hypersensitiveZO6
07-26-2006, 09:49 AM
EDWARDS: “Obviously I thought CB Ty Law said everything that need to be said earlier. When I first go there, that was the big story. He was one of the better free-agents out there and with the Chiefs interested people kept asking if we were going to get him and I kept telling everyone that we were going to have to be patient. I’m a patient kind of man, I don’t panic about things and I think that when you know what you are trying to do you have to have patience, you can’t rush. When I was in New York, everything is kind of fast and that’s probably why they got on me a little bit because I am pretty patient about things.
“It all kind of worked out and I think it’s good for us, it’s good for Ty Law and it’s good for our football team. We got a good football player. I really admire his toughness. That’s what I learned about him last year. From afar we’ve always had conversations; we’ve had a good relationship when he came to the league. I actually scouted him at Michigan, so I go way back with this guy. I thought he was going to be a good player then when I first came out, I had him going in the first-round, he went in the first-round and history speaks for itself. I think being around the guy and coaching the guy last year on his bad foot with the type of season we had. A veteran guy, he showed up every week and played. There were some times when you think our record is not very good and there are a lot of guys getting injured. We had 15-20 guys every week and there were some new players added to our roster. He kept continuing to play; he played hurt.
“He’s a guy who is very competitive and I think what I like about him the most is that his standard of play is his standard of play. He doesn’t play to the level of competition. He has a way he’s going to play every week, he prepares himself to do that and that’s how he plays and why he’s been successful in this league. That’s why when he retires he’s probably going to go to the Hall of Fame. He has 46 interceptions in his career so far and I anticipate he’ll probably end up around 60 when it’s all said and done. That should be enough numbers to get him in there along with his Super Bowl rings and hopefully that can come to fruition here, too.
“I think his toughness is the thing I like most about Ty Law. He’s a tough guy who loves to compete on Sunday and that’s good to see out of a veteran guy. I am anticipating him having a good year for us. Last year he played on a bad foot and got 10 interceptions. Can he get 10 interceptions again? I don’t know that, but I think he is in great shape and he went this summer with Bob Kersee who has been his trainer for the last seven years. He couldn’t get him last year because his foot was hurting. He’s been there all this time and he was in St. Louis, right down the road, and we had conversations every once in a while. That was our conversation, it wasn’t anybody else’s. It was a two-way street, not a three-way street so no one needed to know our conversations and it all kind of worked out. It’s good for us and it’s good for him.”
Q: When you look at this defense, was he the missing piece?
EDWARDS: “When you have three corners who have played a lot of football that makes you sleep better a night as a secondary coach and a coordinator. I think with that being said, we’ve got two guys who have played a lot of football in CB Patrick Surtain and Law. CB Lenny Walls is a good player too so that helps you do things on defense. Is he the missing piece? I don’t know if he’s the missing piece, I think he’s a very good player and that helps you. There are still some things on defense we have to solve and we have to come to grips with. That will be a process at training camp and obviously when we start playing.”
Q: How bad was Law’s foot last year?
EDWARDS: “It was bad. A lesser guy couldn’t have done what he did. It was bad; there were times when he could only practice once a week. He had to do a lot of things to get ready to play, but when it came game time he was ready to play. There were times I looked at him and said he’s not going to be able to play, he can’t do it. He went out and played and he hobbled around like he was 50 years old or something. There were times when he looked like that when he was playing and we were going to pull him out of there. But he didn’t want to come out, he kept playing and eventually it got better. It would get dinged and he would fight through it. That’s what I like about the guy; he’s a very mentally tough guy.”
Q: How are you going to solve the left/right CB issue between Ty and Patrick Surtain?
EDWARDS: “That’s a good problem to have. He’s played both sides and so has Surtain. Lenny Walls has been a right corner for the most part so we won’t stir him. But the other two guys have flipped and flopped and have both played inside, too. I think there are a lot of things we can do with them and now it’s a matter of getting into camp and competing and we’ll see what’s best for our defense.”
Q: Has Lenny Walls become your leading candidate for the nickel spot over CB Benny Sapp?
EDWARDS: “No, I think Benny has been good nickel back for us and he will get to compete at that position. I think that Lenny is going to be an outside guy. He’s probably too tall of a guy to play inside for what we want to do inside, so we’ll keep him outside for now.”
