Jeremy Rowell
September 25, 2007
Some thoughts from defensive coordinator Jeremy Rowell. FWIW, I’m in the camp that believes the guys are being put in the right place, but they’re not getting the job done.
You can’t be too happy with the defense right now, right?
Nope. I’m not. It’s fundamental stuff. We’ve got to tackle people. We’re there (in position), we’ve just got to tackle folks and we’re not doing it right now. It always comes and goes. I don’t know if it’s like the shanks in golf. I remember a couple of years ago we’re swearing up and down we’re the worst tackling team in America one game and then the next game we’re not. Is it because we don’t work on it? No, because we work on it all the time.
It’s being disciplined enough to go through your fundamentals and do what you’ve been taught to do. We’ve got to keep working harder on it and paying attention to detail is going to make it better.
There was an adjustment that Shawn Todd alluded to that you guys made against ULL
Instead of reading the end, they were reading the interior linemen on a zone read play. They hit us the first time and got eight yards. After that, we adjusted on the sidelines and had it fit right. But we’ve got to do better tackling. We had them fourth and something, they threw the screen and we had two guys tackling behind the line of scrimmage and we missed it. Same thing on another one, we had them fourth down in the fourth quarter when they scored, possibly more than once. We’ve got to make the plays to get them off the field.
What kind of message do you send to guys who aren’t getting it done? Pull them?
You can’t necessarily take your best players off the field and put somebody who probably hasn’t has many reps as they’ve had. We rotate guys pretty good and folks get reps. I wish I could say it was one person, but it’s a rash throughout the whole defense. Everybody had their opportunities to miss tackles and some people missed one and some missed five.
How many tackles was it that you guys missed?
It was around 25. If you miss 25 tackles, it’s going to be a long night for you. Obviously we had opportunities — we stopped them and we did stuff, but the series we did not do stuff we were supposed to, there it went.
Who’s playing well right now?
(Cornerbacks)Leodis (McKelvin) and Elbert Mack are playing pretty well. Boris (Lee) played hard the other night, he was sick. (DT) Marcus Pittman is playing pretty good for us right now. Marcus is playing one of the best up front right now and doing a very good job.
We’ve got to have some more consistency and do a better job tackling. If you tackle folks, you’ve got a chance to stop them. If you don’t tackle them, you’re not going to stop them.
