Vikings 23, Jets 17
Q. I watched you bounce your way off the field, super happy. How much does this win mean to you?
JONATHAN GREENARD: It was a lot. We put in a lot of hard work. From hearing all the naysayers, all the stuff like that, we try not to pay attention, but obviously it's inevitable. But whenever you can see all the hard work come to fruition, it's an amazing thing. We never know who can make the plays, so seeing everybody make plays like Gink, making his pick. HP getting his sack, IP getting his sack. Whenever we can all be like that, I'm excited just to see everything, like I said, again, come to fruition.
Q. How much of a joy is it getting to play in this Brian Flores defense?
JONATHAN GREENARD: Yeah, it's an amazing thing. People always ask what are y'all doing. I don't know. Even I don't know sometimes.
We obviously know the play whenever we've got to check to something, but whenever it gets hot out there, crowd gets noisy because when we're on defense we check a lot. It's kind of like being on offense with a loud crowd. It's hard for you to check. It could be three plays, four plays in one, but you have to understand the scheme, understand ball and just trust your teammates, trust that they're going to put you in the right situation.
We lean on our captains, lean on people who been there before. Hitman has been amazing. Obviously got his 20th career sack. Shoutout to that. That's amazing as a safety. I love what he's done for this organization. We love him back and to see him continue to lead us. And Cash, as well, I feel like those two are the best leaders to weather any storm for our defense and continue to put us in the right positions.
Obviously Flo is doing it, but when we get on that field those guys calm the storm and everything else goes fast.
Q. What makes this team special?
JONATHAN GREENARD: That's a good one. I think it's a lot of guys that are still hungry. A lot of guys have faced a lot of adversity. We've got guys that are either late picks, third round, whatever, undrafted, guys are still in that mode of proving themselves. And I feel like that's how I carried myself all my life.
I've been a skinnier guy coming up all my life trying to play D-line, and they're like you ain't going to do this, you ain't going to be able to do that. And you got guys like Gink, they probably tell him you can't do this and that and he got pick six. Cash, same way.
This whole team is filled with that mindset, and I feel like that's one of the things that everybody is trying to figure out. When are we going to get complacent. You showed yourself, you proved to everybody, cool, you get your pat on your back. But we don't care about that. It's more so, man, we've got so much more to go with this team, not just on the defense. And we still haven't played our best ball which is crazy to say obviously. The score may not be indicative of that, but we're putting something together really, really good, and we're only getting our foot barely in the water.
I'm excited to be a part of that because when I came here, instantly from OTAs, I instantly knew how we worked. Some guys -- OTAs some guys just don't show up or are just there, go through the motions. Man, them guys were working and I'm there with them. Y'all for real about this, y'all really want to -- y'all ain't just trying to win the division, y'all are trying to go out and dominate.
And that's the part where I can get down with that. I've been a part of defenses like that, and I love to have that feeling.
Q. I say a name, what's the first thing to comes to mind. Coach Flores.
JONATHAN GREENARD: Chaos, absolute chaos. Controlled chaos is what I like to say, what he likes to say, too. It's a lot of stuff, man. But I ain't going to give away the secrets. But it's a lot of stuff. It's just a simple fact of if you just trust in the system, trust in he knows what he's doing. You've got to be selfless in this defense. You can't say, Hey, when am I going to make my play. When am I going to do this.
Hey, man, do your job until that number is called. And when your number is called, make the play. You literally seeing four to five players make a game changing play and everybody is just excited as if they make the play, and I feel like that's what he's instilled in all of us. Hey, your time is coming. Don't panic. Don't do anything, don't be selfish, don't play hero ball in this defense. And as you're seeing, we play disciplined ball.
We make sure we do our job and then some because at the end of the day, they don't know. And anytime you've got an offense on their toes, we're playing on our terms and that's what we like to do, to have the pen in our hand last.
Q. In the second half it seemed like Rodgers sped up his process. How did the defense adapt to that?
JONATHAN GREENARD: Yeah, that's the thing about it. Every play has a weakness to it. The thing is with Flo's defense, we don't give you time to figure it out. Some teams can't figure it out. A-Rod is one of one, honestly and probably very few that's going to pick up and say okay, well this is going to here and throw darts. Teams are going to look at that.
