Head Coach Jim Schwartz Press Conference Transcript

On holding players accountable for the loss

“We’ve held the players accountable the whole year. From a playing-time standpoint and a roster-change standpoint. Every time that we’ve thought that we could make an acquisition that could improve our team, we’ve done it this year. That stays consistent to what we’ve said from the very beginning, (that) there aren’t going to be any 16-game scholarships on this team. There does reach a point that you need to have 53 guys on your roster and it reaches a point that there are other guys out there that can improve the team but there’s accountability on a weekly basis and on a going-forward basis. We’re all accountable for the way we’ve played.”

On whether anyone will be cut or benched for the upcoming game vs. Arizona

“That remains to be seen. Again, we’re going to exhaust every avenue, every opportunity that we have. If we think that an acquisition will improve the team, we’re not afraid to do it – we’ve done that all season. We look at that, our pro personnel department looks at that hard on a weekly basis. If you’re asking, ‘Are there going to be any sacrificial lambs that we’re going to throw out just to make a point?’ The answer is no. Every one of our moves is going to be from the standpoint of evaluating what talent we have and whether we can improve by going somewhere else and that’s always the bottom line. We don’t do things just to make a point and that’s where we’ll go forward.”

On whether he would cut a player just to send a message

“We can make points in a lot of ways and like I said, we’ve done that a lot of ways but I don’t know how that improves our team to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to make a move just for the sake of making a move, just to show that we’re doing something.’ I think our track record the whole year speaks to that; we’ve done that from the very beginning so there’s been no change in philosophy there and I don’t see the benefit of making a move just to make a move. Every time we’ve put a 45-man roster for Sunday it’s always been with trying to give ourselves the best chance to win that game and that’s what we’ll continue to do. There are a lot of other things that go into a player’s evaluation and there are other things that as we are getting closer to the end of the season. There are things that you make offseason decisions based on and all that goes into our evaluation and all that goes into the way that somebody played.”

On whether he’s backing off from his statements about holding players accountable for their performance after Sunday’s game

“No, I’m not backing away from that at all. I spoke those words and I still feel the same way. There is accountability that goes beyond playing time but again, there’s only so many things that you can do on a weekly basis, particularly at this point of the season. If there is somebody out there that we think can improve (the team), we’ve proven that we’ll make that point. I think when you talk about accountability; there are a lot of different levels to that. There is accountability like I just said, accountability for playing time, accountability for starting positions, accountability for the 53-man roster, accountability for the 45-man roster and there’s also accountability for going forward and I think that all those things will go into consideration.”

On whether he feels the team quit during the game

“I think when you said, ‘Did the team quit?’ the resounding answer to that is no. You could parse that a lot of ways. It depends on what the definition of quit is. Did we play hard, did we try, all those things – yeah. You’re not going to find a snap on tape where somebody doesn’t try or somebody is standing around and not trying. Did we always play tough, did we always play physical? The answer to that is no. When you get rushed for 300 yards on defense you didn’t play tough, you didn’t play physical. When you’re 1-for-5 on short yardage plays on offense, you didn’t play tough, you didn’t play physical. Like I said, quit is a strong word and to me quit has connotations of not trying. There’s a difference between not trying and not getting it done. We didn’t get it done. ”

On whether the team can play tougher than they did

“I’m saying that the team played with effort; they didn’t play with toughness, we didn’t play as physical as we need to but as far as stopping or not giving good effort and things like that, which to me are the words associated with quitting, we didn’t have any of that.”

On whether there were instances where players may have taken a play off

“Again, it depends on what you say to take a play off. I mean, did we finish plays the way we should? No. there’s a great example of the last, well not the last play of the game because they took a knee after, but a fourth down-and-one play. They ran a little fullback-belly to (Le’Ron) McClain. McClain got hit in the backfield and we got three guys that are trying their absolute darndest to get him on the ground. He’s a load. I mean he’s rushed for a lot of yards in his career. They don’t use him in that role very much anymore, but he’s running. We had a couple of guys on that play that assumed that the play was over. He was getting knocked backwards and they were sort of sitting around. All of a sudden he spun out and broke free and they weren’t in position. What they did is they assumed that the play was over. It wasn’t a lack of effort, it wasn’t them giving up, it wasn’t things like that. It was not finishing the play. Like I said, there are a lot of layers to it, but we need to play tougher. We need to play more physical. I think that’s the thing that comes out the most. You can’t play run defense the way we played and that goes front to the very back. That’s not a front seven thing; it’s not just a secondary thing. That goes all over the place. You can’t do that and then you can’t have what we did on offense and have five short yardage plays and convert one and be 0-for on fourth down to say that we play tough and we play physical because we didn’t.”

