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HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (general comments) Monday Press Conference
"Well, obviously it's always nice to be talking after a win. That was the biggest thing to come out of this game. We made some progress in some areas. We got some of our young guys another chance to play in a big game and a good atmosphere, and I think that's going to help us down the road. We had some guys that needed to relax a little bit, and we did relax a little bit more in the second half and played better, especially on defense. You get going in an environment like that where a team's going pretty well and they have some weapons, you really have to rely on your fundamentals and what you do in practice and not get overworked when things aren't exactly going your way. That's a lesson we're still learning on defense and this is another step in that direction. Fortunately our offense was very hot and bailed us out and moved the ball and took the momentum away from them. It was a good team win against a really good team. Cincinnati had two weeks to prepare for us and they did some good things to attack us. They did some things we knew they had, but we hadn't quite seen them in that form. It was a good game all the way around, a good win going on the road against a division leader. You're always going to be happy about that. All in all, a good performance and we want to go from there and see if we can play better this upcoming week."
HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on TE-Dallas Clark) Monday Press Conference
"Dallas hasn't had a lot of opportunities this year. He's really a good player, he's blocked well for us, he hustles, he plays hard and he just hasn't had that role where he was going to be the featured guy in the passing game this year. Going into the game we thought we could play a lot of two tight ends, keep their linebackers and run defenders in the game and see if we could split them out and get some match-ups and it happened that way. Then in the third quarter they played nickel and put [DB-Keiwan] Ratliff on him and we got our running game going. The fact that he can do a lot of things really helps us and he's capable of having those kinds of days when his number is called."
HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on the offensive progression since early in the season) Monday Press Conference
"We were never really concerned. We didn't have our rhythm coming out of training camp and we weren't on all cylinders in the preseason games, but there was never any concern about people catching up to us or us not playing well enough. We really hadn't played together all that much. We had a lot of long drives in those games [early in the season] and we didn't finish them off as well as we wanted to but we were moving the football. These last three weeks we've had people play us a little bit differently. They played us with more one-on-ones on the outside. We can certainly play that way. I think we have shown to ourselves that we can play the other way, which we had to do early in the year. Our offense is still pretty good."
HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on the third down conversions) Monday Press Conference
"Yesterday we were really good on the long yardage. We put ourselves in some long yardage situations and were still able to convert. For the most part in this last for our five game stretch, we've stayed in manageable third downs, and been at 3rd-and-4 or 3rd-and-5, and those we have enough skill people to convert those. We haven't turned the ball over, we haven't had a lot of penalties and therefore we're scoring a lot more."
