Opening statement
Monday, Sept 14.
“By midnight tonight, there are going to be 16 teams in the NFL that are going to be dealing with a loss and losses are a fact of life in the NFL. I was with a team in Nashville that started 0-5 and fought back and almost went to the playoffs. I was on a team that started 1-4 and ended up in the AFC Championship game. We’ve seen teams like the Pittsburgh Steelers lose three in a row and go to the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl. We’ve seen teams like Indianapolis – I think they lost three out of their last five the year they won the Super Bowl.
“Every team loses; it’s a fact of life in the NFL. The way that you deal with it and what happens as a result of the loss is what separates the good teams from the bad teams. Teams that don’t make the same mistakes over and over again, teams that learn from their mistakes are teams that win those battles. I told the team, there are a lot of things that go into dealing with a loss. No. 1 is: know exactly what happened; you can’t deal with it (and) you can’t put it behind you if you don’t know what happened. We needed to identify what happened, we need to address it and then we need to put those mistakes behind us and that’s the players’ job to be able to execute and not let those mistakes happen again. It’s the coach’s job to identify the mistakes, to come up with solutions and it’s the player’s job to execute those. That’s going to be our challenge.
“Every team deals with losses, we’re no different than anybody else. Our challenge is putting it behind us, staying in the right frame of mind and going forward.”
In Play! Magazine
