Adam Gase – October 10, 2018
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Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Head Coach Adam Gase
(With DE Cameron Wake, we didn’t see him again out there today, is this something you think might be more than just a week or two?) – “I think we’re on track. I don’t think he’s far off. He wasn’t going to do anything on the field today, so that’s why he’s basically working on getting his body right inside.”
(We didn’t see DE Robert Quinn out there.) – “Yeah, it was more like a vet day for him. We’ve been meaning to do this the last couple of weeks, but we’ve had so many injuries in that room that we haven’t been able to do it.”
(T Laremy Tunsil was back practicing today.) – “Yeah, he’s still in the protocol. He’s going through the steps.”
(After this practice, is it just how T Laremy Tunsil responds?) – “I don’t know. I don’t ask all those questions. Whatever they tell me.”
(You said the other day you really can’t slow down Bears LB Khalil Mack. How difficult is it to defend him?) – “It’s hard. It’s hard because he does a really good job … he gets double-teamed a lot. And when you do that to good players, they’re going to figure out a way to work around it, whether it be somebody setting a pick for him and then now all of a sudden he ends up on the guard through a stunt (or) where they align him. They’re going to find ways to try to get him one-on-ones and then he’s going to adjust. He’s a smart player. He’s been around for a minute, so he’s seen it all. There’s not a whole bunch of new things you can throw at him. You know that when he starts moving around, you just have to have a good plan.”
(Did DE Cameron Wake play through the knee injury against New England? Was it the same issue?) – “That’s hard for me to say. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
(How does WR DeVante Parker look?) – “He felt good today. We’re just trying to progress him to where we don’t have any setbacks. The fact that he’s saying he’s feeling as good as he does, that’s a good sign for us.”
(How can you help QB Ryan Tannehill with his decision-making when he’s under pressure?) – “I thought we were good the first three weeks. I think he had some good touchdown passes when he had pressure. I think his rating was up there pretty good before these last couple of games. We just had a couple of bad choices, this last game especially. It’s one of those things where it’s hard to explain and we go back to work and we work on collapsing the pocket and moving around and getting the ball to your check-down. (It’s) all of those little things that sometimes you might take for granted that you do during training camp and OTAs and stuff, and you’ve seen him do it in games and you start working on other things. Sometimes it’s one of those deals where you’ve just got to keep working on the same stuff.”
(How much of it is on QB Ryan Tannehill and how much can play-calling help with that?) – “You always feel like there’s a better play to call. The hardest thing is I really can’t run across the sideline and ask them what they’re going to be in. I’d love to be able to do that, but sometimes defenses get in some stuff where we think we’re going to be good, protection-wise, and then we get thinned out and it’s not ideal.”
(I’m asking about penalties. When you look at how often they’ve extended drives for the opponent and put you guys in tough spots, how big an issue has that been so far?) – “It wasn’t an issue the (first) two games, and that’s probably why we’ve had the results we’ve had. We had a decent first half on the offensive side. We had those ones on special teams the first half and then it flipped and they all came on offense. That’s going to put you at second-and-20, first-and-20, second-and-15. It’s just not an ideal down-and-distance because you’re going to end up in third-and-long, which you don’t want. We got kind of in a situation to where we were getting those penalties and then we didn’t really want to throw it. We couldn’t push the ball down the field because we weren’t holding up in protection. We really put ourselves in a bad situation by having those and we need to get back to the formula of what we had those first three games.”
(We saw WR Travis Rudolph join the practice squad, and also I think he got hurt?) – “I’m not sure yet. I saw it. It didn’t look good. I’ll find out more when I get back in.”
(How do you look back on your one year with the Chicago Bears?) – “I thought it was good. It was a good learning experience for me because Coach (John) Fox (went) there and I want to say I was maybe like the third or fourth person to get hired, so I was able to watch him go through all the steps, from hiring trainers, strength staff, basically it was a full changeover. So being able to see that, because I didn’t get to see that in Denver, there were so many of us that stayed. When he joined up, he kept seven of us on the offensive staff. Nobody else moved around in the building. There were just some coaching changes, that was about it. Going to Chicago, I was able to see him go through all the steps of hiring everybody. I thought that was good for me leading up to this. So at least I had seen both ends of the spectrum of kind of how that worked out.”
(Are there many left there from your time there?) – “The defensive staff. I don’t think anybody on offense, though.”
(In 2016, your team did better when there was less QB Ryan Tannehill and more of something else, and that year it was running the ball with RB Jay Ajayi. Can you find a similar recipe this year, or will you ride and die with Ryan?) – “I thought we were pretty balanced this last game until we missed that third-and-1 and it just went downhill from there. We lost Laremy (Tunsil). We tried to run the ball a couple of snaps just to try to get it going and they did a good job of stopping us. Now, we’re down by 10. That’s when the numbers are going to get skewed. Any time that you get down and there’s time left and you have multiple series, it’s going to get out of whack.”
(As we start the week for Chicago, are you set as far as what you’re going to do with the offensive line if T Laremy Tunsil is out?) – “We’ll see how it all plays out. We have a good idea of how we would handle things if he doesn’t play or if he does play.”
(What have you seen from T Zach Sterup?) – “He’s always done a good job in practice. I know the defensive line always talks about how long he is and how hard he is to get around. I know William Hayes has said since the first day he got here. He said, ‘When that guy punches you, you feel it.’ He’s got a strong punch. We were able to play him last year at the end of the year, which was good. So we’ve actually seen him in game action. We just keep trying to help him get better.”
(A lot of players after the game have a tradition of trading jerseys with each other. Does that ruffle your feathers? Do you mind about that, especially after a loss?) – “I don’t know. I don’t care. (laughter) It’s so irrelevant to us winning a football game. I don’t care about all of that stuff. They can do whatever they want. I don’t care.”
