Adam Gase – November 1, 2018
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Thursday, November 1, 2018
Head Coach Adam Gase
(Did DE Charles Harris have a setback of any kind?) – “No.”
(How is DE Charles Harris doing?) – “He’s progressing. That’s a tough injury, especially when you’re at a position where you have to explode and come off the ball the way that those guys have to. It takes time.”
(It seems like it’s not looking good for WR Kenny Stills with him still missing practice today. Where are you at with him?) – “We’re just kind of finishing the week out and see if we can get him out there and see what he can do, see how he feels. I don’t think he’s accepting that answer. I know he’s not…”
(Is WR Kenny Stills the type of player where you would put him on the field if he has not practiced the entire week?) – “Yes. But I just want to make sure that we’re not going to have a setback injury-wise. That’s my biggest concern.”
(When you spent the past weekend looking at stuff, what on defense did you come to the idea … I know guys doing their jobs is the number one priority.) – “The biggest thing we talked about was explosive plays. That’s where we’ve really been hurt the last two games where teams have been able to get in the end zone with four or less plays, which puts us in a bad spot. One, it’s just happening multiple times. We’ve really just lived off of turnovers and the longer some of these drives have gone, we’ve been able to take advantage of a mistake and got a negative play somewhere or a turnover to where we can flip the field and now all of a sudden we can do something on the other side of the ball. We really haven’t had that opportunity. We’ve been really hurting ourselves by not being on the same page, not doing our job, not finishing a play to where the other team takes advantage of it.”
(Assuming that C/G Ted Larsen is healthy and was full go yesterday, are you moving forward with him as your starter or are you considering C Wesley Johnson or C Jake Brendel at all in terms of a competition there?) – “We’re good with where we’re at right now. He took a weird shot. It was just a weird angle for him to where it just kind of knocked him out of the game there for a little bit.”
(And with C Jake Brendel, I guess you have a decision to make by next Thursday. Do you know at this point if you’re going to bring him back this year or is that undecided?) – “We’ll just take the whole time and when we feel it’s the right time and he’s feeling right and we’ve got a chance to move him up, we’ll move him up. Any time you can get an o-lineman that’s fresh, that’s beneficial to us.”
(When you talked about how you’re going to take the weekend to assess everything including scheme defensively, how much thought and how much discussion was there about making more than a tweak to the Wide 9 concepts?) – “There wasn’t a ton of discussion about anything. It was more ‘these are the things we need to fix. Here’s what we need to do. This is how we need to do it.’ And then we moved on from there. That was about all of the discussion there was.”
(We haven’t talked to him today yet but last week Defensive Coordinator Matt Burke was pretty angry with how things have gone. What kind of conversations have you had with him about keeping this thing together?) – “All of our conversations have been about what are the solutions. Anybody can walk in and say this is messed up, this is wrong. That’s great (but) I need to go in there and say ‘Hey, here’s where I think we can do something different or better.’ That’s what I’m looking for from him too. ‘Here’s how we’re going to get this fixed. Here’s how we’re going to address this.’ That’s what you want to do. Complaining about any of the problems, that doesn’t do anything. We need solutions.”
(You obviously are on the offensive side but you felt the need to go in and say these are a handful of things that…) – “Yeah, I mean that’s my job. I’ve been around for a minute.”
(What is it about Defensive Coordinator Matt Burke’s approach and his process that you trust him even when you guys hit a rough patch like this?) – “You’re talking about a smart guy that’s been around for a long time that’s been a very good position coach. He’s done a lot of good things as a coordinator. We’ve had some really good games. We’ve had some games where I know he wants some (back) – whether it be calls or execution. We all do, at the end of the day, of going ‘Man, I wish I would have done this.’ That’s part of the learning process. That’s why it’s the guys that keep learning and figuring out a way to get things fixed when it’s not going the right way that are the guys you want to be around. Those are the guys that you trust. That’s what he works to do every week.”
(Do you think of Defensive Coordinator Matt Burke as somebody that adapts rather than somebody that sticks to doing this no matter what?) – “Yeah, he’s not going to do the same thing over and over again and just keep getting drummed. None of us want to do that. We weren’t doing well on offense in a lot of different areas over the last three years and we just kept trying to adjust and tried to figure out what works for us.”
(Regarding TE Mike Gesicki and yards after catch, I know that you’ve talked about him not leaving his feet. He went low and he kind of got dinged. How should he proceed? How does he get yards after catch do you think? What’s the best route for him to take there?) – “Make the right decision on whatever you do. Just don’t be wrong. The one that he hurt his shoulder on, he went really low and of course he came right back at me and said ‘Well, I didn’t leap. If I jumped over the guy, I would have been alright.’ (laughter) It’s just one of those things where he is a tall guy. He’s a long strider. It is kind of strange the way he can defend himself. Does he go low? I just want him to be careful as far as trying to get up in the air too much because you saw what happened in Houston and now all of a sudden he gets dropped on his head. We just have to keep finding ways to get him to get north and try to get glancing blows and run through contact.”
(How can TE Mike Gesicki’s athleticism help him? He’s pretty fast and he’s agile but how can that help him running upfield?) – “Well, he can run by everybody. He’s fast for a guy that size.”
