“We had opportunities. In that first quarter, we self-inflicted and that is our fault. We had every opportunity to come out and play better than we did and we didn’t do those things.”

(on if the defense is good enough to compete this year)

“They should be. We have six out of seven guys back from our front. We have a couple of veteran safeties that I think are capable and you would like to believe that our corners can do the job. We will find out. I don’t think the defense gave us an opportunity to win in the first quarter and I am disappointed. We had opportunities to stop them and unfortunately, we allowed them to get the first score on the first drive when we had opportunities to get off the field.”

(on the snowball effect of the defense’s bad start)

“I’m trying to tell the defense, ‘It’s just one (stop) at a time. One at a time, one at a time. Then you look up and you’re down 21-0, one at a time’s tough.”

“We just got outplayed in every phase of the game. We need to start fast on offense. Two three-and-outs is unacceptable.”

(on his own play)

“It is kind of frustrating when you are sitting on the sidelines thinking that you didn’t do anything that would change the outlook on things. When you self-evaluate yourself, what I did today wasn’t enough and I need to be better. You have to continuously keep moving the ball forward and I didn’t do that enough today. I am going to point the finger at myself first and say that my performance I put out there today wasn’t good enough.”

“When the score gets like that in the beginning, and we get off to a tough start, it just becomes hard. We tried to claw ourselves back in it before half, but we sputtered and settled for a field goal. If there was a mistake to be made that couldn’t be made, we made it.”

(on the offensive woes early on)

“We had no rhythm. We ran six plays, and we were down two scores. We did a bad job of not giving our defense a break after the first drive. We’ve got to do a better job of converting third downs and staying on the field. It just got away quickly.”

(on the offside penalty that kept Green Bay’s drive alive on the first possession)

“That was kind of the story of our day. A lot of critical errors and self-imposed negatives and penalties. Just a lot of stupid stuff.”

“It’s one thing when another team beats you, and it’s one thing when you do stuff that hurts you. A couple of times we jumped offside and that’s on us. The ball isn’t even snapped, there’s nothing they did and we’re jumping offside. We made a point of it during the week that [Aaron Rodgers] likes [to use] the hard count and we have to do a better job when we’re in those situations.”

(on if he’s concerned with how the defense has been playing)

“I don’t think concerned is the right word, we just have to be consistent. It’s shown throughout the whole year that when we’re playing well and doing our job, we can be pretty good, and when we’re not doing our jobs, stuff like this happens.”

“We understand that we’re not playing well, and it’s all about us going back and applying ourselves better. Obviously there’s some miscommunication and things going on defensively, and we just have to do a better job going out and competing at a higher level.”

(on the early penalties)

“It’s one of those things that we talked about all week. Third down and [Rodgers] hard-counting and [us] being disciplined, and that’s what it boils down to. We weren’t disciplined enough on defense to get them off the field and keep them out of the red zone, and ultimately it ended up hurting us.”

(on the defensive issues that aren’t going away)

“We can’t keep sitting around and waiting on things to happen. As a defense, we’ve got to go out and make things happen. Until we do that, this outcome is going to continue to be like this.”

“Defensively, we needed to stop Cam Newton. He was our focus all week, and we have a lot of respect for what he does and what he does in that scheme. We were able to get that done. Offensively, we wanted to get the ball on the perimeter, and the statistic that jumped out to me at halftime is I think we had 13 broken tackles. We executed our plan.”

(on how Jordy Nelson’s first touchdown set the tone)

“It’s important to score. That’s why we have been taking the ball, I think three or four weeks in a row. Taking the ball and not deferring on the coin toss. We wanted to get the ball in space. It was an excellent read by Aaron; he hit Jordy up the sideline; he breaks a tackle and scores. Big play production, you have to have it. That’s how you win in this league.”

“We had 21 first-quarter points so we made them pretty one-dimensional, which we wanted to do, especially the way Cam (Newton) ran the ball last week. That helped them out but they’re doing a good job covering guys, creating turnovers, and we’re holding on to the football pretty well.”

(on his streak without throwing an interception)

“It’s just being smart with the football. I’ve thrown a couple of offsides or 12 men on the field (penalties) so I think I’m getting them out of the way in those situations and taking better care of it in the ones that actually count.”

“They ran it, they ran it all right and we did a pretty good job of shutting it down, making sure we knew where to be especially after the success Miami had last week. So it was good to see, especially knowing that we might see a few more of these teams in the near future.”

“When the offense can score like that, when they’re clicking like that, and the defense can hold them like the first three drives and we can get 21-0, it’s hard to run after that. They had to do some catch-up.”