Black and Blue Review
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“You expect to win every week. I don’t expect to come in (somewhere) and get beat. When we win, I am satisfied. I am excited about it. I am delighted. Still, it is what we expect.”
(On what is the difference between today’s game and the first game against the Saints in Charlotte)
“We scored early (today). We had opportunities the last time that we played them. We get takeaways early, but we didn’t put points on the board. This is the kind of offense (the Saints) that if you don’t score early, you let them back in the game, they will get you. Coach Payton does a tremendous job with it, his attacking style of football on the offensive side. If you don’t score points off of the takeaways, if you don’t score points off of field position, he will come back to get you. We know that. That is the sense of urgency that we talked about, understanding that we needed touchdowns. You can’t kick field goals against this team and expect to win.”
(On what he saw during the scuffle between teams in the first half)
“I just saw somebody push our quarterback. I thought that our guys reacted. It’s unfortunate that it happened that way, but it’s kind of also part of the game.”
(On if the first drive of the game was perfect)
“I think so. I think that Mike (Shula) has called good games. It is good to see us complete one. You can go back and talk about all of the different games that we’ve lost and some of the early drives that we have had. This one culminated in a touchdown. They can’t culminate in field goals.”
“We got the ball and started fast. Mike (Tolbert) started us off with a great catch and then we went down the
field and scored and set the tone for the rest of the game. When you execute like that, it’s fun to watch and
when you don’t, it’s hard to watch. So as an offense, my job is to put up points any which way possible, and
when the offensive line is playing as well as they did today, and our running backs are running like they were,
and our guys are catching the ball like they were; it’s hard to lose.”
(on fracas that followed his TD)
“There was a lot of testosterone on that field at one time, so it’s bound to happen whenever you have a bunch of alphas so to speak. Somebody out there has to have a alpha mentality and I don’t think there were many alphas out there at the end of that one play. I am glad we got the touchdown, however, as I felt that touchdown drive set the tone for the rest of the game.”
(on subdued reaction after first win in two months)
“It’s business. You can’t flare up, or you can’t be outside your character when you’re doing things that you’re supposed to do. Of course I’m happy right now, but yet, we’ve still got our work cut out for us. There’s a lot of things that have to work our way.”
“I thought that was the biggest difference, when we came out early and got the first touchdown to take the lead. When you look at our season so far, we’ve moved the ball well but then all we end up with are field goals. So I think, today, that play was the kind of momentum we needed to get us going on both sides of the ball.”
(on beating the Saints by 31 points)
“We were on a mission this week. Everybody was dialed in, tuned-in. The fast-pace, everybody was real tuned-in on their assignments. It was a real good week of practice, and you could just tell it was a different mindset this week.”
(on fast start)
“Obviously we got off to a really good start. That first drive set the tone and got us settled into the game. That opening drive – the no huddle and us executing well – really quieted the crowd. We had good rhythm and a good mix of pass and run. When you’re balanced like that and setting tempo, it keeps defensives off balance – especially defensives that like to attack. When it’s on, we are pretty good at it.”
(on Cam Newton’s game)
“When he’s in control like that, he’s as good as there is, man. His ability to run, extend plays, designed runs. Passing game, we were efficient. It wasn’t anything magical, it was just efficient offensive football from the opening snap. It was fun. It was enjoyable.”
(on the offense’s performance)
“It feels like this is the day we’ve been talking about trying to have on a lot more negative postgame press conferences. But now we need to sustain it. Now we’ve seen we’re capable of it. We have to keep this formula going. This is who we are, this is what we’re good at, we’ve known that, we just have to continue to execute it.”
“I don’t care what people say about us outside of this locker room. We come in and we work, and I got a lot of messages this week with people telling me what they thought about this game. But, you know, at the end of the day, we all have to go out there and produce and do it on the field and we did a great job of doing that today.”
(on holding the Saints to 10 points)
“It was awesome. Knowing how high-powered their offense is, knowing what they’re capable of doing offensively in putting up points and scoring on you, it was definitely huge for this defense, and it’s huge for our confidence moving forward the rest of the season.”