On how today was different with players having the day off

“Maybe our staff meeting is a little bit longer because we didn’t have players coming in. Generally we pick up a little bit later in the day after the players are gone. We always scrutinize the game. There’s always what we talk about as a 24-hour rule, putting the old one behind you and getting ready for the next one and that always happens on a Monday, but the fact that the players were only here in a treatment role and a workout role gave us a little bit more time to scrutinize this game. A little bit more time to talk about personnel decisions and 53-man roster and 45 and also starting 22; so yeah, it’s been a little bit different there, but not drastically, just a little bit.”

On whether he expects there to be one or more changes in the starting lineup next week

“Yeah, that’s a possibility, yes; but again, that hasn’t been something that we’ve shied away with before, so our criteria hasn’t changed, our determining factors haven’t changed. We’re going to go with the best 53 that we can put on the field that week. We’re going to go with the best 45 that we can put on the field that Sunday. We’re going to go with what we consider the best 22 to accomplish the game plan that we have for Sunday, so that hasn’t changed. Every week there’s been a little bit here and there, I mean, we still have a ways to go. We still have injury issues to consider, which affects some of those other performance issues. Yeah, there’s a chance, I don’t want to lock in and say, ‘Yes there will be some,’ or, ‘No, there won’t,’ because there’s too much ground to cover between now and Sunday. I think the point that I want to make is, that hasn’t changed since week one. That’s been our M.O. since then and that’s been disappointing because we haven’t had a consistent 22. We haven’t had consistency at a lot of positions and it’s been a performance based thing. We’ve had some injuries, sure, we have a lot of guys on the injured/reserve and we’ve had a lot of times where we’re trying to replace those guys and get guys up in roles; but what’s been more disappointing to me has been finding consistency in your active 43. Bill (Keenist) might be able to do the research for it, I said 43, 45, our active 45, particularly when we’re healthy, probably should be just about the same every week, but it hasn’t been for us and we’ve had a lot of moves as we’ve tried to find consistency and tried to reward guys that were performing, whether on practice or in games.”

On whether he would categorize the game against the Ravens as embarrassing

“I’m always embarrassed by a loss and it doesn’t matter if it’s by 40 points or if it’s by one point. This is a bottom line business and you want to win and when you don’t, you’re embarrassed and you want to do something about it. So if that’s the way that you want to define it, then yes, that was.”

On how significant RB Kevin Smith’s injury was

“Yeah, that’s most likely going to be an end of season for him. He’s got it bad. I never like to… I don’t want to speak for doctors until they go in and they can analyze all those different things because I’ve seen situations where it’s been worse than expected or even better than expected. But, it will be a season ending injury for him and then where it goes from there will depend on what happens when the doctors get in there and really see what’s at stake and all. I think anybody who saw it knows that it’s a severe knee injury.”

On whether he has torn ligaments

“Yeah, you can say that. Don’t say multiple. He has at least a knee ligament injury and after that.”

On LS Don Muhlbach

“(He) suffered a head injury and wasn’t able to return to the game and his status is up in the air.”

On S Louis Delmas

“Delmas wasn’t able to finish with an ankle. He’s had some tests. We’ve been encouraged by the tests that have come back, but ankles can be funny things and sometimes we’ve had players that have tried to go back to practice and felt they were good and ended up missing some weeks. We’ve had other guys that have been able to come back. The initial tests were encouraging.”

On whether it could be a high-ankle sprain

“There’s so many degrees of that, yeah. There’s so many degrees of that. We were worried about that, yes. I think the severity still remains to be seen. Let’s see where he is practice wise and getting through and doing some things like that. He’s dealt with an ankle sprain on the opposite knee for a long time now, but it’s been a lateral sprain, it hasn’t been a high-sprain and that’s been something that he’s been sort of persevering through for the last month now."