Q: What effect do you think this will have on the team knowing that you have Ty Law going into camp?
EDWARDS: “This team is a good football team. This is not a team who hasn’t won. This team has won, we just haven’t been in the playoffs enough and that’s the hurdle we are facing now. That’s something we have to strive to be more consistent that way. I think this team has a lot of gifted players. Look at the number of Pro Bowl players they had last year. Maybe not on defense, but hopefully that’s going to change. I would assume that’s going to change.”
Q: Why did you make the move with the Jets last year to sign a guy with a bad foot?
EDWARDS: “I wanted the guy because we needed a corner. He was better than guys with two good feet.”
Q: Why should people believe that his foot is ready to go this year?
EDWARDS: “Last year we knew his foot was injured and that he was going to go through a transition period because he hadn’t done anything on it. We knew that going into the deal. That’s how we kind of practiced the guy, that’s why we kind of let him heal as he was playing. He was sore and he had to go through a whole season of doing that. He’s had a whole off-season where he has trained. Last year he couldn’t even train on his foot, he didn’t even do any training so you knew coming into training camp it was going to be sore. He had to do all of his training during the season and that’s very tough.”
Q: So training with Bob Kersee tells you that he’s ready?
EDWARDS: “Exactly, he did none of that last year. He’s down to 205 pounds right now. Last year he came in heavy because he couldn’t do anything. I knew mentally what type of guys he was and what he brought to the table. You can say what you want, but last time I checked he picked off 10 passes and went to the Pro Bowl. He had a pretty good year. We didn’t have a good season, but he had a pretty good year. I think we ended up third or fourth in pass defense so he did his job. We didn’t win enough games, but he played pretty good.”
Q: Money aside, did you feel you had an influence on him?
EDWARDS: “I don’t have an influence on anything. I’m just one of those guys that thinks if you keep talking and you keep those lines of communication open you eventually come the conclusion that things work out. We had conversations. He called me sometimes; I called him to see how he was doing. We just kept being patient, that’s all you can do and it all worked out.”
Q: What kind of teammate was he in New York last year?
EDWARDS: “He was good. He knew some guys on the team, but he had some things going on too that were tough. He had never been though a season like that, it was tough. Neither had I, we talk about it a lot how we’d never been though anything like that. It’s hard for a guy who has been somewhere to go somewhere new. It’s always hard for free agent guys when they change teams because they don’t want to feel like they are invading the locker room. Especially a guy like this, he’s a talented guy who brings a lot of exposure to himself the way he plays and rightly so. He’s going to come into the locker room and be quiet. He’s not a vocal guy, he doesn’t lead like that. He leads by how he prepares and how he practices. He didn’t want to take away from anybody. He’ll be that way here too. He won’t be boisterous and stuff like that. He’ll be Ty Law. If guys ask for information he will give it, he’ll help young guys, but he’s not looking for attention. This guy loves playing football. It’s not a hobby and it’s not about money to this guy. It’s about this guy leaving his legacy as a great football player. That’s what he believes in and that’s what he loves to do. When you watch him play, you will see it on Sunday.”
Q: How did he adjust to the NFL’s emphasis on illegal contact last year?
EDWARDS: “It took him a while. It took him about five or six weeks to get adjusted because he was a culprit early. He kept looking at me and I kept looking at him and said let me get this right, this rule is for you. Don’t you get it, don’t you understand that if you even breathe on a guy they are going to call it on you. Eventually he got it worked out. Early it cost him; he got a couple of interceptions and they called them back. He’s been under that system and now he knows, but he’s a physical guy. He’s a hands player. He’s going to play with his hands and he has that mentality. He going to get his hands on receivers and that’s a good thing, that’s never a bad thing.”
Q: Do you know how tough your football team is or is that something you are going to have to learn?
EDWARDS: “I think training camp brings out the toughness in you. The first day everyone is excited, everyone runs around, it’s like the first day of school. The second day of school is pretty good and then all of a sudden by the fifth day of school the teacher gives you homework for the weekend and you’re not very excited about school. Training camp is the same way. About the third day you start putting pads on and you start hitting, you wake up in the morning and you’re a little bit sore, those beds are not very comfortable. The conditions are kind of cave-manish. The air-conditioner is leaking and you don’t sleep at night, it’s bad. So now you have to get up and go do that again, that’s mental toughness to me. That says something about a guy. The older you get the harder it is to do.
