One of the main reasons our defense has played so consistently is our work on and improvement in our tackling. We haven't had the missed tackles that we've had in the past. That's something the defensive coaches emphasized in the spring and have continued to emphasize in practice now. By making sure we stress the fundamentals, and that's one of the things we do each week, that has paid off with how well our defense has tackled compared to previous teams.
As a coach, you always strive for perfection. Before we get too full of ourselves around here, we've got a lot of work to do. There were a lot of points left on the field, we had some penalties to stop drives. The good thing is Derek Javarone has been fairly consistent. He's been 100 percent scoring points in the red zone. That's been the difference. As I told the team, be happy but not satisfied. We have a long way to go. The strength of our schedule is ahead of us. We certainly can't sit back and start feeling too good about ourselves.
Nothing provides an opportunity for growth more than adversity. They can handle it one of two ways: they can deal with it, become better from it, work through it. They can feel sorry for themselves and make a bad situation worse. So, it's all part of growing up and I expect them to handle it very professionally.
I want him to do some more work on some of the things we talked about coming up from Triple-A. He worked this afternoon with Davey on reads and breaks in the outfield. There were some things we wanted to check on and try, and tighten up for him before we went ahead and got him involved. He'll get in over the weekend.
We are a work in progress. These guys had a lot of baggage laid on them last year. We weren't that good last year. There were a lot of young players cutting their teeth, but they also are players who came up together (through the farm system) and had success together. And they want to have more success together.
I don't care who you are, if you get called out publicly, it affects your focus and concentration. You can say it doesn't and you can try your hardest not to let it seep into your work or what you do. But that's something out of his control that also got thrown onto his plate that he needed to deal with.