Did you find it difficult to recognize your own defense with all the big plays it was giving up?
It wasn't what we had put on film the last five games, but I don't know. We will go back and look at it tomorrow and see where we went wrong.
Did they do anything differently this time to protect Jon Kitna?
I think early in the game they did a great job speeding up his throws and getting the ball out of his hand quick. Check downs to the running backs, chipping with Witten before he got out and with the running backs to slow down our pass rush. Give those guys credit, their o-line played well tonight. That is as simple of a fact as there is, we just didn't.
No. It is football and we are humans. Sometimes you play lights out, literally, and sometimes you just don't have it. Today I don't think we brought the energy that we had brought the last five games, for whatever reason I don't know. I don't know that we were complacent and thinking that we were going to come in here and show up and beat the Cowboys again and thinking that they were just going to lay down. I don't know what it was, but this wasn't the football team that we had put on film the last month and a half.
What were your thoughts when the lights went out?
I actually thought it was a good thing. I thought it was a way for us to kind of restart defensively. I think our crowd got into it after that and we made some strides there, but we just put ourselves in a hole and it just ended up just a little bit too big for us to come back from.
The Felix Jones screen touchdown, do you think the lights still being low accounted for anything?
That was just a great call. They caught us in a blitz, they ran a screen opposite our blitz and when that happens you have to rise to the football and it is just tough. That was a damn near perfect play call for what we had called. Like I said, you give Dallas credit. It would be easy for me to stand up here and make excuses about calls or the lights going out or whatever it may be, but the simple fact is we didn't play well enough to win the football game.
Are you concerned at all about another second half slide?
I feel as though we have learned from that, but I am not mad, I am not really sad about this game, I am actually kind of glad in a way. Maybe this is that wake up call we can use. Maybe this is a chance for us to kind of look at ourselves and say that we aren't as good as we thought we were and it gives us an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and continue to go out there in practice and work. Sometimes in this game you win games like we have in the last month and a half and you are complacent and you start not going through your daily routines and crossing every T and dotting every I. For us it gives us an opportunity to go back to the grind, go back to where we were after that Tennessee game. That is how we are feeling right now, that is hopefully how we respond to this.
This seems like the first time since that game that people were getting animated at each other on the sidelines and maybe things were coming loose at times?
I don't think it was loose. I just think we were trying to get a spark there. Football is kind of like a puzzle and sometimes pieces don't fit so you have to continue to try something different. I don't think anything came loose and I know from a distance it kind of looks like guys are fussing and fighting and things like that, but I think it is just constructive conversation. We are all out there just trying to get better and figure out what we can do better on that football field. It is all about making adjustments. Tonight some of our adjustments just didn't work.
After the last few seasons where you had a second half swoon will you talk to the team about that?
I think we learned from that. I think we are poised to kind of rebound from this. I am glad that we kind of hit this bump. For me mentally it puts me back in that state of where I have to come in here and work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday to Friday and get ready for Philly. There are not going to be any of us making excuses about it and that is what I like about this team. I think last year we started making excuses for it and I can just tell by the conversations that I had in the locker room right then that we will get them next week. That is what our focus has to be. We know we have a good football team. We just played a very talented football team and we allowed them to stay in the game and get a big lead there and get that momentum. When you do that playing from behind against that team is not easy to do. We kind of kicked ourselves in the foot in this one.
Do you think they had any kind of advantage since you played them so recently?
I think it is tough playing a team almost back to back like that. They got a spark from bringing in a new coach and they came in here fired up and ready to play. They made some plays. We made some mistakes that literally cost us the football game, offense, defense, and special teams. Defense we didn't play with the same energy that we did down there and whenever that is the case it just seems like there is a lull and it is hard to get out of that sometimes. We started to get out of it a little bit in the second half, but it was too little, too late.