Seahawks 31, Steelers 17
Q. T.J., what do you see going on with the run defense. They had a number of long runs against you guys. Is part of that tackling? What's happening?
T.J. WATT: I don't know, man, we're going to have to look at it and break it down. Clearly it's the same issues are raring their head from last week and in the NFL you don't have time to go back after each and every game and make the adjustments. You need to make the adjustments before they happen and if they happen in-game, before they're allowed to continue to snowball like they did today and like they did last week.
So back to the drawing board. I'm sure there's a multitude of different reasons why this is happening but we're way too talented. We have way too good of schemes to allow this to happen week after week.
Q. Did you come into this game thinking you fixed some of those issues in practice?
T.J. WATT: I was definitely confident. I think each and every week we feel confident going into the game. You never go into the game thinking negative thoughts, but clearly it wasn't enough.
Q. What was allowing them to have so much success on those chunk plays. It really felt like on third down they picked up a lot of big yardage.
T.J. WATT: Yeah, we weren't able to pressure the quarterback as much as we'd like. There was a good amount of max protection. We just need to be able to get home and help the guys in the back end to reduce those big plays, even third down and long, some of those were runs too. We need to do a better job of stopping those plays so they're not allowed to have those fourth and ones and be much easier to convert.
Q. Do you feel teams are maybe now these last two teams are going through the middle in part to avoid you?
T.J. WATT: I don't know. I mean, I'll let you guys speculate all that stuff. I'm just trying to help as much as I possibly can any way that I possibly can.
Q. T.J., does it affect the mood and psyche of the defense sometimes? You have the offense and you're going down but they're kicking field goals. I'm not saying it has to but does that sometimes have a negative effect on the psyche of the defense?
T.J. WATT: Not at all. Just trying to control what we can control. We have enough problems on our hands than to be worrying about the offense.
Q. Going back to Baltimore, we know the struggles, the playoff game, the run game and then these two first weeks of the year. Is that the transition the emphasis on stopping the run doesn't seem that it's happening. You talked about it but is there anything from last year to this year that you thought you guys had fixed or at least you thought you might have set?
T.J. WATT: There's always an emphasis on the run. The first note of every single week is smash the run and you guys have heard me say for nine years we're always trying to smash the run and it's not a look of trying. Schematically, effort, I don't know, we'll have to look at the film but we need to be better and we need to look in the mirror and we need to turn over every stone we possibly can because this can't continue to happen. Otherwise you're just going to continue to see what we saw today, not really able to pin your ears back. Teams aren't able to get into one-dimensional situations. You have to wait until a two minute drill potentially to be able to get after the quarterback like we do. Yeah, it's not fun football right now. We need to get back to doing what we do best and that's stop the run first and foremost to create those longer down and distances.
Q. When that's number one priority, stuffing the run, how deflating is it, then, when you don't do it?
T.J. WATT: Very deflating, we're sitting here talking about it the whole press conference.
THE MODERATOR: Thanks, guys.
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