Videos and excerpts from our three coordinators at their weekly news conferences on Thursday afternoon at the Atlantic Health Jets Training Center:
OFFENSIVE COORDINATOR MARTY MORNHINWEG
**
**
Mornhinweg on his offense coming off the win over the Saints and the bye and heading to Buffalo...
We're nowhere near where we want to be, need to be or will be, but the players are really putting in the hard work and preparation. The mentality is we need to get better every day because everyone else, with very few exceptions, is going to keep getting better. We have to be ahead of the curve there. So we'll go to this ballgame, coming off a bye, the guys should be a little bit fresh. We had a little bit better practice today than yesterday, sort of anticipated.
We've got quite a challenge now. This front that we're going against — one of the very best in this league. I believe they have more than a handful of guys with more than five sacks. They're fast, they're physical, they have several players with great instincts, they play the game very naturally. So anyway, we have a heck of an opportunity, a heck of a challenge, we have crowd noise to deal with. We're coming off of a bye so we have to reestablish a little bit of a focus there. The players are working hard.
**DEFENSIVE COORDINATOR DENNIS THURMAN
**
Thurman on what gives him the belief that Ed Reed can still play...
Just watching tape, we went back and looked back at some of the games he had played in Houston and he's playing pretty well. He looked like the same guy to me. There weren't many opportunities for him to make plays and the way I looked at it was one of those things where it's not so much what he was doing but what the offense was not doing because he was on the field. That's as valuable as what he is doing. You just watch offenses and a lot of teams were staying away from him.
We watched him play man-to-man, he did a good job. We watched him play half the field, he did a good job. We watched him in the middle of the field, he was doing a good job. They blitzed him a couple times, he was an effective blitzer. He wasn't far off the guy we had in Baltimore. Is he the same? Not at 35, but he's not far from that.
SPECIAL TEAMS COORDINATOR BEN KOTWICA
Kotwica on how close the punt return team is to breaking a big runback...
I would tell you it's an improving unit. Obviously, Josh [Cribbs] coming in has helped and he's got the experience that we talked about. I think more than anything, our blocking has been a little bit better. We were close. We had a nice one there, it seems like a while ago, now with the bye, against New Orleans. I think the group is starting to jell a little bit. Guys are working. They're working hard, but together more. You kind of have a corps of guys that are blocking for you. Again, I think it's an improving unit and I'm excited about where it's going moving forward.
I'm encouraged about what I'm seeing. Hopefully we'll be able to spring one here. We've had a couple longer returns in the recent weeks so that's something we'd like to keep going moving forward.