“For me, I just want to see where we are at. We are going to have some practices where it’s going to be physical. It’s going to be intended to be a physical practice, but then after that you don’t try to beat your team up. You have to test their level a little bit, you have to find out what they are about, you have to see who is going to continue to go and who is going to back off because those are the guys who have to figure out how to push. I’ve got to know the hot buttons, what makes them go, what doesn’t make them go and how far I can take them. I’m not going to try and break them, but I want to know how tough we are and I think you establish that as a football team and your teammates see. That’s the whole thing about training camp, your teammates watch. They watch the guys and say, he’s hurt again. I don’t have to say it, they just look. There they go leaving the training room again. Those guys kind of discard themselves, that’s what’s good about training camp because it’s a level playing ground and everyone goes through the same conditions. No one has a bigger house, the car doesn’t matter. None of that makes a difference, we are all the same. We have to go out there and we have to go practice. You got to get hit and you’re sore and you’re hurt and you’ve got to go to bed and you’ve got to get up in the morning. It’s all the same for everybody. It doesn’t matter if you are a $1 million player or a $5 million player, we all do the same thing, it’s great. Even the coaches, you find out about your coaches too. Some of them want to leave and go to the hotel to sleep. You can’t do that, you’re in the dorms. It’s good and I think that’s what you find out about your team.”
Q: You have a couple guys on the roster with Super Bowl rings, what does that bring to the team?
EDWARDS: “I think sometimes we jump ahead too far. We worry about Super Bowl’s, but you can win a Super Bowl unless you win your first games. That’s the one that’s important. You can’t win a Super Bowl enough times. You might luck into there every once in a while and have a great season a go, but most of the time you have to be a consistent playoff football team. That’s what this team needs to become. We need to become a consistent playoff team. My belief is this, a lot like baseball; if you get up enough and keep swinging eventually you are going to hit it. But if you never get to swing, you can’t hit it. We have to learn how to swing. We have to get into the playoffs. We have to know what it means to be a successful playoff team. That’s the step that we have to take as a football team. That’s got to be one of our goals. That’s not the only goal, but it’s one of our goals. The goal before that has to be that we have to win a game. We haven’t won a game yet. Every coach right now is feeling great. We are all undefeated, every city is happy. We’re all undefeated and it’s great to be a football coach right now. To me, we have to get ready for Cincinnati. Going to training camp, there might be a guy that goes to training camp somewhere else that might be on our football team when we open up. So we don’t know what our team is right now.”
Q: Do you feel that you have been given everything you could ask for from the Chiefs?
EDWARDS: “We’ve done everything we can do to get players here and that’s all that you can ask. If some of them get hurt, the next guy has to go play. The last time I checked, they don’t cancel games they really don’t. They kick it off at 12:00 and I have to line 11 guys up there of offense and defense. The 11 that are available will go out there and play and that’s how we’ll play. That’s what we’re going to do every Sunday. Getting good players always helps you to be a better coach, but then you have to play together as a team. This team has good players. They had good players before I got here. We have to learn how to play together as a team. When we start going that then we will become a playoff team and that’s the difference. Great players don’t make it automatic that you go to the Super Bowl. I know that from the guy that taught me that, Dick Vermeil. I went to a Super Bowl with 22 free agents on the team. It’s a team. That’s why they call it the Kansas City Chiefs football team. It’s not golf, it’s not tennis, it’s a team and we have to play together. When we learn how to play together we will be a playoff team and that is very important.”
Q: How do you change a team mindset?
EDWARDS: “I think your mindset is what you believe. And you have to make sure that they understand you can achieve some things if you believe. Don’t be afraid to believe. I think sometimes what we do is look at things and say we can’t do that. You can do anything you want, but you have to believe and you have to coach them in a manner that they understand these are the steps it takes to get there and there’s a way you go about doing that. We started out in the spring and now we’re going to the next step. A lot of guys in the spring look good because they play in shorts, but now we are going to find out that maybe the guys who didn’t look as good; they put the helmets and pads on and get ready to hit somebody, now they look better than some of the guys who ran around here in shorts. You find out a little more about your team and that’s important, too.”
