OPENING STATEMENT:
"Another tough game down here. It was good to win. I felt like our team needed to make a lot of fourth quarter to win, and they did. We made them in all three phases. A lot of key plays at the end that our players came through on, just one right after another. From the turnover, to the touchdown, to the sack, long field goal, blocked field goal, running out the clock, we were able to make the plays we needed to make at the end of the game and that's a credit to the players. We'll take this one, and move on to Buffalo."
On with Julian Edelman being out how big Danny Amendola was for them:
"Danny did a good job, LaFell did a good job, those guys came up with a couple real big catches for us in key situations. Yeah, Danny was...you know...had a big punt return, thought that gave us a little spark there, not that we were able to do a whole lot with it but we...he gave us a spark there in the first half. So yeah, he came up big, but so did LaFell. I thought we were able to get a little more consistency offensively in the second half."
On what it says about his team that they are able to make those plays in the fourth quarter:
"Well, that's what a team is. We all count on eachother. Each guy's got an opportunity to help us in one way or another. You never know when it is, or how it's going to turn out, but when we need them, we need them and they continue to step up. Different guys, different situations, different phases of the game. But we played good complementary football in the second half, particularly in the fourth quarter and that's what we needed to do to win."
On how important Ryan Allen has been to them:
"He's really hit the ball well three weeks in a row. I think he's done a real good job. We had a couple big field position plays there, there was a lot of field position in the whole first half in terms of the punting game and he's done a good job for us."
If this was the type of game he expected from Rex Ryan and the Jets coming in:
"I mean, we've played a lot of games like this against the Jets."
On with the absence of Dan Connolly and his reasoning for the offensive line rotation:
"Well, they've got a real good front. We used Nate [Solder] some as a tight end and [Cameron Fleming] a little bit, but mostly Nate and then kind of rotated the guard situation in there with Josh [Kline] and Cam Fleming at that right guard...well, left guard for Josh, and then right guard for Cam and [Ryan Wendell] flipped back over to the left guard so we had a couple different combinations in there on the line. But I mean, look, it's a battle. They've got a real good front. They've got a lot of good players up there. They're well coached, they've got a good front that's hard to block, and we battled them."
On his thoughts on his special teams unit being able to get blocks, how much credit goes to Special Teams Coach Scott O'Brien, etc:
"Well, having coached special teams for a significant part of my career, I know how that goes. If you see a guy block a kick or you get pressure in a certain area, you try to stop that and then that usually creates opportunities for somebody else. We've gotten them from different guys in different gaps and if a team concentrates too much on trying to stop one guy and leaves an opening somewhere else, then we've got to be able to take advantage of that. We had a stem there, we stemmed right before the snap and kind of changed our alignment a little bit. It was a long kick, kind of like the one that we had in New England. So like Chris [Jones] did, Vince got his hand up, ball was probably a little bit low, but it had to be on a long kick like that. Again, the key to blocking the kick was getting in front of the ball. Vince put himself there and made the play."
On the fact the sack by Dont'a Hightower was a key sack in the red zone:
"It was, that was a real big play. That was a look that we hadn't run the whole game. I thought Matt Patricia made a great call in that situation and then the sack, I wouldn't say knocked them out of field goal range, but certainly made it a much tougher field goal. It kind of looked like they were going to punt it there with the timeout...well, I mean that was the play they were going to run. They took the timeout, and then it looked like they changed their mind and went back and decided to kick it. But I think those yards really probably had a lot to do with all the strategy and the changes there and probably, in the end, helped us a little bit by making it a longer kick probably forced a little bit lower trajectory. That was a big play. We got a number of big plays today defensively and it wasn't perfect, but we cut down on the penalty situation on defense, so that was encouraging."
On the fact they secured a bye this week and how important this week coming up is:
"The Buffalo game?"
Yes:
"Yeah, absolutely. Every game's important. There's still something .... I mean every game's important, you're always playing for something. But Buffalo's got a good football team, obviously they had a big win last week against Green Bay. We had a tough game with them earlier in the year. We had a lot of respect for that football team and it seems like they've gotten better through the course of the season. So I'm sure we'll have our hands full next week. We've got to turn the page quickly and get on to them and deal with the whole, what this week is and the challenges of having the same type of preparation and so forth, but it's the same for every team in the league so we've just got to do a good job with that and be ready to go. But Buffalo's a good football team."
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