Transcript of Tony Dungy's conference call with *San Diego *
(on if he is too nice of a guy to be a great NFL coach)
I never thought that had to be mutually exclusive. I've heard it, but I was taught by my mom and dad a long time ago that you treat people the way that you'd want to be treated no matter what setting you're in, whether you're at work or anywhere. If you do that you're always going to be in good shape. That's always been my philosophy. I think you can be very effective in any line of work by being a good person.
(on what he attributes his success to)
I think number one I've been in two places where we've had very good organizations, had tremendous general managers who had great eyes for talent and would listen well and get you the kind of players that we needed. We had very good assistant coaches in both places. The thing that I tried to do was just see if I could promote an atmosphere where you play consistently, where you try to do the same things all the time and get better and better by repetition. It's a combination of having very talented players who work hard. That's probably the biggest thing.
(on keeping the Colts' offense on course when he arrived in Indianapolis)**
It's funny because the offense was in place obviously when I got here and rolling and doing well, but Tom Moore, who was the architect of it, was my college coach and we basically run the same things that we ran in college. I knew the system very well. He's tweaked it a little since then, but I was very comfortable with what they were doing. What we talked about was that we wanted to stay explosive but become a little more consistent and take care of the ball a little better. I think we've done that. We've cut our turnovers down over the years. We're protecting the ball better. We're playing better in tighter situations. We have a confidence to do that. Then it was a matter of getting the defense as consistent as the offense had been. We knew a lot of the work was going to be on the defensive side of the ball. That would come.
(on the success of his team's defense this season)
I think the biggest thing that we have done is we've kept the same system. We haven't jockeyed back and forth, we've just tried to get better every year. The guys that played in 2004, many of those guys are still playing and they're playing better because they know their job a little better. We're a little more physical having Bob Sanders all year, drafting Marlin Jackson and getting Corey Simon, having some of our other guys – Cato June and Gary Brackett, Montae Reagor – being in the system one more year where they can play faster because they know what they're doing a little better, that helped us become a little more physical. Those are probably the biggest things. I think just staying the course and not leaving what we set out to do.
(on Colts GM Bill Polian)
Bill has done a great job. We've had some salary cap issues and we've had to make decisions and we've let a lot of good players go. We've had good players here, but we've always looked with the idea that we could replace guys and we could replace them basically with draft choices. That's not easy to do, especially when you're drafting in the 20's like we have been most of the time. For Bill to go out and get the players that we need, number one it shows the eye for talent he has, but also he does a great job of listening, especially on the defensive side of the ball. We had to help him understand what this defense was all about and the type of guys we needed. It didn't take him very long. He has brought some guys in here, Bob Sanders and Cato June and even Dwight Freeney. When we picked him at 11, there were a lot of eyebrows raised, but he knew from just l
