Adam Gase – November 26, 2018
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Monday, November 26, 2018
Head Coach Adam Gase
(I know a lot of people are still angry, probably more than any time in your tenure of play-calling. I know you explained the fourth-quarter things yesterday but after thinking about it overnight, do you think maybe a case could be made to place faith in your franchise quarterback on two third-and-10s? I know the one at the 6-yard line but there was one at the 25-yard line. Or do you say all of these people are wrong and I did the right thing?) – “We did what we game-planned to do. We did what was best for that situation. I’m probably more upset about the second-down call. I thought we’d catch them in a pressure to that side and they came from the opposite side. If I could have that one back, that probably could have made a difference.”
(QB Ryan Tannehill’s last 10 throws – all in the second half – were all short passes. Was there anything physically that factored into that or that was complete game plan stuff?) – “I mean there’s a reason why their defense is playing well right now is they don’t give up big plays. The one that we got at the end of the half was unusual. You can’t find a whole bunch of explosive plays in their passing game. Their defense is built for you to score through the goal line. That’s kind of why we stay up here and do what we have to do because we actually know what they’re doing.”
(How did QB Ryan Tannehill come through physically?) – “He was fine. (He) probably (took) a couple of shots that didn’t feel good but he’ll be fine.”
(What are the updates on WR Danny Amendola and C Travis Swanson?) – “We’ll have to get through the week. They probably won’t practice most of the week. We’ll try to give them a shot on Friday and see what they can do and how they feel. That’s really as far as I know. I won’t really know until we get to the weekend.”
(Is either one more likely than the other?) – “No. Neither one of them are in great shape right now.”
(What’s your message going to be to the club? I wasn’t in the postgame locker room but I know there was a lot of anger there from all of the comments I read.) – “Yeah. When you lose, it sucks. We left too many opportunities on the field. You can’t do that when you’re playing a team that’s pretty hot. We shot ourselves in the foot too many times and then let it come down to those last couple of drives. It looks like we’re going to have (Andrew) Luck sacked and they’re going to be on their own 33 or 34 (yard line) and they’re going to be punting back to us and we’re going to have a minute-something left to go win the game. That was kind of the plan when we punted it, was we need one good play on defense. Matt (Haack) was punting the ball good all day. We had a chance and we missed it.”
(When Colts WR T.Y. Hilton got loose on that one play during the drive before the TE Eric Ebron touchdown, what was the call or what happened there?) – “We just didn’t execute the call correctly. We overlapped on coverage and allowed him to get free.”
(Was starting TE Durham Smythe and going to him early simply a function of something you saw in the Colts defense or has he been practicing especially well recently?) – “We’ve got a lot of different packages with the tight ends. You can look at starting and stuff like that and it doesn’t mean anything. He has been practicing well. He’s been doing a lot of good stuff. The entire season, he keeps getting better. The ball went there because coverage dictated it.”
(I think there were 22 or 23 snaps for WR DeVante Parker. Did you want to be cautious with him because of the shoulder?) – “No. It was just the personnel groupings. We had a specific way we wanted to attack them. A lot of things went well and we didn’t do some things right. We were scrambling a little bit there when Danny (Amendola) went down. It’s not really ideal when we have to move Kenny (Stills) inside. We don’t have Danny and now Kenny is going to play a spot that’s really not his natural spot. We’re just not that deep right now to where we can start moving all of these guys around and switching positions.”
(Is LB Kiko Alonso always on the punt block team and what did you see on that play?) – “There are just specific things that we do where sometimes the defensive guys stay out there. It was just him making a good play. I don’t think … A lot of times when we do stuff, you’re hoping for something like that to happen but it doesn’t always. It’s just unfortunate we couldn’t take advantage of it.”
(Not from a health standpoint for QB Ryan Tannehill but from a performance standpoint, was that as good as you could have expected after five or six weeks off?) – “Yeah, I mean I thought he played well. He executed what we asked him to do. There are some things we want to clean up, which are more technical than anything. The biggest thing for us was we knew we had to put drives together. It was not going to be a team where you’re going to get three or four plays and it’s going to be a touchdown. They just haven’t done that. I think something like 44 percent of their (defensive) drives were 10 or more plays that were scoring drives this year. They’ve done a great job of forcing you to play the way that they want you to play.”
(How is RB Kenyan Drake doing health-wise?) – “He’s all right. He just fell on that shoulder again, I think. That’s why he was down.”