On QB Matthew Stafford’s status

“Probably unchanged right now, but we’ll see as we get through this week. I mean, if he’s the same as he was last week, then he won’t play again. If he improves, then that door is open. But it’s probably too early to really definitively say anything there.”

On if QB Drew Stanton will be considered for the starting job if Stafford doesn’t play again this week

“Yeah.”

On if Stanton will be considered more than the previous week

“Are you saying, ‘Did Sunday’s results change our view or the depth chart’ or whatever? No. But I think every single player, we look at how we best fit the 53 and the 45 and slots one, two and three at the quarterback position. That’s been the case in the past and it’ll be the same thing with the quarterback. It won’t be based on results from yesterday, though.”

On Stanton not getting a lot of regular season playing time and if there is a desire to see him perform in a game to know what he can do

“Our desire is to win a game on Sunday and I think any agenda that we have that goes beyond that does a disservice to that game on Sunday; it does a disservice to the guys in the locker room and it does a disservice to the game. What it looks like for the future, what it looks like trying to find out about a player, those kinds of things – that won’t go into the decision.

“The decision will be how well we’ve practiced, how well we’re prepared for the game plan, how well we think we can execute a game plan, the quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end – every position that criteria is the same and it’s win Sunday in mind. It’s not with building toward the future, it’s not where we’re going to be in the offseason or anything else.”

On if he saw a big talent discrepancy between the two teams

“The way I answer that is: I don’t always know what the score is … if you read that much into it. The second half of that game, I don’t know if we punted one time because I wasn’t in much of a mood to punt. I thought it sent a bad message to punt when you’re down. When you’re punting, you’re basically saying to go warm up the buses because we’re ready for this thing to be over. So we went for it on fourth downs and we weren’t trying to stat-grab, we were trying to get yards; we were trying to keep drives alive and those kinds of things.

“The score of that game – the stats in that game – can sometimes be skewed based on the head coach being very stubborn at the end of the game and putting the defense in bad positions and allowing the score. I don’t know. I don’t really know the best way to answer that because there have been some games this year that we have played really high-quality opponents down to the wire and never took the road there to say, ‘Hey, we’re that close. The talent level’s not that far because we only lost by “whatever.”’ To me, the score isn’t as relevant as the fact that you had one point less than the opponent and that’s really the only thing that matters and I try not to read too much into a lopsided score as opposed to a close score.”

On QB Daunte Culpepper being 0-8 as a Lions starter and why he gives the team the best chance to win

“Yeah, I think if you put that in the last two years – if you put everybody who started a game here in that category then we might not have anybody left to play if that’s the criteria for someone playing on Sunday.”

On the perception being that Stanton hasn’t had a chance

“Like I said, when we make a decision, it’s not based on trying something new, experimenting, all those kinds of things. It’s based on what we think gives us the best chance and we’re going to ride with that decision, but it’s not going to be based on just saying, ‘Hey, look, it’s time – we’ve got to change just to change.’ Or, ‘We’ve have to make this decision just to make this decision.’ Everything’s based on a set of criteria that we’ve established. If we think that fits our criteria, then we’ll do it.”

On if Stanton is not as good as Culpepper

“We spent a lot of time in training camp and offseason and during the season establishing what our depth charts are. Daunte’s our No. 2 quarterback, Drew’s our No. 3 quarterback. That’s where that one is.”

On if what he’s saying is that Culpepper played well enough that he should get another start

“We’ve changed other positions based on performance and things like that, sure. I think this: you go back in this game and I don’t want to put too much on one play – there were a lot of plays. But Daunte makes a great throw down the middle and hits Calvin right here with the ball that’s in the endzone. It’s 10-0 at the time after we missed a field goal. So with the possibility of being 10-3 at that time, we got a ball in the endzone – we had been moving the football – and we weren’t able to come down with that catch.

“If we’re able to come down with that catch, all of a sudden – and there’s a lot of hypotheticals in here, believe me – but say we’d been able to make the field goal early when we’d been driving and stalled out on some short yardages and were able to make that catch and finish that catch, we’re in a 10-10 battle in the second quarter against a team that was in the AFC Championship (last year) – a potential playoff team this year, and we’re feeling a lot better about where we are. Not everything is the fault of the quarterback and I think we recognize that when we look at his performance.”

