Adam Gase – October 18, 2018
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Thursday, October 18, 2018
Head Coach Adam Gase
(One thing on your least favorite topic, with regards to QB Ryan Tannehill, there was a report that he’s on a rest plan for 2-3 weeks. So beginning this past Monday, how many days have doctors said he should not throw a football?) – “They don’t know. And I didn’t know we had a rest plan, so that’s new. I’m glad I’m informed. (laughter)”
(So there’s a chance QB Ryan Tannehill could throw next week then?) – “I don’t know. He could throw tomorrow if he wanted to. It might not feel very good.”
(You said yesterday that there were multiple opinions on QB Ryan Tannehill. Was that after Sunday or was that before?) – “That was after.”
(So will QB Ryan Tannehill be evaluated again late in the week by doctors to determine if he should start throwing?) – “I have no idea.”
(When we hear about QB Ryan Tannehill’s shoulder, it kind of brings up the thought of Colts QB Andrew Luck this past year. Have you guys kind of ruled out that as a possibility with him, the situation that Luck had with his shoulder?) – “I don’t know the exact … I just knew (Luck) was out for a long time. I think there were some surgeries involved. We’re not looking at that.”
(CB Cordrea Tankersley, can you explain what’s been going on there because it’s rare that you see a rookie start 11 games and then the second year not play at all.) – “I think it’s practice. When we start over in OTAs, we start a certain way and then guys have opportunities to win jobs or lose jobs. I think he got kind of caught in that where he wasn’t performing as well and I think there were some switches made. Special teams kind of gets involved when you get to the next corner, when you get to the three (and) four (cornerback positions). There’s been improvement there, which has been good. I’ve been happy about that. He really got more aggressive as far as his relationship with the special teams guys, the way that he’s handling meetings and practice and things like that. I think that’s a positive that I got out of that whole transition where he was one of the backups. I do think that … I don’t know if it’s struggling a little bit sometimes early in the season and preseason where it wasn’t going as smooth for him as he wanted to and if that dinged his confidence a little bit. I think he’s headed in a better direction than what he was earlier in training camp. I think he is more confident right now. He’s been practicing a lot better than what he did earlier in the season. Really, he’s going to get an opportunity because with the amount of injuries we’ve been having this year, he’s going to be out there. We just need to have him keep improving.”
(When you have a player who’s confidence gets chipped away, how do you build it back?) – “Really, the way that I look at it is find out what’s bothering him or what’s causing him to have some missteps here and there or make the wrong decision or not understanding a coverage or something like that. See where his mind is really at the end of the day. Then try to chip away at that and try to really build that thing back up, build his confidence back up. Right now when I see him, whether it’s scout team or just with the defense, I see a little different walk now. I see his confidence really returning. It starts on the scout team because those guys are tough to go against. We ask those guys to compete on Wednesdays and Thursdays and try to get the ball and try to pick it off and get PBUs and things like that. He’s going against good competition every day.”
(So is WR Jakeem Grant destroying everybody’s confidence?) – “That’s why they call him the bully.”
(The what?) – “They call him the bully. (laughter)”
(Does anybody here believe that?) – “It is. That’s true. (laughter)”
(Who calls WR Jakeem Grant the bully?) – “The DBs were in training camp. I think a lot of the young guys, when they were here. He was roughing up a couple of guys.”
(With QB David Fales, obviously he’s going to be your backup this week at least. We saw after the last year with him, what is your level of confidence in him playing in a game?) – “I mean if I didn’t have confidence, he wouldn’t be here. I feel good about David. He’s gotten better from training camp to within the season. He does a good job of preparing every week like he could be the guy. He knows the offense in and out. I like his anticipation. He knows where to go with the ball and he understands the kind of playmakers we have outside and the running back situation of having guys that are multiple. David would be fine.”
(Regarding DE Cameron Wake, who makes the final decision on whether he plays? Is this a collaboration or all trainers?) – “When you have a guy like that, that’ll be a collaboration. I’ll talk to him probably later today to see how he feels or wait until tomorrow just to see (how he feels) the next day. A lot of times you just get a better feel in the morning if he’s sore from yesterday or if he’s like, ‘Hey, let’s go.’ Cam is going to shoot me straight. He’s not going to BS around me.”
(How is DE Cameron Wake feeling today after yesterday?) – “He was fine so far but today was really his big day because it’s third down, red area and things like that.”
(How do you know guys you can trust from that standpoint? At some point you have to measure having DE Cameron Wake for Sunday and having him available in December, right? You kind of have to weigh that.) – “With him, you’ll get the right answer. It’s not like that with everybody but Cam I trust 100 percent.”
(QB Brock Osweiler mentioned something yesterday in his press conference that I thought was interesting. He said in the offensive meeting room there’s a lot of talk about standards over feelings. Sorry if that’s a secret.) – “No. We stole it from somebody else. (laughter)”
(What’s the thought process in that phrase?) – “Just you’re not going to change your standards just because it’s going to hurt somebody’s feelings. It’s just as simple as that. It’s just real talk. It’s being honest and sometimes whether you’re a coach or a player, you don’t like to hear it. Nobody wants to hear that they screwed something up. To get it right, you have to know you messed up first.”
