BB: As you know, we gave the players
a few days off. Everyone is back and ready to get going here on Buffalo. We spent some time on them last week; we also spent some time
trying to work on some things just generically that we need to do. But it looks
like it's pretty much the same story with Buffalo. Offensively: running
back, receivers, [Lee] Evans, mobile quarterback. Special teams: kickoff
returns – [Terrence] McGee had another
one yesterday. Active front: blitz-zone team – [Takeo] Spikes is back. So I
think it's a team that we're pretty familiar with, a team we obviously had a
lot of trouble with on opening day. We're lucky it wasn't 24-7 there in the
middle of the third quarter. We came within about a yard of it being in that
situation. The bye week is over for us. We're ready to get back to work, get
on to Buffalo, a division game on the road. It doesn't get any bigger than
that. It's a big challenge for us this week, to come back and try to play a
more competitive game, especially in the first two-and-a-half quarters than
we did against the Bills the last time we had them here in our place.
That's where we are.
Q: Were you happy with the progress you made last week?
BB: I think we got some things done. We'll see whether or not we can carry
those over on to the field. We worked on some different aspects of our game
– situational and just our regular first and second down stuff type of
things last week. I think we have a better understanding. We had some better
execution on the practice field. Hopefully that will carryover into Sunday.
Q: The trade deadline is tomorrow. Can you characterize what is going on
being the scenes? Is Scott [Pioli] busy on the phone calling around the
league? Is it quiet?
BB: Well, no. I think anytime you have a personnel deadline, whether it be a
75-cut, a 53-cut, a trade deadline, or the start or free agency, there's
always communication between teams, if nothing else, just to see what is
available for what the other teams are trying to do and whether or not that
fits into your needs or whatever it is you feel like might be an opportunity
for you. To me it's really no different than any other day. Everyday of the
year, all 365 of them, if we have an opportunity to improve our football
team we'll do it. We'll certainly look at it and investigate it. So whenever
those come around, that's what the personnel department does. That's what we
do. I'm sure that every team in the league is having some type of
conversation or information exchange. I've been involved in those for many
years. Sometimes you're working on something for a couple of weeks and it
never happens. Other times, you're not really thinking about something and
it comes together in a day or so. I don't know.
Q: Do you anticipate anything happening?
BB: I have no idea.
Q: Is it harder to finding willing partners to trade with at this point in
the season?
BB: I think every situation and every team is different. I don't know if any
two years, any two teams, or any two situations are the same. Sometimes it
comes together. Sometimes it doesn't. I wouldn't say that we're actively
trying to do anything, but I also wouldn't say that if the opportunity
wasn't there…if it was there, we would definitely look into it, just like we
would any other day of the year.
Q: Is there one deadline deal that you've been a part of that you can share?
BB: I'm trying to remember how many of these October type of trades… I don't
think I really been involved with too many of them. It was a lot more at the
53, right there, a week or two before the final roster in September. Part of
the problem now is everybody is kind of ingrained in five or six weeks in a
system and there's only two thirds of it left and one third of it is already
there and so to give up somebody now you'd really have to feel pretty good
about somebody else that you had. It's like getting a guy injured. Who wants
to get a guy injured and loose him for the rest of the season? Well, if you
trade him, that's basically what you're doing, depending on what you felt
like you'd get back in return. With each week that goes by, it's harder and
harder to part with people because every team is having trouble with depth
at one position or another. That's pretty much league wide. It would have to
be the right thing for both teams, whichever the two teams are. It wouldn't
surprise me if there were a couple of those. It wouldn't surprise me if
there weren't.
Q: Will the clock start on Patrick Pass this week?
BB: No, we won't start it this week.
Q: Are there certain disadvantages coming off the bye week that you have
because the other team you are playing played yesterday?
BB: Sure. I think there's a little bit of just being in a rhythm and being
in a flow and playing week to week. It's good to have a bye. It's good to
give some of our players a chance to get a little more treatment and get a
little rest. I think the most important thing for us is to come back off of
the little break that we've had here and get back to playing a higher level
of football than we were at when we left. We should be a little bit
healthier. We should be a little bit mentally and physically refreshed. But
now we have to transfer that potential energy and freshness, if you will,
into a more productive and more efficient football team. We'll see whether
or not we can do that. I hope we can.
Q: Is there a challenge at all to regain that energy?
BB: With the way the NFL schedule is, everybody has long weeks and short
weeks and bye weeks. That's just part of it. I don't think it's anything
that is not unprecedented. Just a little different schedule, a little
different routine. Hopefully we'll be able to make the most of it, but we'll
see.
Q: How does your practice schedule work today?
