On the game: “The first half was a pretty good game back and forth. I think what killed us was when we got in the Red Zone we didn’t score. We got down there twice and had to settle for field goals. When you play a team like this you know they’ve got a pretty good offense and very accurate quarterback and they can move the ball (and they did); you’ve got to score.

“I thought early in the game we had some rhythm offensively, but again we stalled two times down there and had to settle for field goals. I thought some penalties got us in the third quarter and set us back. They had some field position early in the game and took advantage of it. You don’t want to give these guys too much field position.

“We had some dropped balls that could have maybe kept the drive going, too.”

On the decision not to go for it on fourth-and-two with about 10 minutes to go: “At that point it’s a one-score game and you still feel like if you can hold them…we had stopped them the series before. If you can hold them and make them punt it’s a one-score game. If you miss it you just give them a short field again and they’re pretty good on a short field. You go for some of them, but you’ve got to know what the situation in the game is and, at that point, with 10 minutes and all your timeouts, you just figure to hold them here and make them punt. If you miss it and they get the ball on the 40 all of a sudden it gives them momentum.”

On the special teams troubles: “Coverage teams you’re always switching guys when you’ve got a lot of injuries. That doesn’t help you – lot of new guys over there. The muffed kicks, we’ve got to catch those but [KR Dantrell] Savage has been doing a pretty good job. [WR Kevin] Robinson had the one good punt return. But the coverage is what got us and gave them field position, especially after we scored. You can’t give these guys a short field. They’re too good of an offense.”

On what went wrong with the running game down near the goal line: “We didn’t get any push at all. They pushed us back and we didn’t get any yards. I thought the one was in but I guess the way it looked on camera they couldn’t see it. They couldn’t get the sideline angle on that side of the field.”

On intentionally kicking the ball short on kickoffs: “Yeah, on a couple of them and five more yards deeper would have been better, would have been perfect. The one (return) guy is a pretty good return guy and had made some yards prior to that.”

On the offense having to play next to perfect to make up for deficiencies on defense: “Yeah, we knew we had to score more points than we did. We figured it was going to have to be 30 points unless we got some turnovers. We got the one and got to score. We just bogged down in the Red Zone and if those are scores it’s an entirely different game.

“It’s a little bit of a disadvantage (on defense) in that you’ve got a lot of different guys playing different positions. What hurt us too is we really didn’t get a rush on the quarterback. He had a lot of time to throw, to his third and fourth receivers. We didn’t pressure him. We blitzed him some but he’s very good.”

On adjusting the offense to Larry Johnson’s return: “We found a way to run the ball out of shotgun (formation) a little bit better but that’s still a work in progress. I thought a couple of times it looked pretty good. We’re going to continue to play that way because that’s the way we move the ball over the last month. That’s our offense and that’s not going to change. I think short yardage we’re going to have to do a little bit better job there. You can’t pass the ball all the time. You’ve got to be able run in short yardage situations and we’ve got a big back who can do that. We’ve got to get some push up front.”