Q: What was the plan for today and this week?

HERM EDWARDS: “We’re in the process of evaluating the last five games. I think that’s what you do in the bye week, go back and look at everything you’ve done on both sides of the ball, especially if you can try to specifically pick out some things that you need to try to improve on. So that’s kind of how the practices are put together. In that sense, we’re in a learning, practice mode trying to emphasize some of the things we’ve got to do a lot better. That’s the kind of mode the team’s in. The coaches now, what we’ll do, we’ll continue to watch tape and continue to self-scout ourselves. That’s why it’s kind of cut in half, we’ll do one thing in the morning and in the afternoon and night the coaches will continue to work and self-scout.”

Q: Are you doing anything this week to prepare for Tennessee?

EDWARDS: “No. We can wait until next week because we have a long week again. We will probably look at them over the weekend, we’ll probably watch the Tennessee tape over the weekend.”

Q: How concerned are you about the lack of sacks?

EDWARDS: “A little bit. Some, yeah. We don’t have many. We’ve got some hurries but not a lot of sacks. That’s something we’re looking at too. How do we improve our rush? How do we get pressure on the quarterback? Right now we’re not getting a lot of pressure with four guys. A lot of things go into that. You have to blitz some, but you also have to play zone because you can’t leave the corners out there all the time in man-to-man coverage. It’s tough, especially with two young guys. But they’ve done a pretty good job. We’re looking at different ways to try to put pressure on the quarterback.”

Q: Is it just a matter of technique?

EDWARDS: “It’s just a matter of getting the right guys, especially on third down, were we’ve been not very good at all. We were very good last year, we’ve got to clean that up. We’ve got to find a way to put pressure on the quarterback. That’s key if you’re going to get off the field on third down.”

Q: Does the lack of pressure illustrate how well the young corners have played?

EDWARDS: “Yeah. They have a lot of time to throw. That’s exactly right, you make a good point there. They’re holding their own. They’ve played against pretty good receivers thus far. They’re doing a good job. They’re going to catch some balls on them. We’ve probably played more man-to-man right now after five games than we did all season last year. Not even close.”

Q: Do you expect to make personnel decisions based on what you see this week?

EDWARDS: “Not really. It’s a young team and they’ve got to continue to play. When they play then they learn, then they have confidence about what’s there and how they play. I think it’s the point. Now after five games, I know what it takes to win. We’re teaching them how to prepare every week with a great focus so that they can be a detail player. We break down too much, we have so many young guys so everyone takes a turn. All of a sudden bad plays occur.”

Q: Do you feel like the team exhaled a little after the Denver win and didn’t appreciate how hard it is to win every week in this league?

EDWARDS: “Yeah, that’s probably a correct statement. You don’t know that because you haven’t had all these guys before and you learn something about that. I think they learn that too about themselves. When you win a game, you can’t exhale, you never can. I think that’s a learning curve that they understand. You go into Carolina and have a slow start it gives you a rude awakening on how tough this league really is. How mentally you have to be tough to understand you have to get through some rough spots. And especially on the road, where we haven’t played fairly well against New England, didn’t win the football game. Then the next two road games haven’t been very good. In the first half we were trying to catch up and that’s never good on the road.”

Q: Are you looking for T Branden Albert to play next week?

EDWARDS: “We’re going to see. We’ll see if he can still practice. He’s doing some things individually, but we have to put him in team concepts of working. Hopefully next week he can practice and if he can, that’s a good sign for us.”

Q: When Branden comes back are you guys going to move T Herb Taylor to the right side?

EDWARDS: “Herb is a swing tackle, he can play both sides. We’d like to keep those guys together. (T) Damion (McIntosh) has been moved from left tackle to right tackle so he’s kind of learning his way. As well as our right guard (Adrian Jones), he was a tackle before. So that’s something we’ve got to shore up, we’ve got to do a better job over there. Herbie (Taylor) can play both sides and obviously he did a good job last week. He’s come in and played pretty well. We’ll just take a look at all those kinds of situations and see what we need to hit.”

Q: What are the main areas of emphasis that you are going to focus on over the bye?

EDWARDS: “Offensively, the three-and-outs are really not very good. Too many three-and-outs, not consistently driving the ball. The run game has sputtered some. No big passes in the passing game. We’re not very consistent there. Defensively, third down has hurt us. Big plays hurt us, whether it be runs on third down or passes. We’ve got to clean that up. We’ve taken the ball away, I think we’re second in the league in takeaways. I think the problem is, we’ve got 11 takeaways and 10 giveaways, so we’re plus right now. That’s not good, we’ve turned the ball over too many times. We’ve thrown eight interceptions already and we’ve fumbled a couple, so that gets you to 10. That’s too many after five games.”

Q: Would you have hoped the offensive line would have gelled by now?

EDWARDS: “You would hope that they would be a little bit better, but there’s really only one starter that’s playing his position and that’s (G) Brian (Waters). The rest of them are all newcomers of they’ve been moved to different spots. The good thing about a bye week is that we can work on a lot of things and hopefully continue to get better.”

Q: Did making the playoffs in 2006 put off a year what you’re trying to do now?

EDWARDS: “Good question. Some people say ‘yes,’ some people say ‘no.’ You’ve just got to look at it at that point in time, that we continued to stay with the same team. This year we’ve decided to go in a different direction. I’ll leave it at that.”