ChiefsPlanet - kcchiefs.com Press Conference with Herm 10/3

HERM EDWARDS PRESS CONFERENCE - 10/3
Oct 03, 2006, 3:14:45 PM

VIDEO: Herm Edwards - Real

HERM EDWARDS: “Just a little fundamental sketch of Arizona, they have some very good players on offense. Some good receivers, a good runner and obviously I think at this point, I don’t know if this is 100 percent accurate or not, but I think they are going to start QB Matt Leinart who is a very good quarterback, makes wise decisions and has a good release. I think they will be excited, the people in Arizona, about seeing him play in his first start at home, which is probably the best thing to do when you are starting a rookie quarterback, start them at home, that’s probably the mindset that they have.

“They are very good on third downs offensively and defensively. In the Red Zone they are very good when they get there and defensively they defend the end zone well. They are a team who has been in a lot of games; they are averaging about 21 points at home, so they can score points. They’ve got some weapons on offense. Defensively they are very quick. They’ve got a couple of good players in their secondary, one of their safeties is a very good player who comes down and blitzes a lot, a tough tackling defense. They are a speed defense similar to ours, they run to the ball very well and they’ve just been in a bunch of games where turnovers have hurt them. They’ve turned the ball over 11 times and when you do that it gets you. When you look at our league now, when you turn the ball over on the road, you’re minus one or more, your percent of winning is about 12 percent, so it’s not very good on the road. You’ve got to know that and when you turn the ball over at home, it’s not much better when you turn it over. The turnovers have gotten them. I know that (Cardinals head coach) Dennis Green is going to preach that, don’t turn the ball over, and if you don’t you always have a chance to win.

“This will be a big game in the fact for us that it is a road game, we haven’t played very well on the road, we’re going into a hostile environment and it will be a good test for us. We just had a win and now we can see how we handle winning. I think the way you handle it is you have to go win again. This is an environment where we have to play one of our better games if we are going to win.”

Q: Is QB Trent Green out for Sunday?

EDWARDS: “At this point, yeah. He will probably be around here this week. He hasn’t started to work out yet. so we’ll see as the doctors let him progress we can see where he is at, but I would assume that Damon Huard is our quarterback this week.”

Q: What about T Kyle Turley?

EDWARDS: “Turley is getting better. We’ll see this week if he is going to participate or not. At this point I don’t know that, he’s getting treatment, but he’s doing ok. He’s feeling better then he did last week, I know that.”

Q: What does your defense have to do to impress you?

EDWARDS: “Keep playing like this for 13 more games, they’ve got to keep doing what they are doing. It’s sad when you’re a defensive minded coach because they never get any credit. It was kind of that way when I was a player, I always assumed that you had to play a little bit better and do a little bit more. These guys understand that. They understand they’ve got to stay on this pace now. They can’t just go three games and then go ‘ok.’ We haven’t arrived yet, not by any stretch of the imagination. We’re still a work in progress like I keep saying, on both sides of the football. We just had one of those days on Sunday where everything fell in place. Now we’ll see where we are going on the road after a win. We haven’t won a game all year, so this is our first win. We’ll see how we handle winning after you win a game. Do you think you are pretty good? If so, we’re going to get ourselves in trouble.”

Q: Is that a test for you, because the Chiefs have not played well on the road?

EDWARDS: “Yeah, we have not played well on the road. We went to Denver, had a chance to win on the road and we didn’t do it. Right now we’re not very good on the road. Historically, for the last five years, we haven’t been very good on the road. We’re .400 on the road in the last five years. That’s not good. That’s not playoff caliber, so we’ve got to improve that.”

Q: In New York your team was good on the road. How do you take that experience and apply it to this team?

