Week 18 at Tampa Bay

“Obviously disappointed in the final score. Credit to the Buccaneers. Certainly, credit to Tom Brady [and] the greatness that he can present. Our secondary, I thought was excellent for most of the first half. I thought we did a great job defensively until the two-minute drive. I think the seven points going into the half and the seven points coming out of the half were obviously a really big swing in the game. With that being said, it was a seven-point game with 10:24 left. You know, our guys fought back in the game and just weren’t able to get some stops. Just some simple missed assignments, plus some guys back there thrown into action. Then, obviously at the end we got aggressive. We tried to get back into the game and weren’t going to punt, so the score got a bit out of hand. I thought the guys battled, played hard and it just wasn’t good enough. Credit to them – they’re a really good football team.”

(On his thoughts regarding how the quarterbacks played, and why he didn’t insert QB Cam Newton on fourth down from the 1-yard line regarding)

“The fourth and inches from the one that was just a quarterback sneak. Had it been maybe a fourth-and-1 where it was going to be a quarterback power – that’s more of Cam’s specialty. But really fourth and inches, you’re assuming your line is going to knock them back. You know, Sam [Darnold] is 6-foot-4, [you think] he’ll get the first down. From the field I thought he got the first down, to be quite honest with you, and the spot came up short. So, looking back, would I have put Cam in there at that point? To me, if it was a designed quarterback run, putting him out there made sense but Jeff [Nixon] made the call to go quarterback sneak and I thought the call was the right call, so we went with it. In terms of Sam, I don’t know if this is correct or not, but it says he was 29-of-42. Obviously at the end I thought up until those two turnovers he had done a lot of good things. I thought he made some big throws. I thought the throw to Robby [Anderson] was big time. It was a zero blitz to his face, and it was as big time of a throw as you can make. You know, he stood in there. Deonte Brown played a lot. I couldn’t see much that Sam did wrong up until the very end. Obviously that fumble and that interception – I have to watch the tape to see if he’s expecting Robby to break it flatter or not. But it was a shame it was that fumble and that fourth down stop and that interception that led to the points and the score looking the way it did.”

(On the reasoning behind being aggressive on fourth down)

“Well, the one was fourth-and-1 and obviously we felt we had a good play and were going to put it in DJ [Moore’s] hands. We went for it on fourth-and-4 and didn’t get it. Really at the end of the half I didn’t go for it on fourth and whatever it was, four, and punted them down inside the 10-yard-line, and they were able to drive. So just based upon the feel of the game and the plays we felt we had called, we made a decision to go for a couple and a couple I decided to kick away.”

(On the timeout at the end of the first quarter)

“We had two guys in motion, he was about to snap the ball, so I wasn’t sure if he was going to snap it and we were going to get a penalty, so I was kind of reacting to what I saw out there. Unfortunately, the play clock was running down. I would’ve loved to have let it go to the half, but I didn’t want to get a penalty in that situation because we had a decent, manageable yardage to go.”

(On what he has been told about his future in regard to returning to coach a third year in 2022)

“I’ve been pretty straight forward with you guys. I’m never going to speak for Dave [Tepper]. Every conversation I’ve had with him, he’s been supportive. I talked to him today before the game. We were talking about the offseason and what we have to do moving forward. Since I took the job, we’ve had a plan. I’d like to be further ahead in the plan. No one likes the results we have right now. We’ve talked about it time and time again – we know the areas that we have to improve. So, I’ve never had a conversation with him about, ‘Hey, anything about my job status?.’ or ‘Hey, you’re in peril.’ It’s always been talking about football and the future. So, I’ll leave that to other people.”

(On CBS color analyst Tony Romo’s comments during the telecast that Matt Rhule had indicated he would be back and if he has been told definitively by David Tepper that he would be back in 2022)

“I’ve answered that to you guys off the record and on the record, I’m never going to speak for Dave, I’m never going to speak for anyone else but myself. Every conversation I’ve had has been about the future. What I told them is I’m going to coach until someone tells me I’m not the coach. The minute I make things about myself and not about the team then I’m not who I want to be. Today this was about going out there and trying to make sure that Shaq Thompson, Juston Burris, DaQuan Jones and those guys had the best plan possible, and Taylor Moton, that they had a chance to win the game. I’m not paying attention to anything else. So that’s my job. But like I said, I don’t speak for anyone else and every conversation I’ve had has been simply about the future and the plan and where we are in the plan and what we have to do in free agency and the draft – all those kinds of things. We’re in a really important time for Carolina to get over the hump.”

(On how he would like the offense to look moving forward)

“I’d like us to have a true identity of being able to run the football, play-action and protect the quarterback. We have some skilled players that are excellent players. So, we’re going to go through a process now with both internal and external candidates. Kind of like what we did in the GM search, we’re going to talk to a bunch of people. There are a bunch of really smart people out there from a lot of different places. We know what the strategy we want is. We want to be able to control the line of scrimmage and run the football and protect the ball and we want to be able to do those things. It’s just the tactics for how to do it. We’re going to try to find someone who can get that done at a high level. There are lots of people who can. It will truly be a process.”

(On what he learned about his team today)

“We learned a lot of things, right? We saw some good and some bad. You know, [Rob] Gronkowski had a bunch of big plays where he’s supposed to be covered and we’re kind of just turning him loose. Who exactly that is – I’ll have to go back and look at the tape and hear the communication, but I think we gave up seven big plays, explosive plays and that’s something we haven’t done. Obviously not having Jeremy Chinn out there, not really having Justin Burris out there [and] young guys being out there the communication really wasn’t at the level we’d like it to be. There are also some good things. C.J. Saunders made some plays, Deonte Brown made some plays. We saw a lot of guys make some plays. We’ll turn the tape on, I’ll watch the tape on the plane. I’ll watch it first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll see lots of flashes. I saw Deonte get edged at the end for a pressure. But Deonte was in on some of those scoring drives, so it was his first chance to play. They’ll be a lot of good, they’ll be a lot to learn from. In terms of learning about our team, watching DJ Moore make that catch across the middle in game 17 when we can’t go to the playoffs, to hit his shoulder and come back in the game, to see Jermaine Carter play at MIKE linebacker the whole game and play on special teams I was grateful to him. Justin Burris has been hurt and he’s running down on kickoff. I tried to pull him off the kickoff team, I said ‘JB don’t get hurt out here, I can tell you can’t do it.’ He said, ‘Coach, I’m finishing the game.’ There are a lot of guys on this team that people should be proud of. I know everyone is disappointed right now and I know we don’t like the win-loss record. I get all that – that’s what this is about. But there are a lot of guys that I think really competed and laid it on the line. And that’s what I said to them, we had a chance, it was seven points. We just didn’t make the plays down the stretch. I didn’t get it done for our team down the stretch. But a lot of young players got a lot of reps. Listen as I watch tape tonight and even tomorrow, hopefully I will be able to say I thought so-and-so played well because they got good reps.”

(On his comfort level with how his team and coaches got ready for the game today)

“I thought offensively in the first half we went right down and moved it well. I thought we kept guys off the quarterback better today than we did two weeks ago. l thought the defense played fantastic. It was a mirror image of last week, right? We punt the ball down it’s third-and-long and we get beat on a big play or else we’re going to get the ball right back. Or even the fourth-and-1 that I was asked about earlier, we got the ball right back. The defense went out and made a stop and got the ball right back. I thought our guys competed, they played hard, they played physical. We lost [Jeremy] Chinn yesterday. We weren’t planning on not having him, so we had to kind of shuffle around and they paid the price to at least get out there and know what to do.”