Sometimes, defensive coordinator Jim Haslett is really good. Today was one of those days.
Here are some highlights:
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On Peyton Manning: “We’ve seen them all. I think Peyton is probably, if not the greatest quarterback of all time, he’s got to be considered. There’s not much he hasn’t seen and hasn’t done. I’ll give you a little story. Back in my third year coaching in the NFL, I was with Jim Mora down with the Saints and Peyton was a sophomore in high school. Obviously he’s got a great family tradition. I’ve known Archie and the family for a long time. He would come over to our offseason training camp and he was a sophomore and throw passes, and he was better than any quarterback we had. That’s as a sophomore in high school. So that kind of tells you. I’ve known Peyton for a long time. He’s a great football player. You’re not going to go out and trick him. You’re not going to go out and try to disguise him. He’s seen it all. He’s done it all. We’ve got to hope that he’s having a bad day and that we’re having a good day and things click for us and we can kind of slow him down.”
(Note: Manning likely was a sophomore in college when this happened – Haslett was in New Orleans as an assistant in 1995-96; Manning came out of college in 1998; changes the story a little. Still, we get the point).
On teams trying to trick Manning: “I don’t know if teams try to. Some teams try, some teams don’t. You’re not going to trick the guy. The guy has seen everything. He knows coverages. He understands that if there’s two back there, three, he knows where he’s going to go with the ball. He rarely, rarely, rarely makes a mistake on film.”
On LaRon Landry: “LaRon Landry, I like coaching the guy. He loves football. He loves being out here. He’s full metal jacket all day. Walk-through, he’s full speed. He had 20 tackles in a walk-through the other day. The guy is unbelievable. He’s got the same speed all the time. As a coach, I love coaching guys like that because he does whatever you ask. He’s full speed. He plays hard. He’s a guy that can make plays. You’ve got to put him in the right situation and you can do a lot of different things with him. He’s done everything. He’s rushed the quarterback, he’s played the back end, he’s played linebacker, he’s played safety. He gives you a lot of options.”
On Andre Carter playing with his hand down: “He’s good at what he does. You try to change him a little bit. You try to teach an old dog new tricks, he’s done the same thing for 11 years and he’s really good at it. We tried to change him a little bit and obviously it didn’t work out exactly like we would like. I still think he can do it, but he’s good at what we’re doing with him. He’s playing a lot. I think he played about 60 plays last week, and very productive. Hopefully we can keep that up and he can give us more production out of what we’re doing with him.”
On Jeremy Jarmon playing last week: “That was interesting. I thought we were going to play him a little bit more early. I kind of let Jake [Burney] let him handle that. He came up to me in overtime and said I’m gonna put Jarmon in, he’s got fresh legs. I look at him like, ‘Are you crazy?’ But he went in and did a nice job. He had a hit on the quarterback and a couple pressures. His knee is starting to come around where he’s getting back to playing full speed. We didn’t really see that during training camp because of his leg. Now he’s starting to come around to the guy everyone kept telling us about.”
On what is helped more by getting healthy, his leg or strength: “I think he’s got a little wiggle to him. He’s got a little speed. He’s not the biggest guy in the world from the standpoint of fitting into the 3-4 defense. He’s probably 285 pounds, somewhere in that area—you’d like to have those 315, 320, but he’s good at what we’re asking him to do which is rush the quarterback and he’s pretty good at that. He’s smart enough to drop and do the other things we’re asking him to do.”
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