Adam Gase – September 13, 2017 (Conference Call)
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Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Head Coach Adam Gase (Conference Call)
(I’m curious. How disruptive was the storm and did it impact your guys’ ability to prepare for the Chargers here or did you guys actually get extra time on the Chargers because you didn’t play in Week 1?) – “More extra time. I got out here on Saturday, Saturday morning. I was able to start a little early and I think a lot of other guys on our staff did as well. We were trying not to get too far ahead though because like the first game of the season, you spend two weeks on a team thinking about that, you start making things up as far as what a team might do. We tried to keep it as much to a normal week as possible just so we didn’t overdo it. A couple of us were here in the hotel rooms, so we really didn’t have anything else to do, so we probably spent a little extra time on it.”
(What are your impressions about what you’ve seen from Chargers Head Coach Anthony Lynn here in his first year?) – “Offensively I can see his fingerprints working with those guys and then defensively, it seems like that defense is kind of built in his personality but with (Defensive Coordinator) Gus (Bradley) as well. I see a bunch of guys just playing hard and fast and that model of his background, trying to do a good job protecting the football and then creating turnovers.”
(By Head Coach Anthony Lynn’s fingerprints on the offense, do you mean that it seems more run focused than the Chargers maybe have been in the past on game film?) – “I don’t know if I want to go all the way in saying that. Some of the run game things, you can see some of the stuff that he’s done in the past. But it’s always … When you kind of have a staff that’s already been there you can kind of come in and with a fresh set of eyes and there’s some suggestions you can always make as far as to help (Offensive Coordinator) Coach (Ken) Whisenhunt out as far as his experiences, whether that be he likes doing gap scheme over outside zone or inside zone, and just trying to figure out the right way to use the running backs or how he sees it. It’s good for that offensive staff just getting a different perspective when you’ve got an offensive guy coming in and a lot of those guys have been together. So you can see that he’s had a little bit of an influence on some of the scheme runs they’ve done.”
(Chargers QB Philip Rivers is entering his 14th season, but what do you like about him at this point in his career?) – “It’s hard to put my finger on one thing. I’ve been on the other sideline so many times. I’ve always loved the way he’s competed. I love the fight that he has. It doesn’t matter what the score is, it’s never over with him. You’ve got to play a full 60 minutes. He always makes the big play. It just seems like you’re trying to go for the knockout punch and then all of the sudden, he makes a play and it’s a tight game and then he either figures out a way to win it or it’s going to come down to that last drive of the game, whether it be the team that I was on, on offense or them on offense. I don’t know if there’s been too many games that I’ve been involved with against him where it’s been too lopsided. Early in my career in Denver, there might have been a few games where they smacked us around pretty good and they were rolling really good with those big receivers. He’s a guy that seems to put the ball where he wants to put it the majority of the time.”
(Obviously QB Jay Cutler is super familiar with your system from Chicago, but is it fair to say that his challenge will be being more familiar with the guys around him and where is he in that process?) – “He has spent so much time with those guys since he’s gotten here. He’s been in Miami, really, his family stayed back in Nashville, so I think he’s bugging (the receivers) more than the other way around because I don’t know if he’s really got that much to do. He spends so much time with those guys, running routes after practice, they watch a lot of film together. It seems like those guys have been spending a lot of time together to make sure that they’re getting caught up to speed with how he sees things, how they see things. It seems like they really did a good job of trying to speed up the whole familiarity process between receivers, backs, tight ends and the quarterback.”
(Was it pretty easy for you to nudge QB Jay Cutler out of retirement, given your experience together?) – “That might be a better question for him. I guess in my brain, I would say yes, but you’d really have to ask him. At first, I think he was just (asking himself) ‘Can I get back in there after not doing anything all spring and most of training camp?’ It’s really the pass rush. You’ve really got to get used to being in that pocket again (and get) the feel of where to slide, when to take off, when to stand in there; but it seems like what he has to go up against in our defense every day, he got caught up pretty quick.”
(Everybody knows that your situation is not optimal right now, it’s not like it was supposed to go. Can you name three things that you feel really good about your team right now because of the situation that you are in?) – “I feel good about our leadership with our players. Our veteran players have been outstanding through this whole process. I feel really good about the resiliency that we have as a group. We’ve been together now a year and a half and we’ve battled a few things, nothing necessarily like this. It’s a different obstacle we’re going through because it’s really a non-football related type of thing; but the resiliency this group has, these guys are fighters. When any adversity hits, these guys just put their head down and keep working.”
(As far as Sunday goes, it’s such a unique situation. I don’t know that anybody knows exactly what to expect having an NFL game in front of 27,000 people. Is it even possible for that environment to have an effect on an offense with noise? Are you curious to see what it’s going to sound like in a stadium that size?) – “It’s really something I don’t really worry about. We’re treating it like we’re on the road anywhere else and we’ll prepare accordingly, and we’ll adjust in-game if we have to. It’s not something that I’m really focusing on.”