Q: When did you know that Ty was going to be a Kansas City Chief?
EDWARDS: “Probably last week. I was up in Tahoe. I had a pretty good sense that it was all going to unfold. I couldn’t say anything; somebody asked me that question and I said I had no idea because it’s not up to me. I don’t do the contracts”
“It all kind of worked out and I think it’s good for us, it’s good for Ty Law and it’s good for our football team. We got a good football player. I really admire his toughness. That’s what I learned about him last year. From afar we’ve always had conversations; we’ve had a good relationship when he came to the league. I actually scouted him at Michigan, so I go way back with this guy. I thought he was going to be a good player then when I first came out, I had him going in the first-round, he went in the first-round and history speaks for itself. I think being around the guy and coaching the guy last year on his bad foot with the type of season we had. A veteran guy, he showed up every week and played. There were some times when you think our record is not very good and there are a lot of guys getting injured. We had 15-20 guys every week and there were some new players added to our roster. He kept continuing to play; he played hurt.
“He’s a guy who is very competitive and I think what I like about him the most is that his standard of play is his standard of play. He doesn’t play to the level of competition. He has a way he’s going to play every week, he prepares himself to do that and that’s how he plays and why he’s been successful in this league. That’s why when he retires he’s probably going to go to the Hall of Fame. He has 46 interceptions in his career so far and I anticipate he’ll probably end up around 60 when it’s all said and done. That should be enough numbers to get him in there along with his Super Bowl rings and hopefully that can come to fruition here, too.
“I think his toughness is the thing I like most about Ty Law. He’s a tough guy who loves to compete on Sunday and that’s good to see out of a veteran guy. I am anticipating him having a good year for us. Last year he played on a bad foot and got 10 interceptions. Can he get 10 interceptions again? I don’t know that, but I think he is in great shape and he went this summer with Bob Kersee who has been his trainer for the last seven years. He couldn’t get him last year because his foot was hurting. He’s been there all this time and he was in St. Louis, right down the road, and we had conversations every once in a while. That was our conversation, it wasn’t anybody else’s. It was a two-way street, not a three-way street so no one needed to know our conversations and it all kind of worked out. It’s good for us and it’s good for him.”
Q: When you look at this defense, was he the missing piece?
EDWARDS: “When you have three corners who have played a lot of football that makes you sleep better a night as a secondary coach and a coordinator. I think with that being said, we’ve got two guys who have played a lot of football in CB Patrick Surtain and Law. CB Lenny Walls is a good player too so that helps you do things on defense. Is he the missing piece? I don’t know if he’s the missing piece, I think he’s a very good player and that helps you. There are still some things on defense we have to solve and we have to come to grips with. That will be a process at training camp and obviously when we start playing.”
Q: How bad was Law’s foot last year?
EDWARDS: “It was bad. A lesser guy couldn’t have done what he did. It was bad; there were times when he could only practice once a week. He had to do a lot of things to get ready to play, but when it came game time he was ready to play. There were times I looked at him and said he’s not going to be able to play, he can’t do it. He went out and played and he hobbled around like he was 50 years old or something. There were times when he looked like that when he was playing and we were going to pull him out of there. But he didn’t want to come out, he kept playing and eventually it got better. It would get dinged and he would fight through it. That’s what I like about the guy; he’s a very mentally tough guy.”
Q: How are you going to solve the left/right CB issue between Ty and Patrick Surtain?
EDWARDS: “That’s a good problem to have. He’s played both sides and so has Surtain. Lenny Walls has been a right corner for the most part so we won’t stir him. But the other two guys have flipped and flopped and have both played inside, too. I think there are a lot of things we can do with them and now it’s a matter of getting into camp and competing and we’ll see what’s best for our defense.”
Q: Has Lenny Walls become your leading candidate for the nickel spot over CB Benny Sapp?
EDWARDS: “No, I think Benny has been good nickel back for us and he will get to compete at that position. I think that Lenny is going to be an outside guy. He’s probably too tall of a guy to play inside for what we want to do inside, so we’ll keep him outside for now.”
Q: What effect do you think this will have on the team knowing that you have Ty Law going into camp?
