He was right. I was wrong. He was the better player and he proved it. He's one of the great leaders I've had in the time I've been coaching. |
I don't know how many adjectives I can use on this guy. He's stout, he's quick, he runs downhill. Somebody has to miss a block for this guy to have a minus play. That is kind of the philosophy [head coach John Fox] believes in and we all believe in on how to run an offense. |
I kid him all the time, he's like a classic automobile. You only take him out on Sunday afternoon for a drive. You don't rev him up too much. But you do hit the gas once in a while just to remember what it was like when it was great. |
I knew when we went there that their defense was good. We didn't know it was as good as it was. |
I think the risk would be inherent in not feeding the ball to Steve. He's the best guy to have the ball in his hands on our team. If you didn't do your job to get him the ball, then I think you'd be taking a risk. |
If you look at the [passer] rating in all of his playoff games, it rivals anybody's. |
It was kind of in our minds that they were a little short there. |
Jake was tremendously determined to play well because he felt badly about the last time. Not just him, but me and everybody else on the offense felt like we kind of gave this one away the last time. |
Jake's a day trader. He's not into mutual funds. He's not looking to see if he can find an interest-bearing account or dividend stocks. He wants to hit the high-flyers. |
John allows people to do their jobs by not micro-managing. Yet, at the same time, he stays on top of everything. He allows and encourages people to be creative. There's a great deal of dialogue and discourse that takes place among the coaching staff about the way things should be. Some people have a tendency in the way they manage to mute that. John does a good job of allowing healthy confrontation, because it brings out better ideas and decisions. |
John is super committed to his plan. Everybody has a plan. But the key to John is that he sticks to it. |
The thing is people want to work for John Fox. He brings a certain energy to what we do. |
There's going to be a lot of temptation on people around the league this year on (wide receiver) Terrell Owens. I can tell you right now, we won't be involved in that temptation. That's part of the plan. |
We knew Chicago was a good team going in there. We didn't know it was as good as it is on defense. We made a couple of errors, and they got ahead. That's the way they like to play. |
We started this after the 2003 season. We prepared for this to be part of our plan: to have Steve and Jake have different signals and the ability to change plays at the line of scrimmage. |