On whether Culpepper’s underthrown balls were a concern

“Yeah – I think there was one he would like to have back; Calvin’s (Johnson) got the coverage beat over the top and then he wasn’t able to get the ball out where it needed to be; I mean that’s a long throw. The other ones weren’t as much of a concern because there was something that caused that play to be limited, whether it was rusher in his face, him moving out from the side, throwing on the run or something like that. Probably the one that he would like to have back – Daunte has a strong arm. But he’s got () over the top, doesn’t want to overthrow it and ended up under-throwing it a little bit and wasn’t able to complete that one.”

On what his philosophy on resting players when a game is all but over

“We’re going to play our players; (taking starters out) wasn’t even a consideration. If it was the other way – if we were winning 41-3, (Kevin Smith) wouldn’t have been out there. Did we have a chance to win that game at that point? Slim, probably not very much. But the message it would have sent by taking players off the field in that situation would have been the same as punting late in that game. It would have said, ‘Hey, just keep that clock rolling, let’s get out of here.’ That’s never going to be our philosophy here.”

On whether he ever got an explanation from the officials on the ‘chain snafu'

“Yeah, the clip fell off the chain. He called fourth down and brought the chains out and looked at it; they won’t call first down unless they think it’s definitive in their mind that it’s obviously a first down. So he says fourth down, okay, let’s bring the chains out. In the process of bringing the chains out and stretching the chains, the clip that they put on the yard-line fell off. So they really had no idea exactly where that was to be able to actually measure. So then they went back and they said, ‘Well, in our judgment, it would have been a first down as we looked at it when we brought the chains out.’ They eyeballed it before they brought the chains out for a (measurement).

“Hey, look: in the grand scheme of that game, the clip falling off the chain was probably No. 123 of things that went wrong in that game.

“Did that affect the way that we played the next play? No. Did we miss tackles because of that? Were we not in position because of the clip falling off the chains? I’m never going to stand up on a podium or anywhere else and have officiating be the reason that we don’t perform on the field. It’s never going to be that case. To me, it’s a non-issue. It was a call on something that happened; it was a call that they made. It had nothing to do with the fact that we gave up a touchdown on the next play. We need to stop them. We’ve got three downs to stop them on the next series and we gave up a touchdown on the first play. That’s our fault. That’s not the officials’ fault.”

On whether the decision to have WR Derrick Williams return kickoffs was a result of RB Aaron Brown’s decision making on the previous return

“To the bone-headed play at the end of the first half? Yes it was."

On what Aaron Brown could have done different on those returns

“There are a lot of different things you can do in that situation of which we have covered every one of his options right there. One option is to establish yourself out of bounds and then touch the ball. In that case the ball is out of bounds and we get the ball on the 40-yard line. The other thing would be to let it play and if it went out of bounds then obviously it goes out of bounds. If it goes in the end zone then take a knee and we get the ball on the 20, and at least we have a chance. We had called timeouts. The game had sort of gotten out of hand on the series before that, but if we could have gotten the ball and made some points at the end of the half, that would have gone a long way to at least giving us a little bit of momentum, at least getting us back in that game. The third of which is that return to the field. They kicked opposite to where our return is, which we have an adjustment for, almost every team in the NFL does, where rather you abort the return and you change it over to returning to the side of the kick, and every single person other than our returner is on the same page with that. There was a reason why we lost yards or got tackled inside our five-yard line for that because it was a failure of scheme. Oh no, it wasn’t a failure, it was a failure to execute the scheme. It was a poor decision and at that point in the game we needed a return right there, and we have been pretty consistent getting balls to the 25 to 30-yard line. If we could have done that in that series, we could have got that ball out there. I think we had two timeouts and a minute, I mean we got a chance to go get in field goal range or maybe to score a touchdown, so yeah, there was a reason that, that one was made.”

