Pittsburgh Steelers Media Conference

Sunday, September 27, 2020

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Bernardrick McKinney

Postgame Press Conference


Q. The mentality of the team -- you've been in this position before a couple years ago; had to fight your way out of an 0-3 hole. What does it take to try to do something like that, try to engineer some kind of turnaround again, and how did you guys do that before?

BENARDRICK MCKINNEY: I mean, this is a new season. Every season is different. We dug ourself in a hole, but we just got to keep guys being positive. Me, as a leader on defense, I got to keep telling them just stay focused, stay focused, and just get better every day, try to get a turn around.

Q. Bernard, can you talk about your defense's inability to stop the run again in the fourth quarter?

BENARDRICK MCKINNEY: I mean, we just got to keep fighting through, man. I got to keep enforcing the D and myself just to next-play mentality. They got pro athletes; we got pro athletes. We didn't go a great job in the fourth quarter trying to get off the field to give our offense the ball again.

We're just going to keep working and keep doing what we do best and stay positive and try to stop the run next game.

Q. Can you point to any specific issues that are the problem?

BENARDRICK MCKINNEY: No. We just got to find a way to just play complementary football, and just as a defense, just like I said, next play, everybody doing their job, every player being consistent.

So it's not a problem because we got guys that's working their ass off every play, every day, but we just got to find a way to just come together and be consistent.

Q. In the first half you guys had a pretty good, solid defensive performance. Talk about some positives you saw in the first half that you can take that would carry and help you guys out as the season moves forward?

BENARDRICK MCKINNEY: Positive, one, we knew that -- I mean, we don't any fans so we knew as a defense we have to come with a swaggers and have a lot of juice. We got guys Michael Thomas, guys that are not even in the game bringing the juice to keep the juice up.

A lot of guys play with a lot of energy and kept us going through the first and third quarter.

Q. You look at the way teams have attacked you and tried to hit the edges. Is there anything in particular that when you have had trouble setting the edge, what have you seen traditionally from defenses that you can to counteract that?

BENARDRICK MCKINNEY: We just have to be consistent. We have a lot of like hungry defensive players on our defense, so we are trying to make plays, but we just got to be consistent of doing our job every play and not overthinking it and being too aggressive.

So we just calm down and everybody do their job and we should be great.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports
101895-1-1041 2020-09-27 21:11:00 GMT

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