(on if the running backs are hitting the holes properly) Well, like I said, I think there are times when maybe we dont read our keys as well. There are times where were not doing as good a job up front. There are times that were running uphill; when I say that, were running right into a safety support system or something that weve got to get into a better play or call a better play, however that pans out. But I think its a lot of things. Its not just one thing, and its everybody having to do something a little bit better. We put a lot of extra attention into it last week. It didnt get a lot better this week. Were going to go put the same attention to it this next week. Weve got the people to do it, weve just got to keep battling to get it done.
(on how much the loss of C Steve McKinney has hurt the team) Starting off with Steve, Steve had a fine camp and was playing extremely well for us so naturally, you miss a player of Steves caliber. And we really miss him because he does a couple of things for us as a football team. He gave us flexibility at center and guard. He gave us the numbers on game day to where we only suited seven (offensive linemen), even though we only suited seven yesterday. So from that standpoint, his loss has been a tough one.
(on what was different that made the run game better last season) Well, as I said, last year at this time, actually if you go back and look, we were running the ball even less at this time last year than we are right now. So I dont know if thats encouraging or not because its still nowhere close to good enough. But how do you get better at something, John (McClain)? Youve just got to keep going, you know? I mean, we could go out there and throw the ball 55 times; thats not going to make us better running the ball. So were going down there this week playing one of the biggest, most physical football teams there is in the league, so theres a tremendous challenge there. But were still going to have to run the ball. Were going to have to go out there and try to run the ball and keep our third downs manageable, and were trying to keep this quarterback in one piece right now. We know weve got a guy who can go out there and throw it around. But for our football team to be successful, weve got to still try to run the football and try to establish the run because we cant let him drop back 35, 40 times a week. Its just not going to be good for us in the long haul.
(on if there is anything he can do up front to help the running game) Yesterday if you watched the game, we tried to spread the Dolphins out. Thats what we tried to do. We went to a lot of different personnel, spread the field trying to get a five to six man box and do some things a little bit different then we had in the past. When we looked at the game, we felt like we had some running lanes that we could do a better job of hitting. There were some times we didnt do as good a job up front, like I said. When youre struggling with something, youre right, you have to start searching. One of the things were doing today as a staff, we spent the whole morning evaluating ourselves. I like to do that about every four or five weeks. I dont like to wait until the end of the season and say why were we doing that half the year. We stop every four or five weeks and evaluate ourselves, so thats what we did today. Hopefully, we found a few answers and hopefully, were going to get better.
(on how much freedom QB Matt Schaub has to change plays and how could that prevent from running into bad situations) Our running game is taught as such that we dont mind running into eight-man fronts. The run game that we put in, we can adjust versus eight-man fronts. Thats something we have to do better, just to get better doing that. What I mean is, there were a couple time when we spread the field yesterday trying to get a five or six man box and all of a sudden we get a buzz safety of something that coming down in the hole, something that comes down very, very late that we cant get to or cant account for and all of sudden, you have a bad play. The way to fix that, we could give (QB) Matt (Schaub) more freedom. The way to fix that is to continue to throw the ball. People want to do that, so there are ways of attacking that. We have to come out of a game that we have 30 runs saying that we gave ourselves 30 good chances. We cant have 30 runs and say on 22 of them, we should have had something positive happen here, but on these eight, theres nothing we can do. You cant do that because youre wasting snaps.
