HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on if losing a starting quarterback is catastrophic)
"It can be. I don't know that you can worry about that. You try your best to do that, to be sound in your protection and what you do, and beyond that, I don't think you can worry about it. There have been some people that have gone to their back-up quarterback. Atlanta, it hurt them last year, obviously. St. Louis went to Kurt Warner, and it didn't hurt them too much. They went to the Super Bowl. So, every case is different, and I think that's what you have to communicate to the team. If you say, 'We have to protect the quarterback at all costs, because if he gets hurt, the season's over,' well, when he does get hurt, the season's probably over. We don't really approach it that way. Yes, we have to protect the quarterback, and yes, it's important, but we have confidence in the other guys. We can still win if they play."
HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on if losing the AFC Championship can be a building block)
"It can if you approach it right, and I think we have. What you have to understand as a team is, as good as the season was, that it wasn't quite what we wanted, and it wasn't where we wanted to end up. If we take that approach and we build off of it, then, it is a plus. If you take the approach that, 'Hey, we're close, we're almost there, and we don't have to do too much other than a couple of little tweaks,' then it can be a negative. And I think we've taken the approach that we won a lot of ballgames last year, but we lost three games to the two teams that were in the Super Bowl. So, three out of the five games we lost kind of shows us where we have to improve."
HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on making it back to the AFC Championship game)
"It's a tough task to get to the championship game, and to get to it two years in a row, whether you win or lose, it's hard. Usually, I think what happens, the team that loses many times can get lulled into that trap, 'Well, we're almost there. We only have to do this, or if we get this one player in free agency or if we draft this one player, or we do one thing, we're going to win it.' You still have to go through the whole season. You have to buckle down. You have to win 'X' number of games to get back into the playoffs. It's not as simple as saying 'When we get back to the championship game, we've got to do this.' That's what I think we've tried to avoid with our team."
HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on the defense)
"I think we have to improve if we're going to be a championship-caliber team. We have to improve on defense, and I was alarmed last year when our scoring defense went up."
