There’s always a little bit of adjustments in terms of what alignments, a couple maybe movements and calls, but we couldn’t panic. That’s what I kept saying, ‘stop panicking.’ Don’t come up with some magical calls that our guys don’t know how to execute.
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Don’t try to get it all in one play. Win this play. That’s really what I said to the coaching staff and the offense at halftime. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. That’s what outside noise and voices try to get you to do is panic. Don’t panic.
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Like, you don’t want to create chaos and panic about why something happened. That’s why I talked to this group about, it’s 14 to 13, we can create a narrative that, ‘Oh, they were thinking about Miami,’ or, no, we have to focus on, ‘Why didn’t you—what did they do to execute versus our defense, and what did we not do on offense in the three-and-out set to make sure we execute? But we have to be careful of creating, I keep using this word, panic, because all of a sudden, we’re gonna start saying, ‘We’re losing confidence in what we’ve done to get to this point.’ That’s the important part in the middle of this 13-to-14 struggle. It’s like, ‘Let’s focus on the things that really matter. What aren’t we doing, and what do you have to do better as coaches and players, and not saying some other reason, something else is (indiscernible) with ours.
Q. You use the word panic a bunch, so did you sense any of it (and) what gave you confidence that if you didn’t that you guys were OK?
FREEMAN: I used that word probably just to make sure our guys didn’t lose, probably the, not the faith, but the conviction that they’ve had in what we’re doing, what they’re doing, because of a loss. I think it’s important because if you all of a sudden start listening to all these different people with answers and you yourself start to think that you have the great—like you lose conviction on, ‘Hey, we’ve done some really good things to get to this point, don’t panic and all of a sudden go away from what we’ve done really well.’ How do we make sure we do the things we haven’t done so well better?