On if that being his second chance is his last chance

“I don’t want to say it’s his last chance. Sometimes another chance doesn’t come. Let’s put it that way. You know, you can’t count on another chance coming. When Wally Pipp called in sick, Lou Gehrig took over. We can be honest, there is a significant portion of our roster, that’s on our roster because they were cast offs from other teams. There were teams that didn’t want them or let them go, or stuff like that and we need to make sure, or the players need to make sure that they’re not in the same position this year with us.”

On calling timeout to talk to your defense in the third quarter

“Yeah, I wasn’t talking. I was speaking in tongues. There weren’t any of those cameras around. I hope there were no lip readers out. But saying things or doing things are two different things. It’s easy to say that there is something you want to see and there’s the other thing of being able to do it than actually being able to get it done. There was no magic calling a timeout there and saying, ‘hey let’s get going here, let’s get these guys stopped.’ That wasn’t going to get them stopped. The reason I called the timeout was to let them know the urgency I felt to get them stopped and sort of how I felt about it, and if it didn’t get done. That wasn’t a timeout to see what formation they were in, to get us a chance to talk about it. We’ve taken those timeouts before. It wasn’t to conserve time. It was to make sure that they were all hearing what I needed to say and I said it.”

On evaluating progress of players and factoring that into who will play

“I think we have an idea where we are every week. I think we have an idea where we think we are coming into the season, where we think we are at the midway point or anything else. It doesn’t change what our job is on Sunday. I’ve refrained from talking about that; I’ll talk about that in the offseason. There’s a time to talk about things like that and that time’s the offseason. During the season the thing to talk about is putting your best group on the field on Sunday, coaching them up during the week and finding a way to get that win on Sunday. It doesn’t do any good to talk about those things during the season.”

On concern over the play of the secondary

“It was obviously a concern. I think that the biggest concern was missed tackles in the secondary. Any time you give up that many yards rushing that’s not one group, that’s a lot of different—you can’t blame it on the front seven, you can’t blame it on the back four. There was a reason that those plays were—the secondary was missing tackles—is because they were coming clean to the secondary, so we weren’t getting the job done up front but those guys in the secondary they have a job to get that guy on the ground. It doesn’t matter if it’s an ugly tackle or a pretty tackle; you’ve got to get that guy on the ground. That’s the only thing that matters and we didn’t do that, and we gave up some significant chunks. I think we had about seven plays in that game on defense that we gave up, Bill might be able to get you the actual stats, but it’s like 350 yards on seven plays, and that’s unacceptable. On offense we had zero explosive plays, meaning 20 yards or more. We couldn’t make a play on offense and on defense we were giving up those chunks. And we’ve talked about it before—the explosive plays and the turnovers are things that lead to scoring and there was a reason that we gave up so many points and there was a reason that we didn’t score. It’s because we weren’t explosive and we gave up that many plays, but we did a poor job tackling as a secondary and we did a poor job up front of letting those balls get to the secondary. The Mason play, you’re disappointed in that, it’s sort of a freak thing. The safety comes and puts a pretty good hit on the guy and the corner’s got pretty good coverage on him and he’s right on the guy’s hip and they happen to knock each other off. That’s football. That wasn’t a lack of effort, it wasn’t a lack of scheme, it wasn’t a lack of execution. It’s just what happened. Stuff like that I don’t look at as much as the missed tackles and plays that led to those big chunks that way.”

On losing RB Kevin Smith when he was starting to play well

“He was running the ball effectively. In this game I don’t think his stats showed as well as he was running the ball because he had a couple of loss yardage plays that really zapped his average, but Kevin was productive in the run game, he was productive in the pass game. Unfortunately, in those games we’ve been behind and weren’t able to feature him and run him the way that he had, so yeah, he’ll be missed. He had some injuries earlier in the season, he was putting them behind him, we were pleased with the way he was playing. I was encouraged by that.”

On if he is leaning more strongly toward shuffling the depth chart in the secondary

“I wouldn’t say any more strongly. It may not sound like it but it’s the same every single week. We evaluate how we played, if we think we can make an improvement by making a change then we will. If not, then we won’t. had a difficult time tackling in this game, he missed a lot of tackles. I think it might have even been seven. Against Cincinnati he had a great day tackling and he was a reason we were talking about the improvements that we had made defensively from one week to the next. Is it a trend? No. Is it something that needs to get better? Yeah.”