“I wanted to be outside leverage on him and force him back into me, and when I did that I held onto him. And then when I knew I did that I put my hand in there a little bit on the ball and it came out and I was ecstatic. That was a play I felt we needed to give the ball back to the offense and once they got going, the defense did (its) job to help our team get the victory.”
(on silencing the Superdome)
“They have an amazing fan base and you come in here and it’s loud. It’s real loud. And when you come in here and can hear crickets or hear everyone booing, as an opponent that’s awesome. That’s the greatest feeling you can ever have knowing you whipped some tail.”
“Obviously that’s embarrassing: how we played, how we coached. You pick an area, you pick a phase and it
was awful. You’re not going to have a chance to win when you turn it over that frequently in the first quarter,
you don’t tackle, you give up almost 300 yards rushing, (and) jump(ing) offsides. You name it, check it off.”
(On the first thing to address this week)
“I think two or three specific things. I thought it was sloppy, I don’t know how many balls we dropped. We’re jumping to catch passes we don’t need to jump to catch, we should be catching them in our hands. We fumbled the ball, interception. Defensively, our tackling was awful. They were almost near 300 yards rushing. It was awful. On top of that, you can’t make dumb mistakes like jump offsides when a team is getting ready to punt or kick a field goal. It happened earlier in the year at Cleveland: we were getting ready to defend a field goal, offsides. Those are things that are painfully obvious before you put the tape on. That’s the first thing to come to my mind.”
(On why so many problems at home)
“Let’s be clear on this because I think it’s a fair question. It’s happened on the road and at home. It probably has nothing to do with the building, the bricks, the venue. It probably has a lot more to do with you’re staring at it. You could be in Atlanta, you could be here, you could be in Cleveland. It’s disappointing here at home because the season started off with the idea being, ‘Can they play well on the road?’ That was half of the year. My point is it probably has nothing do with venue. You play like that, it doesn’t atter where we play: downtown, uptown, across the lake at Mandeville high school, or at another NFL venue. You play like that, it doesn’t matter really. That’s the unfortunate thing because you’d like to take advantage of our home crowd. We’ve had great support and we don’t even give them a chance because it’s two or three scores before they even sat down.”
(On if it is too late for personnel changes)
“Absolutely not. It’s not too late. And that’s not a threat. All I’m saying is it’s madness to be here after a game like that with our fans and say we will have it right next week. We’ll look at everything. That’s how our business is though. Obviously as inconsistent as we’ve played, as poor as we’ve played, and we’ve played poor, I’d say as bad as we’ve played in a while, this game. Obviously we’ve had some other games. This one was a tough one to look at and I’m sure it’ll be even tougher to look at on film. But we’ll cover it all.”
“They go down and score. They put a nice drive together and it’s 7-0. That’s no big deal. On the second play, we fumble and give the ball to them. They get some points. On the first play of the next drive, we take a shot and throw an interception. They go down and score. Within the first six minutes of the game, they’re up 17-0. We’d run three plays. Obviously, that can’t happen. We really didn’t find a rhythm in that first half. We couldn’t sustain any drives. Give them credit, but we certainly didn’t execute.”
“I wouldn’t use the word frustrating. I’d use embarrassing. To call yourself a professional football team and play that way at home, that is embarrassing. We are all embarrassed on how we performed. Carolina outplayed us from the beginning to the end. They outhit us. They outscored us. We couldn’t score on offense. We couldn’t stop them on defense. We got outcoached. Anything that could go wrong went wrong. As a professional, I’m embarrassed by the way I performed on national television. This is not how we should play. The scores should never be that lopsided especially with the talent that we have.”
“We got everything we deserved there. We did not come out ready to play. We turned the ball over. We could not run the ball. We couldn’t stay on schedule. We had no tempo. We got exactly what we deserved.”
(on still being alive in the NFC South standings)
“It does not matter if you aren’t winning. It’s irrelevant. There’s no reason to look at the standings in the NFC South if we can’t win a game. It won’t matter if we don’t come ready to play.”
“We were embarrassed. We apologize to our fans and our coaches. It’s on us as players. We take responsibility and we have to come out and take care of business. We didn’t do that and it was bad, bad football today”
(on the scuffle)
“(Cam Newton) was getting in our guys face and I don’t take kindly to that. I saw it as disrespect so I did what I thought I had to do.”