So we have to understand how we are going to adjust to that because everybody else is oh, that's the winning recipe right there. We had a couple plays in there that we expected that they would try to hit in open spots and we executed. But at the end, he got on a little roll. It's A-Rod at the end of the day. It's still crazy. I watched with my own eyes as he called our defense and didn't even look at the throw, just threw the ball. A-Rod tip your hat sometimes.
I was honored to be on the field with him. Honestly I wish I sacked him, but I was just honored to be there. He's a great mind. He's like a coach on the field. It was really something special to hear and watched how he diagnosed coverages and diagnosed the whole play, know who's coming, who's not coming, know where his hots are. Things that a lot of inexperienced quarterbacks or quarterbacks without that type of poise or experience will be able to manage.
We know that they're going to use that recipe moving forward. We've got that target on our back. We say that every week. Our defense is one of those where we say, hey, we want to beat their defense. It ain't about we want to beat that team, we want beat that defense. I tell everybody too on that. I feel like that's makes us carry a chip on our shoulder, because when our backs are against the wall we want to see what's up.
Q. (On the noise level.)
JONATHAN GREENARD: It was crazier than I thought. I ever been here before. They told me about it when they came here a couple years ago. But I was like, do they really like American football like that? Obviously coming from Houston, they didn't have a well-established fan base like that, so obviously if they probably had it here, who knows. But to see how they showed up here. Skull Nation was amazing. People who didn't know about the Vikings ball, they got a jersey and start doing the chant. We'll take that.
We love it. The hospitality has been great here. The fans have been amazing. The support has been amazing. I can't say enough about everything about this place. I've been growing up watching this team on TV forever.
I'm a big soccer fan, so playing in the stadium I'm definitely honored and I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life.
Don't kill me for this, team. I started out Man City. I was a big Tottenham fan when they had Gary Gill back in the day, but I bounced around for a good bit, but for sure I definitely liked Man City for sure. Sorry.
Q. The last three weeks, you've limited rushing yards. How have you been stopping the rush so well?
JONATHAN GREENARD: Stopping the run is a want-to thing. I feel like it can be a schematics thing, but stopping is a want to. You either go and win your one-on-one match and get off the block and make your play or they're going to get yards on it. Flo calls it up to where it is like that. Either you're going to be free or win your one-on-one to make that play. You've got to earn the right to rush the passer, you can't go out there play everything like it's pass because they'll just run it right down right up the middle.
We pride ourselves on that. We pride ourselves on making sure we keep them under 100. By our standard, we try to keep them under 50. But they're good teams out there, they're great players. We hold ourselves to a high standard more than what people probably put on us.
But even today too many in our opinion. We won that game, but there's still people who say we got a W going into the bye week, but defensively we know that we've got to tighten up. Because teams are going to be coming after. They're going to look at all those plays that they hit on and we can't get complacent. They ain't going to pick it up now, they're going to come with some stuff.
We're going to go back to the drawing board. We're going to enjoy this one, 24-hour rule, but at the same time, hey, man, we're going to be running the right route honestly whenever we come back to play ball.
Q. What was going through your mind when they (indiscernible) again?
JONATHAN GREENARD: I didn't think he was going to score initially, so I'm running, and I'm like, oh, he got a pick. Of course, because we see him during the practice. At this point I don't even get excited. I seen Hitman have a block on Breece. I'm like okay. Took off saying -- I ended up running faster than him to get to the end zone. Man, I love that. Gink is such an instinctual player that these things are normal for him, he expects these things to happen. He should have had another pick, but he slipped on one of them. Could have got right in the windows with another pick.
But that's just Gink. Everybody knows that he's like a Swiss Army knife middle linebacker on the edge, nickel, you name it. He's just a special player and he's a guy who's also been in a Flo system before so he can kind of help us out with certain things to expect out of offenses.
Q. We're in London and you know they play a different type of football here. Who would you compare a footballer to in your game?
JONATHAN GREENARD: That's a good one. Can I show my Man City card again? The old Man City card.
I'm a big Kompany guy a long time ago. His defense, how he managed the game, his physicality, his knowledge of the game, understanding how teams are going to attack him. He always never flinched and everything. He always was able to adjust on any type of attack of anything no matter what the formation was. I remember him vividly literally just stopping anything. Anytime he had a one-on-one with anybody, he was locking it down.
Yeah, shout-out to him and hoping to meet him one day, too. But yeah, definitely like to say that.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports