They thought we were going to hurt the game, but we just wanted to help ourselves, because the players needed to get together to protect their interests.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
At one time, we were asked to play your own man; you're responsible for your own man. And, if you were good enough and kind of a ball hawk, you helped everyone else. Now it's really much more of a team concept defensively than it was when we played.
I wanted the players to feel like they were part of a family, to be conscious of that controlled togetherness as they made that slow entrance onto the field. It had a great psychological effect on the opposing team, too. They'd never seen anything like it.
I don't think teams play this game to hurt other guys. I don't think that's the story. We don't play this game to hurt one another.
It was kind of like they were just giving us a toy to play with, to do whatever we wanted with.
As coaches say, it's about finding your role. We're coming together as a team.
We were going to have to experiment, and we needed to develop our younger players. And a lot of the changes were because of injuries. But that's where I give a lot of credit to the group in terms of being able to maintain things.
They gave us the freedom just to play and have fun.
We're just going to come out and play. We know that we're supposed to win all the games, but if we don't, we just have to take the next game and focus on what we did wrong in the game before and just try to do better at the next game.
The players wanted more money, higher salary caps and they didn't have that family relationship we felt with the players. Mentally, the players were more businesslike.
People get hurt all the time in the game of football, it's part of what we do.
No opposing quotes found.