(Was that Mike Martz?) – “No. We stole it from somebody else. (laughter)”
(How do you try to manage that some of us are more sensitive than others? It’s the same thing with players. Some of your players might respond better to different styles of pushing.) – “It’s delivery. To me, I look like it as just making sure that we’re not sugarcoating anything. We get it out there and we make sure we talk through everything and we know if there was a mistake made. That’s really the biggest thing. You don’t want to let something slide just because it’s a veteran or a quarterback or a star player. It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, everybody wants to get it right. That’s the key to the whole thing.”
(You’ve said before that you’re not surprised about what RB Frank Gore is doing, even if a lot of people are. Is there anything you’ve learned about him and his game in these six weeks?) – “He just looks the same to me. I feel like I say the same thing about him all of the time. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to answer. The guy, he battles. When he bursts through the hole, it just doesn’t look any different to me.”
(QB Brock Osweiler also said yesterday that there were a couple of instances in the game last week where he actually knew the play you were going to call before you called it. He just knows the offense that well. Is that something that you almost expect? Does it surprise you? How do you react to that?) – “It doesn’t surprise me. He’s been around this offense for a while now so he kind of knows. He can tell probably on the sideline just through discussion of what I’m thinking and if he doesn’t like that, he’s not going to be afraid to tell me. I think all of those quarterbacks do a good job of at least communicating back as far as ‘That’s not really one of my favorites.’ Or ‘I really like that.’ He’s not that big of a predictor because I’m probably giving him like four plays that I really like on the sideline and he might guess one of them right. (laughter)”
(In your time with the Broncos leading up to before QB Brock Osweiler was drafted, how much interaction did you have with him? I guess what I’m asking is how much of a hand did you have on them pulling the trigger on drafting Brock.) – “I’m trying to remember. We went and worked out a few guys. I think it was (John) Elway and Matt Russell, ‘Foxy’ (John Fox), myself, (Mike) McCoy. I think we took a few trips there to talk to a lot of quarterbacks. We went out to Arizona State and worked him out that day. He was just a guy that we kind of gravitated to.”
(Yesterday, QB Brock Osweiler said that he doesn’t follow social media and he wears, figuratively, earmuffs to shut everything else out. Do you think that’s helped him to this point, where he’s been criticized before, to be ready for something like this?) – “It’s keeping pollution out of his brain. That’s what it is. It’s not like you ever read anything positive, so why read it? In this profession, you just have to stay in the bunker, because if you start letting all that other stuff kind of get in your head, you start to believe it after a while.”
(What has C Travis Swanson shown you since he’s taken over at center?) – “He’s learned everything very quickly. He’s a big guy. He really solidified that middle. He’s done a good job with what we’ve asked of him in the run game. He’s helped us get some good movement there. Pass protection, he’s done a good job working with those two guards considering he hadn’t really played a lot with them. It’s an unfortunate transition that we had to make, but I think he’s done a great job jumping in there with both feet and making sure that we didn’t have drop off.”
(What’s one thing that QB Brock Osweiler does well that would surprise us?) – “The command he has of the offense, what he knows how to get in and out of. It will be subtle things, how he can help out those other guys, like little reminders every once in a while that might be something that he might have heard four or five years ago. Sometimes it helps. Maybe a guy will do a certain thing and that helps him get open. The more experience that you’re in something, some of those little nuggets you pick up along the way and you can possibly help another guy out.”
(Do you think that what QB Brock Osweiler went through in Houston and then briefly in Cleveland then back to Denver made him a better quarterback? What do you think that experience was like?) – “I think any time you go through any kind of adversity and you keep getting back up on the horse, it’s going to be a positive. You’re going to get better. If you work at it hard enough, you’re going to get better. I think that’s what he’s really done. He did a good job of just focusing on what he had to do here of improving on the things that we asked him to improve on, supporting Ryan (Tannehill), trying to help him with what he knows about the offense that maybe he might not talk directly about, but he might tell him ‘I went through this experience in it, here’s how I handled it’ behind closed doors that nobody else hears. I think he did a good job of that. He’s brought a lot of value and helped the skill guys as well.”
(Does the continuity help you because it’s just not another backup quarterback that you don’t have a relationship with in the past, that QB Brock Osweiler knows a lot and it makes this a little bit easier of a transition?) – “Yeah, any time that you’ve already had a guy that’s been in the system. Playing behind the guy he played behind, he learned a lot of things that most guys don’t get a chance to learn, and he was smart enough to listen. He didn’t ask a lot of questions, he’d listen. He mimicked a lot of the things that Peyton (Manning) did, but he was going to be different because that guy is one in a gazillion. They just don’t make him like how he was. I think he took a lot of the good that he learned from him.”
(What was it like having Peyton Manning on the sideline?) – “It was good. It was good to see him. I hadn’t seen him in a while, probably since 2016 or something. Any time he comes around, it’s good. The guys are always great. Some of these guys he’s played against before. That was probably the first time he’d seen (Josh) Sitton in a while. It was good to get him around and all of the guys to see him.”