(Is RB Kenyan Drake going to be limited in practice this week?) – “Him and DeVante (Parker), we’ll probably keep the same protocol as what we did last week.”
(How would you grade the run defense overall? Did you see any progress there?) – “The explosive plays, we’ve just got to eliminate those. They hurt us so bad. It’s one guy coming out of his gap. We’ve just got to keep tightening it up. I think a couple of times they caught us. They had a good call against what we had called. That’s going to happen. I can live with that. It’s just when we have a good call and we don’t execute it, that’s when it’s tough.”
(How much of that was there in the fourth quarter?) – “I thought (Defensive Coordinator) Matt (Burke) called a really good game. I thought he made it really tough on them. We got turnovers and it’s not like they’ve been … I mean, Andrew (Luck) hasn’t really been throwing picks. The way that they had it game-planned, the way that we executed for the majority of the game was good. If we can just eliminate these explosive plays, that’ll help us a lot. If we can just make teams have to drive on us because they’ll eventually, as we see every week, the offense will screw it up.”
(Where were your thoughts on the wild sequence at the end of the first half, with the three consecutive turnovers?) – “I was happy about two of them. (laughter) One of them I was not so happy. I felt good. I thought we were going to score there and just really flip the game, and then when we turned it over, that’s just a killer.”
(With the C Travis Swanson situation, any contingency plans for practice this week in terms of moving guys around?) – “We’ll get through that. We’ve kind of talked about it a little bit, but nothing is in stone yet.”
(How did your line do in your mind after C Travis Swanson went out?) – “We were trying to shuffle some things around and figure out what was the best lineup to go with and then once we got settled on that, there was some good, there was some bad. We kind of fell apart there at the end. I mean, Travis probably played five or six plays where he was hurt. We kind of missed an opportunity on one of those where he was pulling, couldn’t really run (but) was trying to run. We left a lot out there.”
(What’s your sense of the overall mood of the team, 5-6 with five games to go?) – “You’re disappointed because you’ve got two games where you’re sitting going like, well, 5-6, 7-4. So … It’s a (expletive) feeling.”
(Five games left, here comes December. Is this a particularly tough one to regroup from?) – “The good thing about NFL players is once we hit Wednesday, they really don’t care about last week. Which is probably better that they’re like that compared to the coaches. We’ll sit and think and dwell and all that stuff. These guys will do a good job of moving on and go to practice and work hard and get after it on Wednesday. Our focus just needs to be one game. How do we win one game? It’s probably good that we’re at home. We’ve got a great opportunity just to kind of get back to .500. We’ve just got to focus on ourselves and can’t worry about anybody else.”
(What kind of December team do you think this one is going to be? That’s where the culture comes in that you’ve talked about.) – “We’ll find out. Guys that we’ve got will battle. I thought they played hard yesterday. It was unfortunate we lost that game because I really thought there were a lot of guys that did good stuff. It’s just hard to see right now because everybody does the same thing. Everybody goes and looks at the result and all of the good things get forgotten about. That’s where we can’t get lost in it as a team. We’ve got to focus on the things that we did improve on. The things that we didn’t, we need to get better at. And then we have to figure out a way to win this week.”
(Was it particularly hard because not only was it a loss, but against a team you’re battling for a playoff position?) – “It doesn’t matter. I’m probably the only one that really needs to worry about stuff like that. The rest of those guys, they don’t care. They’re worried about winning that game. They’re not sitting there looking at the standings going, ‘Oh, here’s where we’re at.’ We win our games and try to take care of our business and let the chips fall where they may. But in my spot you’re going, ‘Did we just lose control of our own destiny?’ But they don’t need to worry about that stuff.”
(If you can look back to the Bengals game just now; if QB Ryan Tannehill didn’t get hurt, do you kind of look back at the last six games overall?) – “No, because we gave ourselves … We had opportunities. We won a couple of games. We had good games a couple of games, whether it be offense, defense, special teams. It is what it is. You just hate when you’re up and lose a lead and you know what you left on the field. You know some of the situational stuff that didn’t get done right.”
(What do you see from WR Leonte Carroo the last two games, special teams two weeks ago and then yesterday. Do you take some pride in that young player’s development?) – “I’m glad that he got an opportunity. I know that was great to see him just go up and get one. I don’t think we’ve done that enough to where we’ve had moments where a guy you don’t expect goes up and gets a ball like that. The more we have guys do that, the more confidence Ryan has at throwing the ball down the field when it’s a 50-50 jump ball. That’s ideal.”
