QUOTES FROM **INDIANAPOLISCOLTS PRESS CONFERENCE
HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY **
(on what he would tell his defense to do if they had to defend Peyton Manning) "Well, our offense is really not that difficult. We don't do a lot, we don't go in motion, we don't do a lot with different formations; we just play basic football. I think what you have to do is do what you do best and that's what we expect from the Bears. They are not going to change very much. Obviously, the more pressure you put on any quarterback, the better off you're going to be. You have to stop the run and put pressure on the quarterback without taking too many chances."
(on whether or not you can outthink yourself as a coach) "I think you're better off, in any game, doing what you do and that's what we're going to try to do. We're really not going to be too concerned with what the Bears may do; we're going to do what we do best. I think that's the way to play no matter who you're playing against."
(on having a quarterback who is already established) "To me, it was just a tremendous blessing. Normally when you take over a team, you're taking over because the team is not winning. Most of the time, they're not winning because they don't have an established quarterback. It's very, very seldom that you come to a team that has a Peyton Manning already in place, in his prime, ready to go. So the thing you try to do as a head coach is try to build on it and improve on it, but don't try to change the structure of what was already there. When I got there, we talked about continuing to be explosive and continuing to score points, but what we wanted to do was just hone in and take care of the ball just a little bit better. I think Peyton and the whole offense has done a great job of that. We've cut our turnovers down every year and still manage to score points and be explosive. So that was, for me, a blessing to step into a situation where the offense was already in place."
(on the chemistry between Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison) "I think the chemistry that Peyton has with a lot of our receivers now is through hard work—developing over time, running routes against air in practice and the offseason, running that route against eight or ten or twelve different types of coverages during the course of time. Certainly, he's done that with Marvin more than with anybody else because he's been there longer. But Reggie Wayne, Dallas Clark, [Aaron] Moorehead—all of those guys have developed that with him, it's just something special with Peyton and Marvin because they have been together so long. Marvin really thinks like a quarterback. He was a quarterback in high school, he understands when he sees a certain coverage what the quarterback is looking at, where the ball is likely to come, where to gear down, when to change things a little bit and they have tremendous recall, so that helps. It's really, more than anything, hard work of throwing those same routes over and over and over. They'll be out an hour before the Super Bowl working on routes that they've thrown for nine years."
(on how much thought he put into his message this week about the importance of making it to the Super Bowl as an African-American head coach) "To be honest about that, I've thought about it a lot. I've probably thought about it since 1999 when we were one step away from this game, and what it would have meant to me at that point. Now, seven years later, a lot of it is crystallized. It's important for me to let people know how proud I am to be here. It's important for me to let people know the guys who have gone before me, who spurred me on and were my role models. I watched John Thompson win that National Championship and I was excited. Seeing guys like John Chaney [as well]. Most often it had been in basketball, and it's great that we're seeing it in football now and it's important. But it's also important for me to kind of state my case too, as to the fact that it's not just African-American, but it's how you do it. Doing it with excellence, whether you're a minority, majority, whatever, anybody who gets an opportunity can do it well and do it with excellence."
(on what they fixed after the Jacksonville game to improve the running defense) "Bob Sanders helps because he's a great player, but whether he plays or not [isn't the only factor]. We played other games, we played Cincinnati, without Bob Sanders and without our top four safeties, as a matter of fact, and played better because we played smarter, we played faster, and we played with energy. That's what our defense is all about and we believe that we have to be able to do that no matter who is in the lineup. We just concentrated on doing what we do and not getting too exotic. Lovie [Smith] said it best, and he's been in many staff meetings with me when we've had trouble. I've always said, something I got from Coach [Chuck] Noll: 'when you struggle, do less.' That's what we try to do; we cut back on some of the things we were doing so we could execute a little faster and I think that helped the guys."<
