 You know, we actually came out of game pretty clean, so we'll have some guys that we're hopeful to get back coming off the bye. But you know, all in all, we're pretty clean coming out of that game. So hopefully when we get back to work here, come out the bye, we'll be a little bit healthier with Elijah and Juma, chance to get Matt Hennessey back, Jalen Dalton. So that should be a good thing for us. So Hennessey's a guy who I'll work out. Absolutely. If he's ready. As far as quarterback situation, though, he's pretty good. Yeah, we're still working through that. Mike, obviously, I think Bassey tells me I'm talking a week from today. And every change, especially if it goes in regards to personnel, I'll be transparent and we'll have decisions made. You know, like today, I'm sure the next question is going to be about the quarterback. Marcus isn't even in the building today. His wife went in the laborer this morning. So congrats to him, hopefully they haven't had the baby yet, but it'll be his first child. So there's things like that that come up, Mike, and we'll have some very intense meetings the next couple of days. Obviously, I know where we're at and we understand too. Been in some close games lately. We need to get back out of the hump. There will be changes made. And anything we decide to do, I'll be as transparent as possible. I will be with anything personnel-wise, not schematically, but next Monday. Does Tampa Bay, over the next two weeks, what they do and your position with them in regards to the division factor into the decision? No, I think we're at, and that's a good question. But we've got to get over to this hump here. And there's a lot of things at stake so that will not have an impact. It's what's going to be best for this team, short-term and long-term. When you're talking about decision-making, right? And you have a tough conversation with our conversations with you. I know you said when I asked you yesterday that it was just coming off of the game. Sure. What goes into this decision, whether or not to make the change in quarterback? Well, this is at every position, Mike, whether you're making a call at left guard or anywhere else on the field, a lot of things. I mean, you want to be, what you don't want to is have a knee-jerk reaction, which I don't think after 13 games that you are, I think. And what we try to do every Monday is be objective and tell the truth. And in the meetings, there's a way to do that without taking shots. Anybody's dignity or whatever, we'll never do that. It's called coaching and being objective and correcting things and starting with myself. I mean, you've got to hold yourself accountable first. So that's it, where you're not trying to, because you're upset the way the game went, just making a knee-jerk reaction. We're at a point in the season where we've got a lot of things to look through and we keep up with, we've got to weaken. So, like I said, we're in a new spot. You have a quarter of the season left and we have a late buy. It's the latest buy I've been a part of. How much do you think is that maybe you can play in? I know, I guess it was the last time we went round and round with quarterback questions. You had said that at this time, the way there's now a court. The buy doesn't necessarily matter. Well, there's a lot of ways to look at. I mean, how have you got to do it? I mean, whether, you know, at any position, I mean, anybody that's up on game needs to play away. So you got to be able to adapt. It's not like you say you own what you have to have. You're going to change, you know, you're starting whatever tackle guard or center you need a week or two. That's not, I mean, that's not reality, but if you're coming off that short stint we had with the Chargers and Carolina, and there's a lot of things that went wrong, you don't want to look like you're just blaming one person. Again, if you think it's the best thing for you at that moment, yeah, we're going to do that. That's what you're paid to do. But our circumstances are very different today than they were a couple of weeks ago, for different reasons, not just football, but it's the reality of our situation. I know a part of the quarterback here, but what is Marcus doing in your eyes to potentially, like you said, you're having tough conversations. What is he has done potentially to keep the job? Well, again, how you frame these questions is on this topic, there's a lot of things, a lot of spots that we need to do better, Mike, to get, you could say, close all day, but we need to get back into that win column. And there's certain a lot of good things that there are some things that are trending in the right direction that give you a chance every week, but they're saying things that we need to enhance, and we will. I was looking at the other side of the quarterback ledger. There's just some numbers here. For the second straight week, you rushed for over 150 yards against the top rush defense. You had seven drives yesterday, not including the very last one where you was next to impossible to score. You scored on four of those seven drives. The three drives you didn't score on, you either had a false start or a holding penalty. Now, that to me doesn't seem like it adds up to a quarterback problem, per se, but there are execution things in there that are tied to the quarterback. So what do you make of all that? When everything, that looks really positive all together. Sure. How do you parse it as to why you can't get a win out of that? Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. A lot to unpack. It kind of goes back to why, to not blame on one person a couple weeks ago, there's things that are trending. We've been in some low possession gains for a lot of reasons, right? Time of possession, we've now held some people to low scoring. We need to get into the red zone more. You know, I think the thing, you're never gonna be really good if you're in a lot of third and longs. Certainly need to be better than in the last five weeks. We've been in too many. Some of them maybe had a hold here, gotten off track. I thought we've protected pretty well for most part against some pretty good fronts. When you get off schedule, those third and nine pluses are hard to convert. Pretty damn good when you're wearing reasonable situations there. So when you get into those metrics are right, but again, you're gonna need to get more than 20 points. And so if you get more possessions, again, we can be a little bit cleaner, extending some of those drives, getting down to the red zone more. That'll get us over the top. You're looking at it from more offensively. Defensively, same thing. Being able to get off the field in a more timely manner. We're doing a decent job in the red zone forcing people to kick field goals, but we need more possessions. We need to be play cleaner in all three phases. You're surprised about the penalties and a little bit sloppier than the old? We had six. You know, the ones that drive you nuts at the pre-snap. We haven't had that all year. So we had the one and only a game. We had the two procedure penalties. Right, then you had the one, the hold on Felipe, the hold on Hesse. And then I'm missing one of the horse collar. So we've been pretty damn good with the penalties. The ones that you can control, the pre-snap ones, those are the ones that frustrate you more than anything. The other ones, Peter's aggression, we got to look at it, what happened? What can we do technique-wise to coach off this? How can we be cleaner there? For sure. All right, we're not teaching anybody to horse collar. You know, along with Hesse, the ball gets bounced. The guy's outside. There's a timing thing where you're gonna have to let go. Clearly. So those are things, again, six of them in a low possession game. The ones that happen on offense, yeah, they hurt us. I never talked about that offense, but defensively, are there things that can absolutely, that can be changed in the short term versus it being a more global thing? I love the global term. Any more corporate jargon you can work in there? Intentional. You can make things intentional. No, it's not that. I mean, there's just people like to throw that jargon out there. I love the global reference, but in all seriousness, there's a lot of little things. I mean, obviously we have adapted when we gave up some explosives, kind of the middle part of the season. There's a give and take. There's some things that I think we can do a little bit cleaner situationally as well. You know, you're getting into these games. They said we're living in these high pressure, which is good, but we gotta get back over the hump there and there's some schematic things that we'll look to tweak, Mike, that I won't really go into detail. There may be a couple of personnel things too. How much of that goes to specifically maybe pass rush because that's an area that the last two seasons is pretty good. Sure, and we've been some games have been okay. There's been other ones that have been pretty pedestrian and for some of it, it'll never change. You've got to be in sync. So whether you're setting up games or pressures, they may need to get them to hold it an extra half a second, which will cause an effect. In other ones, you've got to win some one-on-ones and we've got to find ways and keep adapting. We've got to be creative and that's what we have to do, but there is a give, it is coordinated. So if a guy's off here and given too much cushion, the ball's coming out quicker than you anticipate. So those are the little things and that's the art of coaching that we got to continue to work on. And maybe this is just such small sample sizes, I don't know, but the way you all played against Justin Fields, when you really didn't pressure at all, you got more, no, you blitzed on, you seem like you got a lot more pressure. Was that just a factor facing a guy like Justin Fields, or is there something that can get drawn from that? Well, I think every game's unique, what you need to try to stop, right? What does a team do well? What are you trying to neutralize? What are you trying to attack? What are you really trying to hide yourself, right? That's the art of it, you know, like, trying to neutralize their strengths, maybe protect some of what you feel or some mismatches or weaknesses, where could you exploit that's, so every week's a different challenge in that regard. There's certain things that carry over that I think we have in certain spots. Certainly I've been pleased with the offensive line and the intent, some of the things that we've done there. So that can maybe carry over week to week, even though we're attacking a different scheme, but the confidence in the production week over week, you know, when you're playing different offenses, different quarterbacks, different schemes, there's a lot that goes into it, but certainly there's things that we need to improve and that's what we'll work to do. You always focus on you guys and what you can control. I don't know, I mean, do you spend time, you know, as far as where you are in the standings, talking to your guys, are playoffs still in your mind frame right now? Is it just a week to week with everything? It's a hard balance because you're obviously aware of it. We don't live in, if you can say, you know, unless you like, literally like don't have, yeah, don't have a phone, whether you want to look at it or not, if you even forget what alerts you pop up like, damn. So yeah, you're aware of it. You know, we're aware of it. Everything that goes into it like the schedule, Mike brought up walking in here about whether we're gonna play on Saturday or Sunday and obviously we would adapt. You start focusing on that, we need to get a win. So, you know, whatever we got to do, we got to find a way to try to beat New Orleans down there. In terms of, I know a little bit again, we focused on a lot of quarterback, but how have you felt about the play of Drew Dalman this year in terms of what he's been able to give you and also some of the snapping? Right, you know, obviously, you know, those are obvious to anybody watching, but I think Drew's done a pretty damn good job for a guy that's going through his first year at the center. I think he's got a good command, he's got some strength, you know, sometimes with the way we play when you're running certain schemes, you