EDAWARDS: “I think they learned, hopefully, from our experience in Denver how to do that, how to keep the crowd out of it. You don’t allow the big plays, you don’t turn the ball over, you just kind of methodically just play the game and as you keep playing the game the crowd continues to stay out of the game and all of a sudden it’s the fourth quarter and you’ve got a chance. Or you get a lead and all of a sudden you turn the tables on them. There is a mindset you have to play with. I always tell them that when you go on the road, you’ve got to survive the first quarter and then you can’t turn the ball over. You cannot turn the ball over. If you watched the game last night a little bit, Green Bay was playing fairly well and then all of a sudden they turned the ball over. Then all of a sudden now the game is out of hand. You can’t do that. They survived the first half; they turned the ball over a couple of times too. Philly turned it over a couple of times going in. The visiting team, their kind of in the game in the second half, then you turn the ball over two or three times, game over. You can’t do that on the road. It getting to be an even more factor in our league, it’s unbelievable. You watch games and the games are pretty close and it’s kind of ugly. Nobody is really moving the ball and then all of a sudden there is a turn over and its three points. Then another turnover and its seven points. All of a sudden you have 10 points created by turnovers. You don’t survive those things, you don’t. If you look at the stats, and the stats don’t lie, I look at them every year and they don’t change. If you’re minus in turnover ratio on the road, your percent of winning is less than 10% in the league and you’re in trouble. Your team knows it. I’m not saying you can’t turn it over, but you better go and get some to get it back to even, because if you don’t you’re going down the wrong road.”

Q: Can you talk about how a defensive coordinator goes about preparing for a rookie quarterback making his first start?

EDWARDS: “Obviously you have to look at his strengths. His strengths are his ability to get rid of the ball, he has a quick release, his is a very smart quarterback. He reminds me a little bit of Jets QB Chad Pennington in the fact that he understands where his receivers are. I think he’s pretty good at reading his coverages. Now the speed of the game is a little big different here then it is in college. I think what you try to do is you try to give him some different looks. You obviously have to put him in the known downs to see how he handles them. I think for most quarterbacks in this league, and this is what separates the real good ones from the guys that are pretty good, is third down. That’s the big down for the quarterback in this league. Can you make the throw on third down to keep the drive alive? When you see the great ones, that’s what they do.”

Q: Do your eyes get a little bigger as a defensive coordinator when you face a guy making his debut?

EDWARDS: “You do, but you still have to be cautious because they thing they have is that they have some gifted wide receivers that can make plays and that’s always scary. They are just one play away from making the big play. When you can throw the ball and you’ve got some receivers who can jump up when they are covered and catch it, that’s what they do. This offense is kind of similar to the one that (Cardinals head coach) Denny (Green) had in Minnesota that we used to have to play twice a year. He had WR Randy Moss and all of those guys up there and you just shake your head because you knew they are going to test you vertically, they’re going to throw the ball down the field and you figured if they threw it five times, you survived it if you only let them complete two. If you let them hit on three or more, you weren’t winning the game. That’s what you have to defend when you play these guys and they’ve got a good runner in RB Edgerrin James. He (Green) is kind of building this thing like he built it in Minnesota. It takes a little time getting the pieces in order and Denny is a good football coach, he knows how to attack you offensively. That’s what you kind of have to look at when you play them.”

Q: How different will your preparations be when you are preparing for a veteran guy like QB Kurt Warner?

EDWARDS: “You look at what they try and do offensively and I think the quarterback is one part of it, but you still have to play in the pieces of what they have and they surround him as a quarterback with some talented guys that can make plays offensively. I think that Matt (Leinart) is a quick study, he understands that. He doesn’t have a lot of playing time in the NFL, I think every time he goes on the field he gains more confidence in himself of playing at this level. He’s a confident kid, I think he understands their offense and he’s got some gifted receivers. When you line up in that situation, you’ve got to be ready to play.”

Q: Your defensive game plan might not be that much different than it would be if QB Kurt Warner was playing?

EDWARDS: “Well, our plan is our plan and we are going to have a certain attack on how we are going to try and attack people in what we try to do. I think that every coordinator understands that when you go in, you’ve got to know what you can do. I always say that we have to play to our strengths on defense. You always try to take away some things that they do well and make them try and beat you with things they don’t’ do quite as well. To me it never changes when you play defense, you’ve got to stop the run. You’ve got to stop the run, period. If you don’t stop the run you are in trouble, I don’t care who you are. Any defensive coordinator will tell you that. They all say the same thing, the first thing you do in the room, you don’t even watch the passes. As soon as the week starts, you watch the run. You watch what they run, how they block the run, how are we going to stop the run, period. From there it goes to the passing game, then it’s third down, then it’s the Red Zone, but the main emphasis right away is you look at the teams and see who their runner and how do we stop them from running? What are their best run plays? If you can’t stop the run, forget it, I hope you can outscore them because it is going to be a long day for you.”

