Chris Jones played every snap defensively yesterday. How would you assess his performance?
“Chris, as you mentioned, he got a lot of playing time yesterday. I think he was in there for every play, that’s right. Chris is a smart kid. He came in and picked things up pretty quickly. His play time has increased a little bit each week. I think he’s athletic, he runs well, he has good playing strength, he has a little bit of quickness in the pass rush and overall, he’s got I think decent skills in there. Look, it’s not perfect, there are certainly a lot of things that he can improve on. But I thought he and Joe [Vellano]both have given us, given their amount of experience and all the things they’ve had to deal with, in terms of the types of offenses that we’ve played and so forth, some of the payers in there, like Jahri Evans, pretty good player there and [Ben] Grubbs, that they’ve done a good job of hanging in there and being relatively productive. Again, a lot of things we need to work on, but the play that Chris made on the screen pass, it was sort of an angle screen there on [Darren] Sproles, I think it was in the second quarter, could have been a big play but Chris made the play from behind, just short of the first down, I think it was like third-and-6 or something like that, and he made the tackle for a four-yard gain. It was close to being a big play, as well as a third-down conversion. He’s active, he runs well, he’s been a factor in both the running game and the passing game. He still has a long way to go, but works hard, plays hard; tough kid. He’s smart and he’s done a good job picking things up.”
