Mike Pouncey – October 4, 2017
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Wednesday, October 4, 2017
C Mike Pouncey
(Where do you think the offensive line is playing now as far as where it is compared to where it’s maximum potential could be?) – “We’ll see. Obviously as a unit, we’re not playing the way we need to be playing. We’ve got to rush the ball, we’ve got to run for more yards in the first half to give (Head) Coach (Adam Gase) confidence in us. I think we’ve got a ways to go, but it’s still early in the football season. We went out today, had a really good practice and (we’ll) just keep building off that.”
(How good is it to have a ‘normal week’ and be back and be home?) – “It feels good. I can’t wait to go out there and play in front of our home crowd. Obviously we can never use that as an excuse. We got dealt this schedule and we’ve just had to deal with it; but it feels good to finally be able to play in a home game.”
(That smile came out as soon as I said you finally have a normal week.) – “(Laughter) It’s just good, man. It’s good to be at home. Everything’s a little bit easier. You get to go on cadence. You don’t have to really worry about the crowd. We’re just excited to go play in front of our home crowd. We’ve been all over the world these past couple of weeks and it’s been a fun experience, but it’s definitely not the record we want to be at right now. We kind of put ourselves in a hole and we’ll dig our way out just like we always find a way to, and get better week by week.”
(Talking about digging yourself out of a hole, does last year’s slow start give you confidence that you can get out of this hole?) – “Just any season, it’s a long football season. We’ve only played three football games so far. Obviously we lost to two teams that we thought we should have beat. Those games right there add up at the end of the year when you’re trying to make the playoffs. That’s why I said we’ve got to dig ourselves out of this hole. When you’ve got teams that you’re expecting to beat, you’ve got to go beat those teams. Right now, we didn’t do that these last two weeks. We’ll work on that. We’ll get better as a football team. We’re excited to go against this Tennessee football team. They’re really good on defense. They get after the quarterback with their two edge rushers and they play the run really well. It’ll be a good task for our offensive line and we’re ready for it.”
(Is it attention to detail, just little details that you guys are screwing up?) – “Yes, I mean it is one thing on this play, another on another play. We’ve just got to start playing as a whole unit and once we do that, we’ve seen what that turns into, and that turns into our offense looking really good. We’ll get back on track this week and look forward to running the ball a lot more.”
(What do you have to do to try to get the running game going?) – “We’ve just got to stay on schedule with it and whenever we get there, whenever we get the calls, we’ve got to make sure we do really good at it to keep (Head) Coach (Adam Gase’s) confidence high in us running the football. Obviously if we’re losing three or four yards when we run the football, then he’s not going to go back to it. So it’s something we’ve got to do as an offensive line and pay attention to. Especially early in the football game, we have to run the ball really well.”
(What would you say the atmosphere has been like this week? Has there a lot of anger about the way things have started out?) – “Yes, obviously guys are mad. Any time you lose a football game, if you’re not mad, something’s wrong. I think that shows that you have a really good football team, guys that really care when they come in and they’re pissed off about a loss. That’s pretty much been the attitude this week. Guys are just very disappointed in how we played last week, especially on the offensive side of the ball. The defense has been playing really well these past couple of weeks. We’ve got to do a better job of keeping them off the field, stop going three-and-out and keeping those guys fresh, so that in the fourth quarter they can win some football games.”
(Did you sense that in practice today too?) – “Well you can’t ever get that sense. We’re running maybe 25 plays in practice. In a game, we’re running 60-70. I think today, we did a good job running the football during our run team periods. We’ll look at it on film, but we’ll have a lot of confidence going into this football game.”
(The attitude more, though, like the mood and the approach in practice today.) – “Like were guys wanting to be out there in practice today?”
(Well like you were saying, you guys were angry from last Sunday.) – “Yes, guys are pissed. There were fights today at practice. If that’s what you’re asking, yes. Guys are mad that we didn’t play well this past weekend, so we’ll do a better job of that.”
(What do you remember most from the Tennessee game last year when you faced those guys?) – “That we were down three starting offensive linemen before the game. This year we’ll have all of our guys. Last year we had a few starters out and we had some other guys in. We’ll see how we do against these guys with our starting group.”
(On running plays that have been bottled up at the line or behind the line, do you think it’s been mostly the individual linemen being beat physically by their guy? Has it been a little bit of communication stuff?) – “You can point out anything. At the end of the day, it’s just not getting the job done. What I think we’ve got to do is do a better job in the first half of football games to run the ball well. That gives (Head) Coach (Adam Gase) a lot of confidence. It opens up our offense a lot more. We can do play action and stuff like that. We’ll get it rolling this week.”