Q: RB Edgerrin James hasn’t really gotten on track yet. What’s been the situation out there?

EDWARDS: “A little bit of a new system. Their offensive line is still getting coordinated together and that has something to do with it. Edgerrin is a heck of a football player and what he can hurt you with is he comes out of the backfield and catch passes and make first downs for you to keep the chains going. When you look at their time of possession, they possess the ball about 30 minutes a game. About half the time they have the ball on offense and that’s not good. We don’t want to get into one of those games either where you get on the road and the home team has the ball over 30 minutes. That’s not good and I always say that defensively you want to be fresh and you don’t want to play over 30 minutes. That’s a concern right there and they are very good on third downs at 44 percent, so they are converting third downs and that time of possession is that 30 minutes. We’re going to have to play well on third down, I know that right now. That sticks out of my eye in my mind right now that they have 44 percent, that’s ok on third down. You’ve got to get off the field on third down.”

Q: How much of their struggles can be attributed to the offense?

EDWARDS: “I just think that they are holding everything in offensively. The thing is, it’s like anything else, when you go through a game that you turn the ball over a week before and everybody says their struggling, what happens? Players play better the next week so I anticipate that they are going to be at their best when they play us, so we better be looking forward for that.”

Q: Are you worried that it might be a problem with the praise your defense is getting?

EDWARDS: “What they are going to have to realize is don’t get distracted. Don’t get outside what we are trying to do. All of that doesn’t matter unless you continue to win and you are consistent. We have to be more consistent as we play and we don’t know how good we are yet. We won’t know that until the end of the year when it is all said and done. If you don’t win, it really doesn’t matter. We’ve got to win games, we’ve got to play defense a certain way. I think the thing that we have to never lose sight of is that we are going to be a tough football team in all three phases of the game. Offense, defense, special teams, at the end of the day we better play tough every week. If you don’t do that, it’s not good. We’re going to have to have that mindset every week. As far as accolades; accolades are accolades. Don’t worry about them, just line up and keep playing. Don’t worry about them, just don’t read your press release. Just keep playing and get better and we have to get better. We have to get better on defense and offensively.”

Q: How much of a load is it to get that first win off of your back?

EDWARDS: “I feel good for the players and the coaches because of what they put into it. I think it’s good for them to enjoy a win. It’s always better to win than lose. You get a little bit of confidence in yourself, you feel good about yourself. You feel good until Monday and then it goes away for me. You feel good Sunday night and generally on Monday you wake up and you get here early and I don’t feel good again, I want to win another game. That’s how I do it. I’ve always done it that way as a player and that’s what’s kind of sad because you have been in this league for a long time and you don’t enjoy those wins enough anymore because you are always worried about the next week. It’s a crazy game that we are involved in. It’s a short couple of hours of being happy and then you start thinking about next week. Because really, if you don’t win the next week, that one really doesn’t do you any good. You say, ‘one game and then we lost again.’ You don’t want that, you don’t want to get into that situation, you want to keep winning at that’s what we try to do.”

Q: What did you see in DT Steve Williams that made you want to promote him to the active roster?

EDWARDS: “We told players when we first arrived here that if you were a player and you were doing things that we asked you to do, you were going to get a chance. If you say it, you’ve got to go and do it. We’ve seen him progress practice after practice and felt that at this point we are going to bring this guy up; we’re going to let him play. He did, we put him in the game and he played. I think it sends a good message to your football team. I always tell players I don’t care how you get here. If you are on this team, you’re on this team. If you get an opportunity to play, you do what you are asked to do and we think you can be a productive player we’re going to put you on the field. Defensive line coach Tim Krumrie needs some credit on that and he’s coached the kid. The guy was a free agent, came in here and has worked his tail off and he needed an opportunity and played fairly well. He got about 20 plays and he’s in the rotation system with the defensive linemen and good for him. He worked at it, he deserves it and now he’s got to continue to get better. Now that he went through his first game, you can say well it’s my first game I played; well I’m already on him. I said, ‘you’ve got to improve now, you’re on film, so now you’ve got to get better.’ So that’s what he has to do.”