every call is going to be with a spy.’ You’re not going to do that. If you’re pressuring, you’re going to have guys in certain zones. A lot of times when teams are in man-to-man coverage, that’s when you see it because that’s when they can do the most damage.”
(Do they have any designed runs for Bills QB Josh Allen?) – “Most of them were drop back, everybody is running out of there and then we let him get out of the pocket.”
(It seems like you want to make clear there is not too much on your plate calling plays and still running a game as well.) – “No. We haven’t had a lot of mismanagement of games. We’ve got a lot of people that are involved in game-day management. I just have to make the decision. We’re talking through stuff all of the time.”
(Is there anything you’ve learned then about how to manage your time on Sunday?) – “Yeah. It slows down the more you do it. Year 1 to now is … I can’t even imagine. If I went back and was able to watch myself in Year 1 compared to now, it was probably a nightmare in Year 1.”
(What did you think about your running game this year? Were you able to use it the way you wanted to use it?) – “It’s like almost everything. It’s been so inconsistent where one game it feels like we’re really getting some good, explosive plays, we’re blocking guys well, guys are executing things well. And then some games like last week it just felt like we could never get to that second level. It always felt like it was at the line and then we’d be at the line of scrimmage and a lot of times we squirted out of there, but that wasn’t happening. They did a really good job of … It just felt like they kept bottling everything up. Even when we tried to move outside sometimes, then we’d get pushed back, now the backs kind of get cut off, we try to cut up the field, and now it’s minus-1 or -2 yards. It hasn’t been as consistent as you want it to be.”
(Was it effective in getting you to play-action?) – “It was. We had some good stuff in play-action. The one time, unfortunately, that they covered everybody, Ryan (Tannehill) didn’t have anywhere to go with the ball. I hate to say this, but we probably should’ve just taken a sack there, which I’m sure at that point he had been sacked quite a bit and he’s trying to make a play in that point of the game. We just can’t throw a pick-six there.”
(All season has it been…) – “It’s been … Sometimes it’s good. Some teams it’s good against, some teams it’s not. Some teams do a good job of getting out of there on play-action and getting into windows.”
(You were happy with RB Frank Gore? I think 62 percent of his carries were on first down.) – “Yeah, Frank helped us a lot. Our third downs were shorter. I wish we could’ve used that to our advantage. I think when Frank touched the ball on first and second down – first or second down – we were like third-and-6. If he didn’t, we were like third-and-9. Frank just has an ability – and it’s one of the reasons why he’s one of the leading rushers ever – is there might be nothing there and all of a sudden you’re second-and-6, second-and-5 and then it’s third-and-2. He could get something out of nothing.”
(You talk about Year 1 to Year 3 for you. Does that learning curve change over time? Is Year 3 to Year 5 going to be the same kind of thing?) – “Yeah. Every game you go into you learn a ton of stuff. It’s the same thing I tell the players, there’s 10 things you come out of the game and you’re like, ‘Okay, that happened.’ There’s things that come up that you may have never seen yourself. Maybe you’ve seen it happen to somebody else and kind of be like, ‘What would I do in that situation?’ When you start seeing things live and it’s happening fast and you’ve got 40 seconds or less to try to make a decision and make the right one, it moves pretty quick.”
(How important is this for you, the coaching staff, the players collectively to put away last Sunday and last Monday and look forward to the last game?) – “It’s the same mindset going into every week is you start fresh and your goal is to win one game. Our goal is to go on the road and win a game and try to finish the right way in the division and overall record because 8-8 sounds a lot better than 7-9, I know that. Just like last year, 7-9 sounds a lot better than 6-10. We’re focused on that. I feel like the guys did a really good job at practice today. It was good to see them flying around and enjoy being out there. They just know it is the last week that this team will be together. It’ll never be the same.”
(I wanted to ask you about the running game. Obviously, there’s going to be an adjustment without RB Frank Gore, but why can’t you get those sustained early runs or why couldn’t you, maybe it was Jacksonville’s defense, get those sustained early runs in first and second down last week?) – “What were they sixth in defense? It was a tough defense to run against. We tried to stay, or at least I tried play-calling-wise, to stick with the run game, because I didn’t want to get in one of those deals where now Jalen Ramsey starts getting a little nosey and then we get some kind of issue where he jumps one and gambles, because he can. We were trying to stay consistent with that, getting third-and-shorter situations. The penalties killed us, because we were second-and-20, second-and-15. When that happens, it’s hard to recover from that stuff. Think about, especially over the last three years, how many times did we recover from a negative play on first or second down to convert on third down? It’s rare. You really have to do a lot of things right the next two downs.”
(WR DeVante Parker, he’s kind of been present, but not really productive. Is that injury? Is that practice performance? Is that a chemistry issue?) – “I feel like he’s practiced probably as good as I’ve seen him practice over the last three years (with) his speed, detail of what he’s doing. And for some reason when we’re getting into the game, I don’t know if he’s trying to be too perfect and it’s slowing him down. I feel like we have routes sometimes where he knows cold and then I’ll see what I see at practice. It’s just one of those things, just cut it loose. Don’t worry about making a mistake. If you do, it’s the quarterback’s job to find you and put the ball on you and then go make a play after the catch.”
