Opening Statement: "It is Friday. We had a really good practice. Excited about our home opener. Really excited for our fans just to get a chance to [attend the] first real home game. It is our job – we have control over the product we put on the field and the environment that we can help our fans create by playing a certain style of football. So, we are really excited about the home opener, and with that, I'll open it up for questions."
We saw WR Zay Flowers out there a little earlier. What is kind of your feeling about his chances of playing? (Jamison Hensley) "Yes, we are going to spend the next hour or so working through all those. There are some guys we will kind of see how it goes, how it went today and kind of go from there."
If WR Zay Flowers cannot go, what is your confidence level in the other guys? (Jamison Hensley) "Look, they are going to kick the ball off at 1 p.m. on Sunday. So, the confidence that I have in the guys is really high. It comes from the amount of reps that everybody has gotten all the way back to OTAs, all the way through training camp and just the detail and the preparation that everybody puts in week to week. So, I feel really good about anybody that we will have out there that they will be ready to play."
Have you seen enough to lead you to believe DL Nnamdi Madubuike is ready to play, or where are you on that one? (Jeff Zrebiec) "Yes, again, we will go in and kind of figure that out, and we will kind of have to wait and see."
Do you have an update on CB T.J. Tampa Jr.? (Jonas Shaffer) "T.J. [Tampa Jr.] is probably the one guy I would say will be out this game, for sure, and we will kind of figure out if we need to do anything further than that. But, that is where he is at."
We have not asked you much about it, but T Carson Vinson – what have you seen from him over the course of the summer, if he is needed to play? (Ryan Mink) "Yes, I think at one point in time — speaking about [Carson Vinson] during training camp — I think he is one of our most improved players. I thought he did a really good job in Week 1. He had a chance to get in there on some of our jumbo-type packages as an extra guy. So, I think it is a really cool thing to see a guy really get in there and start to play, and his play style is exactly how we want to play. He is very physical, he plays really aggressively, and again, I think he has just really, really improved. He put a ton of work in the weight room in the offseason, and I think it shows up in how he played in the preseason. So, [I am] really happy with where he is at."
What can you do about when you have a game like last week where you had so many penalties? Even Week 1, how can you go about changing that on a week-to-week basis? (Cordell Woodland) "I will say this — I think we focus on the pre-snap process a lot. Not to give the guys an out, but [on] a few penalties in the first game [with] the speed of the game, like grabbing a guy, or those types of things, at some point, with the play style that you are trying to play, there is a little bit of cost of doing business in the first game of that real, real speed. It is the pre-snap ones to me that we continue to harp on; we continue to focus on. We harp on it a lot, and hopefully it is just another one that now that we are at home, it kind of flips, right? It is like on the road, the offense deals with a lot of the noise and the environment. So at home, they are normally able to operate a little bit better, and on defense you have to be really good watching the ball and not trying to hear everything because of the crowd. So, we want it to be really loud, but that again puts our focus on just handling ourselves pre-snap. If we do that, man, we feel really good when the ball is snapped."
Was WR Brandin Cooks just a due diligence situation? Is there a plan to sign him? (Jeff Zrebiec) "Definitely. We lost Ja'Kobi [Lane]. We had a vet on the practice squad who is now on the roster. I think you are always trying to figure out the best 70 players, not only for this particular week or weeks from now. We will always be trying to figure out who the best guys are for those spots. We had a chance to bring him in and work him out."