Head Coach Mike Macdonald After The 44-22 Win Over The Cardinals In Week 10

Mike Macdonald (0:00)

All right, good to see everybody. Great win at home in the division.

Obviously a great start to the game. Offense going down, scoring a touchdown, defense coming back, getting off to a significant lead there. Just as a little funky there in the second half. It was just kind of a weird game that all the things that happened, all the takeaways down in our area. I thought our defense played really hard. They came up big in some of those, in those short area drives. And then it was great to put the game away on offense with some of those four minute drives, running the ball and closing it out. So plenty of stuff to work on. You know, plenty of stuff to work on. You know, operationally, I thought we did some good things, but some things we want to be able to address. But look, anytime a win in our league is hard, it's hard to get to. And it takes everybody. It took all 70 today. We had a lot of guys, we had some guys go down this week, as you guys are well aware. And we had guys step up and nobody flinched, and it took all 70 again. So that's how we roll. And you know, you attribute it to us, our guys, you know, dedicating how we play our style of football all the time, no matter the situation. And that's what we're chasing. So when we do it right, we play really good ball.

SPEAKER_2 (1:20)

You talked a couple times about Tyrice Knight stepping up last week and now he comes up with just two massive plays. What can you say about his plays today?

Mike Macdonald (1:28)

Well, he got a game ball as well as D-Law. Kennedy Paul, Paul Mollow, actually I gave one. Our running back coach, because I thought our running backs ran tremendously hard and helped close the game out. And they're doing a great job.

But tonight specifically, same story. You got to stay ready, how you prepare. And he's playing great football, you know. Obviously, we want to earn his back as soon as possible. But he's showing that he can go in and play great ball for us and execute. Both of those were pressures that we haven't ran before. And so to be able to go in and execute those things, having not gotten all the reps, was some high powered stuff.

SPEAKER_3 (2:06)

Just like how strange it was to see two kind of identical plays like that.

Mike Macdonald (2:11)

Yeah, I couldn't believe that D-Law got the second one. I was like, holy crap, it's him again. But the way that he attacked the ball, T-Night is just awesome. And we haven't forced any fumbles yet all this year on defense, and we got two today. So it's awareness. It's just taking advantage of those opportunities was awesome.

SPEAKER_2 (2:28)

Was there a whiff per set playing instead of Kyler? You said there were new pressures.

SPEAKER_3 (2:33)

Did you kind of do some stuff differently because he plays a little bit different than all or one?

Mike Macdonald (2:37)

No, it's actually funny. It's actually like, you know, Brian earlier in the week was asking about how you come up with new plays. It's really just building off of looks that you've done, and you're just trying to evolve as the year goes on. But in our playbook, we just hadn't hit him yet.

SPEAKER_4 (2:51)

You mentioned the running game there. What kind of stock do you put in to the performance? Particularly in the second half, you're up near 200 yards, your best output of the season. Kind of the way you guys put it together and tried to get going after the turnovers there.

Mike Macdonald (3:03)

Well, it's a tribute to everybody. I think this is the second game in a row now against Arizona that our offensive staff has done a great job of getting to runs that, through adjustments, part of our game plan over the course of the game that made our run game finish strong. It's so both games, so they deserve a lot of credit. And you felt our offensive line. It felt like we were physical, it felt like we were going to right people. We took the line. I thought our running backs played really well. We finished runs the right way. Ball was never in jeopardy, so those are all positive things. I think we only had one holding call, which Nick will learn from. And yeah, really positive.

SPEAKER_5 (3:39)

What was it about the interior blitzing and interior rushing that you thought was going to work?

Mike Macdonald (3:46)