Vikings 39, Colts 36 (OT)
Q. Matt, that's the wrong kind of history to be a part of. What were your overall thoughts, just the swing in that game?
MATT RYAN: Yeah, it's a tough one to swallow. A lot of really good in the first half, but it's more of the same. When you have your opportunities to finish drives or touchdowns, speaking from the offensive perspective, even early in games, when you get those chances, you've got to be opportunistic. Ultimately we just didn't make enough plays to get the job done. We didn't make enough plays at the right time. When you have chances to put people away, we've got to do a better job than we've done up until this point.
Q. Early in the season comebacks were kind of where you guys got your wins. Why have you struggled to close so much lately?
MATT RYAN: I think it's kind of mistakes at inopportune times. I think from an offensive perspective, when you get your chances to score touchdowns, we've got to come up with touchdowns. Probably a few plays we would like to have done differently and punched some things in when we had opportunities instead of field goals.
But they all add up. It's a good team. Minnesota is a good team. Credit to them. They obviously got back and did a great job with their effort. We had a chance to put it away across the board, and we didn't do it.
Q. How does a team lose a 33-point lead at halftime? Is it death by 1,000 cuts? Is it the wrong mentality coming out of halftime thinking it's over?
MATT RYAN: I mean, I don't think anybody had it -- at least from my perspective, that it was over. I've played in this league a long time to know that a lot of different things can happen. Anything can happen.
You just have to keep your head down and keep going and find ways to make plays when they present themselves. It's not much. It's a handful of plays in a game. It's three or four games from an offensive perspective that we've got to find ways to execute, and it's a win.
We just didn't make them.
Q. In the first half, everything went your way. Some calls went your way. You converted a touchdown. You got a defensive and special teams touchdown. Could you feel it in the second half turning the other way, and what's that like as a quarterback?
MATT RYAN: Yeah, I think you're trying on that one drive, and it kind of kills momentum. We had a couple different parts where we were kind of moving it and doing it, and we just weren't able to kind of finish those drives. That's what you -- at least from my perspective that's what you're trying to do in those situations is stop momentum. It's a game -- like all sports, it's a game of momentum. When it's going against you, you've got to find a way to stop it, redirect it and get it back going your way, and we couldn't do that today.
Q. Was the offensive approach too conservative in the second half?
MATT RYAN: No, I never think of it that way. I think as players we had opportunities to make plays out there that we didn't make, myself included.
First and foremost you have to start there. From the playing perspective and the athlete perspective, you've got to look in the mirror and say, okay, I can do better, and I'm sure across the board we'll all do that.
Q. To that point, is this on the offense? You got a defensive score, you got a special teams score. It feels like if you got one more drive there in the second half you would have won the game.
MATT RYAN: It's on all of us. It's on offense -- we've got to find ways to make plays, and that's the mindset you have to have. You control the variables you can control. I think if we could have played better, obviously we would have won that game.
Q. What do you see in these moments on the sideline when they're staging a comeback or they make a good play? For example when you get a stop in overtime, you get the ball back. What's the conversation like?
MATT RYAN: Here it is. We've got our chance. In this league -- today is probably not why or how games shake out. Obviously it's an outlier. But for the most part it comes down to situations like that, and you have to have your mindset right when you get it, no matter how a game is shaking out you're going to find a way to make those plays in that situation, and that's what you're telling the guys, hey, do your job. Do your job, do it really well, execute the best we can, and believe that we're going to go down there and win the game.
That's what I'm telling those guys before we go out in that overtime period and then really throughout the second half. That's what you're telling them. Hey, next drive, that next drive. Let's focus on that next drive. Let's find a way to score. Obviously we didn't do a good enough job of executing when we had our chances.
Q. You obviously had a good connection with Michael Pittman, but what was hard about -- what did they do to make it hard to get the ball to Pierce and Parris and other guys that are not him?
MATT RYAN: Yeah, I think part of it is just sometimes it's the progressions, right. I'm not sure it was anything necessarily that they were doing to kind of take those guys away. We ran the ball a lot, and then when we had some of our chances, it just happened that he was either primary or in the progression and came open.
I'm not sure it was really anything they did, just kind of that's how the game goes sometimes.
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