Head Coach Mike Macdonald On The 30-24 Victory Over The Titans In Week 12

Mike Macdonald (0:00)

All right. Good to see everybody. Really, you know, it's a good win. You know, it's tough coming East. 10 a.m. game for our guys. You gotta give the Titans a lot of credit. They played extremely hard. I mean, their quarterback played really well. He's a really hard guy to get on the ground, and extended plays, and did a great job, especially on some of those third and fourth downs. I mean, our guys were playing really hard there at the end, and I thought we showed a lot of maturity.

Working through all the things and how the game went, you would have liked for us to be able to close the game out earlier, but they were fighting hard, and they played hard, and they returned the kick for a touchdown. Our guys showed a lot of resilience. Just keep playing. The last drive, we're also playing the clock, knowing that they're going to be in an on-site kick situation. So we didn't give a big play there, which is a positive, but obviously we would have liked to close the game out earlier, but I'll tell you what, our guys fought really hard, played hard. We had a good week of preparation. And look, you don't play teams' records in this league. Teams are too talented. This team is a talented team that is coached well, and they played hard. They just, they've had a lot of one-score games that haven't gone their way. And today is another one. So hats off to them.

SPEAKER_2 (1:18)

Thoughts on JSN breaking the franchise record for receiving yards?

Mike Macdonald (1:22)

Yeah, just, I mean, it's funny. We just told the team that we gave them the game ball, and I asked them what week it was, and everybody said it doesn't matter. So we got the right mentality. But happy for JSN. I mean, he's doing an incredible job, brings it every day, and he's a great teammate, which is awesome. You know, so you're really happy for him.

SPEAKER_3 (1:42)

For all the injuries, with all the injuries that linebacker, how did you feel like Patio went and played out there?

Mike Macdonald (1:49)

Yeah, it's funny, we have an on-the-going joke on our ready squad that we can't block Patio on a daily basis. So I'm glad he had his opportunity today, and I'm happy for him. He went out and played winning football for us and made some great plays. So I'm excited to watch the tape, watch him and see what he did.

SPEAKER_3 (2:06)

Oh, and Smith-Njigba, is he fully healthy? Is he all right coming out of this?

Mike Macdonald (2:09)

By knowledge, yeah.

SPEAKER_4 (2:11)

Isn't he so consistently dominant when everyone knows that he's getting the ball? For the most part, I guess, what does that say about his ability?

Mike Macdonald (2:20)

Well, he's got tremendous ability, he's a great talent, and he's an incredible worker. But I would say it's a team thing.

He's not the only guy running routes out there, he's not the guy protecting. I think our office of staff does a great job of moving him around, which is not easy to play multiple positions and move around. It's just hard for guys to do that. So it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of like elegant simplicity to kind of make him get in all these different spots. So I think the guys around him are playing at a high level too. So I think we can be better. I think today we were a little sloppy operationally offensively. We need to clean that up, got to be better in the reds. All these things that we want to be able to improve on, I think we'll even make it, I think we'll allow them to even take it to another level.

SPEAKER_2 (3:02)

When this was the second game where you guys had no turnovers, how important was that to-

Mike Macdonald (3:06)

I should have started with that. That's a major point of emphasis to play great football. And we're talking about finishing drives with the ball in the end zone. That's what we want to do, we want to finish in the red zone. And obviously, we want to hold on to it. So guys did a good job with that. The ball was in jeopardy a couple of times, like the guy hit the ball, hit the guy in the chest once, and the ball is up in the air. So we got to look at that and make sure we're cleaning those things up.

SPEAKER_2 (3:29)

What happened with Ty Okada and how do you feel like D'Anthony did?

Mike Macdonald (3:32)