BB: We'll definitely start on Buffalo today and kind of get a little jump on
that and then have a normal week Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So
today is a little bit of a bonus day and then with what we did last week,
which was a little bit on Buffalo, but again probably more on just
generically what we need to do as a football team regardless of who the
opponent is.
Q: How much easier is it to prepare for the second game against a division
opponent?
BB: I think opening day is a tough game for everybody no matter who the team
is, no matter however many years they have been there or haven't been there.
It's a tough game to prepare for. It's equal because both teams are playing
with the same deck of cards. They know more about us. They've seen our team
this year. They've seen how we are different from in the past, or the same
as the case might be. We can start to see some of the trends and some of the
stronger patterns in their team whereas in the preseason you see patterns
but you just don't really know a lot of times how strong they're going to
be, or whether that was something they wanted to do in a preseason game, or
it was a function of personnel or something they just wanted to work on.
Whereas now, everybody is playing for keeps. You're seeing everybody's been
shot every week. I think your team is a lot easier to identify after five or
six regular-season games than it is after none. That being said, I think
that Buffalo has improved in a lot of areas. I hope that we have too, and
like I said, I hope that we can play more competitively against them,
especially in the first half than we did out here.
Q: Is there one thing that you think you are a lot better at than you were
in week one?
BB: I think we've improved everywhere, but again, that's all relative
because so has everybody else. It's about rate of improvement. I think we're
better offensively. I think we're better defensively. I think we're better
in the kicking game in terms of our execution. Again, so are our opponents.
I'd like to think that after six weeks we can improve some. We'd really have
a problem if we couldn't improve at all. Other teams are getting better too.
We saw last week against Miami. That's a good football team and it was a
very competitive game. It came down to a couple of plays, just like it seems
to do pretty much every week in this league.
Q: How much carryover is there in your game plan from the last time you
played Buffalo?
BB: I think probably a majority of it anyway, more than half. Unless a team
has made a dramatic change maybe. But in this case, I would say for the most
part Buffalo's personnel is pretty similar to what we saw in the first game
and so was ours, especially at a lot of the key positions. I think certainly
with the plays, there will be some wrinkles and there will be some things
that are probably the same that would be disguised a little differently so
the other team can't identify them or see them quite as quickly or
anticipate them. Again, fundamentally, however you're going to attack a
team, you're probably going to maintain a number of those elements the next
time that you play them again unless there's some dramatic change. It just
could be in fluctuation, in other words, Buffalo could play us a lot more in
a three or four wide receivers set than they did in the first game. That
isn't something that we haven't seen before, and they did it against us in
the first game, but they might decide to change their percentages or the
amount of plays that they do from one set or another. That could be a change
in game plan. I'm not saying that. I think that they're still going to run
those personnel groups because they have all year against every team, it
just may be a question of how much they would emphasize one over another.
Q: With their two young safeties, how much have they played and been on
the field at the same time?
BB: All the time. Other than when [Troy] Vincent got hurt against us and
[Ko] Simpson has come in. Simpson has played free safety and [Donte] Whitner has played strong safety in regular and their sub defenses. They really play
nickel. They don't usually play a sixth defensive back. That was [Jabari] Greer against us, but now it seems to be [Kiwaukee] Thomas. Simpson and Whitner, they're in there all the time. You won't have any problem finding
them. Every play.
Q: Has Jabar Gaffney been able to do a lot of stuff during the bye week?
BB: If there is ever a good time to bring a player onto your team, this
is it, because you're not so in depth into a game plan situation that you're
trying to merge and learn in a system and learn a specific game plan. Last
week, we were able to take some time with Jabar and Brian [Daboll], the
receivers coach, to just sit down with him and just go through our basic
passing game, and route adjustments, and rules, and splits, and depths, and
all those kind of things that you have to go through. Now we'll try to apply
that to a specific game plan against Buffalo. When you're trying to do all
of that in one week, it just becomes a little bit more of a challenge. You
kind of tend to neglect some of your basic fundamental stuff and make it
more specific toward the game because, 'Well, we're only running these plays
in the game. Don't worry about these other 20 because we're not going to
call them.' Whereas from a teaching standpoint, I think a lot of times it's
better if you can just go through the normal teaching progression like you
do in training camp or passing camp and try to get the player to understand
the whole game and then select things on a week-to-week basis. Obviously,
it's accelerated. It's not like training camp in two days. It's two days
plus the extra days over the weekend to at least study and review and
assemble and comprehend the information, which Jabar is a pretty smart guy.
He understands passing concepts and understands terminology and those kinds
of things. Again, I think some of it is similar to what he did in Houston.
There's a little background there. We'll see how it goes. If you could ever
bring a player in, I think it's better to bring him in when you don't have a
game than when you do. It's just a little bit less of a rush job. There's
only one opportunity in 16 weeks usually for that to happen so it's usually
the other way around. |
