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8-18 Tony Dungy and Players Quotes

  HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (opening comments)  “From an injury standpoint, we have a couple of guys on our defensive line that have some minor things that hopefully won’t be long but may keep them out of practice this week.


HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (opening comments) 

"From an injury standpoint, we have a couple of guys on our defensive line that have some minor things that hopefully won't be long but may keep them out of practice this week. (DE) Robert Mathis has a sprained ankle, (DT) Curtis Johnson did have a shoulder bruise and he's going to miss some time. (DE) Marcus Howard strained the other side oblique muscle. He had it on one side early in OTA's and he did the other one after one play (Saturday at Atlanta). He had one play, one sack and strained a muscle, so he's going to miss some time as well. We are a little short on the defensive line and that'll cause us to move some people around. Other than that, I think we came through without many major injuries. We do expect (DB) Bob Sanders and (DE) Dwight (Freeney) back at practice this week. We don't expect (QB) Peyton Manning back at practice this week. I would say at some point we would get Bob and Dwight back – probably Wednesday.

"As far as the game, it was good news, bad news. We did some things better. I thought we had some better individual performances. Our quarterbacks, I thought, managed the blitzes that we got and got us in the right plays and the right protection a little bit better. But, we had a number of things that you can't do if you're going to win games in the regular season and we've got to get those addressed. We had way, way too many penalties. We were offside eight times altogether – a couple of them they declined, but we were offside eight times, we had three false starts and four holding penalties. We let two kickoffs hit the ground, we had another holding penalty on a punt return that cost us about 25 yards. Those kinds of things, we've got to get straightened out. We gave up two long runs that were really the result of us just not playing the proper defense. The good news was that we won and we had some good individual performances.  The bad news was we still weren't as sharp as I'd like to see us in our third pre-season game.

"This week we're playing Buffalo and we will have our normal preparation and regular-season routine. We will have meetings and actually get into a game plan Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Hopefully that will cause us to sharpen up. We'll also structure our practice time where everybody's not going to get the same amount of practice time and we will focus on the starters and the guys that are going to play a little bit more this week."

HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on if he anticipates the starters playing into the third quarter Sunday vs. Buffalo)

"We do. I always like to do that in the third pre-season game, to get us playing into the third quarter so we get the feel of what we are going to do at halftime, how we make adjustments and incorporating that into the second half. I would say that those guys will play into the third quarter for sure."

HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on if he expects DB-Bob Sanders and DE-Dwight Freeney to play Sunday vs. Buffalo)

"Our hope is that they will, and if they don't have any setbacks in practice I think they both will play and have a limited pitch count.  But we will see how practice goes."

HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on how he balances some players needing less practice time than others to be ready to play)

"It really goes by the individual. What they are feeling number one, what their assistant coach, their position coach says, depending on what position they play. Some positions it's easier to play without practicing than others. Everyone is an individual decision."

HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on if he anticipates any nerves from the players going into the first game at Lucas Oil Stadium)

"That's why we are going down there and practice (Tuesday), to get some of that out of the way. Everything I've heard from people who have gone in says it takes about 30 minutes just to look at it and take everything in, so we would prefer not to start off 30 minutes behind. We want to see if we can get a lot of that out of the way. It will be different going in there. I know when we went to (Houston's) Reliant (Stadium) for the first time it was pretty awe-inspiring to see. We want to do that and get some of those jitters out of the way.

HEAD COACH TONY DUNGY (on if Tuesday's practice is more about seeing the stadium than getting work done)

"It's a combination of both. Normally, in the pre

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