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HEAD COACH MIKE SMITH

(Opening Statement) “I felt like this was a very hard-fought football game in terms of the effort. We made way too many mistakes in all three phases. I felt like we had many opportunities; we’ve got to convert when we get in these third and one situations. I know there were two earlier in the ballgame that we didn’t convert. We talked about having to score touchdowns in the red zone; we’ve got to do that when we’re down there.”

(on the short-yardage offense) “Well, we had two third and ones: one we tried to run and one we tried to throw it. We are not getting the surge that we need to on the run plays. We’ve got to be able to move the line of scrimmage on those third down and one situations. Those are to the advantage of the offense, and we’re not getting that done right now. We didn’t get that done today.”

(on the thought of going for two with 13:27 left in the game) “No. There were still 13 minutes to go in the fourth quarter, and you don’t even start looking at that chart until about the seven or eight minutes into the fourth quarter. If you miss that two-point conversion, then you’re flipped on the other side in terms of the score. You usually wait until about seven or eight minutes left for two-point conversions.”

(on the inability to pick up short yardage with the run) “We did not run the ball very effectively. They did a nice job of penetration today, knocking the line of scrimmage back. It wasn’t always blitzes or stunts, they did a great job penetrating into the backfield.”

(on not being able to score on the second-to-last drive against a struggling defense) “They’ve been playing a lot better defense and a lot better as a football team over the last four weeks. They’ve won three out of the last four. They play with a lot of confidence. When these two teams meet, you can throw the records out the window. It’s going to be a hard-fought battle. Unfortunately, we didn’t get it done today.”

(on Dunta Robinson’s unsportsmanlike penalty) “Those are what we categorize as not the type of penalties we want to have. We want to have aggressive penalties, we don’t want to have those. We had that penalty and it knocked us back. We started off at the twelve and it knocks us back out, starting us on the 27 (yard line). We can’t have those types of penalties. We had too many penalties today. We want to play penalty-free football on special teams. We had one early, had one in the third quarter, and then we had one there late on the last punt. In terms of getting the ball in good field position, we had a chance and then we got a ten-yard penalty that basically knocked the ball much further back than where we would like to be starting with no timeouts on the last drive.

(on the emotional frustration of needing one yard to preserve an undefeated record, and not getting it) “It’s very frustrating. Whether it’s one yard or ten yards, when you don’t win it’s frustrating. That’s why we’re playing the games, we want to get the win. We were close, and we weren’t able to get that accomplished. We’ll learn from that, we’ll evaluate it as a staff, and this will be something that we’ll learn from as we move forward. We just started the third quarter, we finished the first two quarters the way we wanted to. We are starting the third quarter not the way we wanted to, but we’ll learn from it. We’ll get back together tomorrow and make the corrections and move on. We’ve got another game to play.”

(on how the Saints were able to shut down the running game) “I’m going to have to watch the tape. We definitely did not run the football with the efficiency that we needed to, wanted to, or thought we could. That’s for sure. We’ve got to not have those empty yards, in terms of not getting touchdowns out of them. When you get down in the red zone, you want to be efficient all the time. There were two times where we did not score touchdowns when we were down there. Obviously we did not win the line of scrimmage for the most part in our run game. That’s the thing that I saw from the sideline”

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