EDWARDS: “This team is a good football team. This is not a team who hasn’t won. This team has won, we just haven’t been in the playoffs enough and that’s the hurdle we are facing now. That’s something we have to strive to be more consistent that way. I think this team has a lot of gifted players. Look at the number of Pro Bowl players they had last year. Maybe not on defense, but hopefully that’s going to change. I would assume that’s going to change.”
Q: Why did you make the move with the Jets last year to sign a guy with a bad foot?
EDWARDS: “I wanted the guy because we needed a corner. He was better than guys with two good feet.”
Q: Why should people believe that his foot is ready to go this year?
EDWARDS: “Last year we knew his foot was injured and that he was going to go through a transition period because he hadn’t done anything on it. We knew that going into the deal. That’s how we kind of practiced the guy, that’s why we kind of let him heal as he was playing. He was sore and he had to go through a whole season of doing that. He’s had a whole off-season where he has trained. Last year he couldn’t even train on his foot, he didn’t even do any training so you knew coming into training camp it was going to be sore. He had to do all of his training during the season and that’s very tough.”
Q: So training with Bob Kersee tells you that he’s ready?
EDWARDS: “Exactly, he did none of that last year. He’s down to 205 pounds right now. Last year he came in heavy because he couldn’t do anything. I knew mentally what type of guys he was and what he brought to the table. You can say what you want, but last time I checked he picked off 10 passes and went to the Pro Bowl. He had a pretty good year. We didn’t have a good season, but he had a pretty good year. I think we ended up third or fourth in pass defense so he did his job. We didn’t win enough games, but he played pretty good.”
Q: Money aside, did you feel you had an influence on him?
EDWARDS: “I don’t have an influence on anything. I’m just one of those guys that thinks if you keep talking and you keep those lines of communication open you eventually come the conclusion that things work out. We had conversations. He called me sometimes; I called him to see how he was doing. We just kept being patient, that’s all you can do and it all worked out.”
Q: What kind of teammate was he in New York last year?
EDWARDS: “He was good. He knew some guys on the team, but he had some things going on too that were tough. He had never been though a season like that, it was tough. Neither had I, we talk about it a lot how we’d never been though anything like that. It’s hard for a guy who has been somewhere to go somewhere new. It’s always hard for free agent guys when they change teams because they don’t want to feel like they are invading the locker room. Especially a guy like this, he’s a talented guy who brings a lot of exposure to himself the way he plays and rightly so. He’s going to come into the locker room and be quiet. He’s not a vocal guy, he doesn’t lead like that. He leads by how he prepares and how he practices. He didn’t want to take away from anybody. He’ll be that way here too. He won’t be boisterous and stuff like that. He’ll be Ty Law. If guys ask for information he will give it, he’ll help young guys, but he’s not looking for attention. This guy loves playing football. It’s not a hobby and it’s not about money to this guy. It’s about this guy leaving his legacy as a great football player. That’s what he believes in and that’s what he loves to do. When you watch him play, you will see it on Sunday.”
Q: How did he adjust to the NFL’s emphasis on illegal contact last year?
EDWARDS: “It took him a while. It took him about five or six weeks to get adjusted because he was a culprit early. He kept looking at me and I kept looking at him and said let me get this right, this rule is for you. Don’t you get it, don’t you understand that if you even breathe on a guy they are going to call it on you. Eventually he got it worked out. Early it cost him; he got a couple of interceptions and they called them back. He’s been under that system and now he knows, but he’s a physical guy. He’s a hands player. He’s going to play with his hands and he has that mentality. He going to get his hands on receivers and that’s a good thing, that’s never a bad thing.”
Q: Do you know how tough your football team is or is that something you are going to have to learn?
EDWARDS: “I think training camp brings out the toughness in you. The first day everyone is excited, everyone runs around, it’s like the first day of school. The second day of school is pretty good and then all of a sudden by the fifth day of school the teacher gives you homework for the weekend and you’re not very excited about school. Training camp is the same way. About the third day you start putting pads on and you start hitting, you wake up in the morning and you’re a little bit sore, those beds are not very comfortable. The conditions are kind of cave-manish. The air-conditioner is leaking and you don’t sleep at night, it’s bad. So now you have to get up and go do that again, that’s mental toughness to me. That says something about a guy. The older you get the harder it is to do.
