JIM SCHWARTZ
Opening statement from today's post game wrap up.
“When you’re in a close game like we were today, there are a lot of plays that you can look at and say, ‘That was the play of the game.’ It might have been the first quarter of the game, it might have been the last. But what we have to do as a team is we have to find a way to make one more play on offense and special teams and we have to find a way to prevent one more play on defense. That’s the bottom line with us. The opponent’s going to make some plays in the game. This is an outstanding defense we played against and we weren’t going to score every single time we had the ball.
On offense, they put some good numbers on the board after the middle of the season where they were struggling. We had to find a way to make one more play. That’s where we are. We didn’t get that done in this game. We made some plays. You can’t overlook that. Two plays with playmakers at the end of the first half: Jahvid Best and Calvin Johnson. We’ve had a lot of other situations like that but there were a lot of points in this game, and I don’t think any one more important than the other.
But there were a couple things. We can’t finish the game with the opponent taking a knee. We got stalled out on offense. We punted the ball. We didn’t do a very good job of punting because rather than pinning them back and making it dangerous for them to come out, we gave them the ball on the 20, and then defense never got the ball back for the offense in a one-score game. (It was) very similar to the Green Bay game, where we have to find a way to get the ball back for our offense. That was a poor job.
Offensively we had a couple shots right around midfield. We had a fourth-down play and we had a third-down play that were short yardage plays and we didn’t make those plays. That was the difference in this game. But to say one was more important than the other… there’s a lot that you could go back and look at a million different plays, but when you play close games, that’s what happens.”