(I know that QB Ryan Tannehill is not playing this week but I have a big-picture Tannehill question. There are some people, whether it’s media, fans or whatever, who have made their case that they’ve seen enough of Ryan Tannehill. I want to know why you maybe don’t feel that way.) – “What qualifications are we talking about with the people saying that? None, so I don’t really care what anybody else thinks.”
(I want to ask you in a different way. Why do you still believe that QB Ryan Tannehill is…) – “Because we’ve made a lot of strides since we started in 2016. He had some good seasons before I got here, I know that. We did some different stuff that year. We leaned on the running game and worked off the play-action stuff. He does a great job with the zone-read stuff. When you have an athletic guy that can move around as much as he can and then his arm strength has been something that I’ve never been around before, where we hit the pass like we hit against Tennessee where he throws it 50-plus yards in the air and the guy never breaks stride. He has some rare qualities that you can’t find in a lot of guys physically. The more that he keeps playing, he keeps learning game to game. That’s something to me that puts him in position to where where’s our ceiling at? I don’t think we’re close to it. I think we just keep getting better (and) keep finding ways to maximize his skillset because it becomes a problem for the defense. It’s hard to defend him when you don’t know what he’s going to do. Is he going to do zone read? Is he going to sprint out? Is he going to run a naked (bootleg)? Is he going to go play action? Is it drop back? Are we running the ball? There’s a lot of things they’ve got to defend.”
(So why wasn’t it better when QB Ryan Tannehill wasn’t hurt?) – “It was. The first three games, we played pretty good.”
(And then the next two.) – “Yeah, that happens. That happens sometimes in the NFL. Quarterbacks … when you play New England, that’s not easy. There’s a reason they win a lot of games every year.”
(I’m not saying you won. I’m saying why wasn’t QB Ryan Tannehill better?) – “The first three games?”
(Than what QB Ryan Tannehill was previously? He wasn’t any … he was the same guy.) – “The first three games he played pretty good. You’re asking me that question and you don’t even know what you’re talking about. It’s hard for me to defend anything when you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t. I’ve watched the film. I sit there. We evaluate the scheme we’re asking him to do and he does a good job on it.”
(I know what results are and I know that…) – “That’s fine. That’s how you look at things. Everything is results to you. We’re going through a process because that’s what it is. That’s what the season is. It’s about trying to get guys to trend upward. We were headed in the right direction. We hit a speed bump with New England. Then (at) Cincinnati, he was playing well and then we lose our left tackle and we make two bad decisions.”
(WR DeVante Parker, how do you keep that momentum going from a career game last week with a quarterback that he doesn’t have experience with to keep trending upwards?) – “I think really it starts in practice, which he’s had two good days. He’s executing all of the things that we’re asking him to do. He’s practicing fast. I feel like his body feels good. Now it’s just going to be when we hit Sunday, trying to make ways where he’s not getting taken away by what the defense is doing, moving him around like we keep trying to do and expand what his route tree is, his position flexibility – whether it be inside, outside or No. 3 in a 3×1. Just things like that. You just want to keep him to where guys can’t get a beat on him where they say he’s going to be there every time.”
(So why wasn’t WR DeVante Parker doing that not just this season but before? Or was it just he was not ready to…) – “Well we were doing that last year. We were starting to move him around more. The flexibility was getting to the point where we felt really confident about it. It’s just we kind of lost … I mean he got hurt. Then we lost track of what we were doing and we were trying to fix a lot of stuff and trying to get our balance back. We just got stagnant in a lot of the stuff that we did with him.”
(Is this looking like the week that TE A.J. Derby will be back barring any setbacks?) – “I think we have a good chance. We really wanted to push him this week. The thing is I don’t think he’s going to be 100 percent. He’s always going to have some kind of pain. We just have to figure out where is he hurting because my biggest concern was in the run game or pass protection, was he going to be able to hold up against defensive ends that are bigger than him? That really was my biggest concern. It seems like things have gone well this week. I’ll have a better idea probably tomorrow and Saturday as far as how he feels after these last two practices because these are the more physical ones. Once we kind of get word from him on how he feels, then we can make a decision.”
(Does TE A.J. Derby benefit you more in the run game or the pass game?) – “I think he’s able to do both. He was actually doing well in the run game. He got better over that span that he was playing. We had a little bit of a drop off when he went out. Then once we brought Nick (O’Leary in), then we had another spike to where we started doing well again.”
(You mentioned earlier this week that you need the defensive tackles to stop going around blocks. Can you explain what you mean by that? Are you talking about stunts or not being in their gap?) – “The biggest thing that we’re talking about is one, setting the edge, and then our interior guys just understand run-pass options of you don’t want to run around the quarterback if you’re inside especially, because that’s just going to open up massive holes inside. Then in the run game, you want to make sure that we’re fighting pressure against blocks. We don’t want to just pick an edge and now all of a sudden we get inside zone and we’re just running up the field. It’s just understanding the blocking schemes and how we need to take those types of things on. I think our guys have done a good job this week of trying to understand the big picture. It’s not always going to be a pass. Let’s make sure we’re doing a good job of taking on our blocks correctly, being square (and) using our hands. Just like all of those little details that we work on every day in individual. I watch (Defensive Line Coach) Kris (Kocurek) do it every day. We just need to translate what we’re doing in practice to the game. If we do that, then it cleans up a lot of things.”