“For me, I just want to see where we are at. We are going to have some practices where it’s going to be physical. It’s going to be intended to be a physical practice, but then after that you don’t try to beat your team up. You have to test their level a little bit, you have to find out what they are about, you have to see who is going to continue to go and who is going to back off because those are the guys who have to figure out how to push. I’ve got to know the hot buttons, what makes them go, what doesn’t make them go and how far I can take them. I’m not going to try and break them, but I want to know how tough we are and I think you establish that as a football team and your teammates see. That’s the whole thing about training camp, your teammates watch. They watch the guys and say, he’s hurt again. I don’t have to say it, they just look. There they go leaving the training room again. Those guys kind of discard themselves, that’s what’s good about training camp because it’s a level playing ground and everyone goes through the same conditions. No one has a bigger house, the car doesn’t matter. None of that makes a difference, we are all the same. We have to go out there and we have to go practice. You got to get hit and you’re sore and you’re hurt and you’ve got to go to bed and you’ve got to get up in the morning. It’s all the same for everybody. It doesn’t matter if you are a $1 million player or a $5 million player, we all do the same thing, it’s great. Even the coaches, you find out about your coaches too. Some of them want to leave and go to the hotel to sleep. You can’t do that, you’re in the dorms. It’s good and I think that’s what you find out about your team.”
Q: You have a couple guys on the roster with Super Bowl rings, what does that bring to the team?
EDWARDS: “I think sometimes we jump ahead too far. We worry about Super Bowl’s, but you can win a Super Bowl unless you win your first games. That’s the one that’s important. You can’t win a Super Bowl enough times. You might luck into there every once in a while and have a great season a go, but most of the time you have to be a consistent playoff football team. That’s what this team needs to become. We need to become a consistent playoff team. My belief is this, a lot like baseball; if you get up enough and keep swinging eventually you are going to hit it. But if you never get to swing, you can’t hit it. We have to learn how to swing. We have to get into the playoffs. We have to know what it means to be a successful playoff team. That’s the step that we have to take as a football team. That’s got to be one of our goals. That’s not the only goal, but it’s one of our goals. The goal before that has to be that we have to win a game. We haven’t won a game yet. Every coach right now is feeling great. We are all undefeated, every city is happy. We’re all undefeated and it’s great to be a football coach right now. To me, we have to get ready for Cincinnati. Going to training camp, there might be a guy that goes to training camp somewhere else that might be on our football team when we open up. So we don’t know what our team is right now.”
Q: Do you feel that you have been given everything you could ask for from the Chiefs?
EDWARDS: “We’ve done everything we can do to get players here and that’s all that you can ask. If some of them get hurt, the next guy has to go play. The last time I checked, they don’t cancel games they really don’t. They kick it off at 12:00 and I have to line 11 guys up there of offense and defense. The 11 that are available will go out there and play and that’s how we’ll play. That’s what we’re going to do every Sunday. Getting good players always helps you to be a better coach, but then you have to play together as a team. This team has good players. They had good players before I got here. We have to learn how to play together as a team. When we start going that then we will become a playoff team and that’s the difference. Great players don’t make it automatic that you go to the Super Bowl. I know that from the guy that taught me that, Dick Vermeil. I went to a Super Bowl with 22 free agents on the team. It’s a team. That’s why they call it the Kansas City Chiefs football team. It’s not golf, it’s not tennis, it’s a team and we have to play together. When we learn how to play together we will be a playoff team and that is very important.”
Q: How do you change a team mindset?
EDWARDS: “I think your mindset is what you believe. And you have to make sure that they understand you can achieve some things if you believe. Don’t be afraid to believe. I think sometimes what we do is look at things and say we can’t do that. You can do anything you want, but you have to believe and you have to coach them in a manner that they understand these are the steps it takes to get there and there’s a way you go about doing that. We started out in the spring and now we’re going to the next step. A lot of guys in the spring look good because they play in shorts, but now we are going to find out that maybe the guys who didn’t look as good; they put the helmets and pads on and get ready to hit somebody, now they look better than some of the guys who ran around here in shorts. You find out a little more about your team and that’s important, too.”
Q: When did you know that Ty was going to be a Kansas City Chief?
EDWARDS: “Probably last week. I was up in Tahoe. I had a pretty good sense that it was all going to unfold. I couldn’t say anything; somebody asked me that question and I said I had no idea because it’s not up to me. I don’t do the contracts”