know, everybody's got it, depending on the play call and whatever, somebody's gonna have a harder job than others, but I think overall, Drew's done a pretty good job with command for a young player in there that we feel pretty confident in Drew. He's not having ever really been a snapper ever? Yeah. Is there something that when you're at pistol versus shotgun, that can be different? That's the same snap. Okay. I think what happens sometimes too, it may be, getting speaking, you know, my own experience sometimes, certain things, certain directions that where maybe it's a certain assignment or a matchup, sometimes guys can get anxious, because you've got a pretty damn good guy, depending on what they're doing over here, when you may not get help initially, and you're, oh, I've got Derek Brown 101, I mean, that could be a challenge, but your job as a pro is to make the hard look easy. That's why you're a pro, otherwise everybody'd be out there. So, you know, those things we're continuing to work on, obviously, again, the things you need to clean up that are pretty obvious are some other little things that, you know, maybe behind the scenes, if may not be his fault, maybe, you know, we should have, because of the pressure, maybe if you fly out of there and puts a little more strain on him. So, it's got to be coordinated, but we're pleased with his progress, but, you know, we'll continue to work that. Just in terms of desert, from week one until really last time, anyone see him throw ball publicly to now, where has that growth been for him that we haven't maybe even been able to see? Yeah. I mean, you haven't seen it, but that's why I got you the question. Yeah, no, I don't mind the question at all, but, you know, it's kind of, yeah, obviously. Yeah, there's things that we've tried to do with all of our young players, things that we do behind the scenes, that we add into practices. They understand even intentionally, sometimes they don't understand unintentionally some of the things we do to try to make it hard on them to see where their progress is at. So, with a lot of our young guys, pretty damn good about where they are. We think that a lot of guys that you may have seen or really haven't seen yet because of depth of position or somebody's playing well in front of them, it made some pretty good progress. Ultimately, until they get out there and play, and that'll be the real test, but we feel pretty confident and a lot of guys that we've been bringing along and things we've done practice-wise in our development program that if we have to play on, we feel like they're more ready now than they may have been in August. Is that part of your team with the quarterback specifically? I'm not going to get into that development. I think in any position, it's the speed of it, the speed and the consequences. I mean, there's a lot of guys that you look good in practice playing DB, they'll jump routes, they'll play a little stickier, and then all of a sudden the real pressure of the game, if you're wrong, and the thought of giving up a touchdown, if you're wrong, it makes them play a little more passive. So, you see in practice, you feel pretty good about skillset development, and then all of a sudden you get in the game, and all of a sudden the guy's trying to, free-put everything, and it's like, all right, where was that aggression that we saw in practice, and well, because there's real consequences here. That happens a lot, too, but until we see him play, well, we feel good about him, and that'd be the next test. Along those same lines, because quarterback has the process so much more mentally, as much as physically, all at the same time, the lack of experience that Desmond's gotten at this point of live game stuff, I mean, how far is the gap that he needs to bridge between what you see in practice and the consequences of the game? Well, I think for any player, you gotta, do you see him out there, but there's certain things, too. I mean, we've talked about this before here, and sometimes it may not be the perfect answer, but if you feel somebody's not ready right away, that could be a detriment to their career. You throw somebody out there too early. Yeah, again, you've seen it. There's a pretty examples of what about, you know, that's the best thing that's going on in society, the what about-isms, but you try to do what you think is best for the player. And out of necessity, if you had to play somebody, I think you brought that up last week, Mike, we had to throw Jalen out there, probably before, well, it was before, we wanted to put him out there, we had to. But you want to make sure you're bringing guys the right way. There's been guys that have gone out there, maybe too early, and it probably altered their career. There's been other guys that you could make it stronger in it, maybe should've been out there a little bit earlier, so yeah, I got that game. But there is thought that goes into it. Again, you try to make the best decisions for the player and for the team. As far as Jalen, I know you've had to take a little once. Yeah, we're gonna make a decision by Wednesday. Is it, has the decision been made this morning, or? It's about 95%. So, okay, I'll have a whole thing. Hopefully, D-Level, we'll be back here, we from the day, and... I mean, you don't have to wait for D-Level. No, but in all seriousness, in anything we do, we got to make sure the next couple of days, and we will, and we'll have some tough meetings, and we'll go through it, and make sure that we'll update you guys on anything that's personnel-driven. Obviously, the scheme, there'll be things we tweak, I won't get into that, but I'll be as transparent as you guys deserve, and everybody else, the fans, whatever. But we got to get through the next 48 hours, and make sure we make the right decisions. What about you, how much do you critique yourself and the rest of the coaching staff? A lot. I mean, we do every Monday, and I know sometimes you go through it, and then all of a sudden, after I get done with this, and I get on there with Arch, I mean, you're on to the next. So, you get a chance to really step back and decompress for a day or two. So, yeah, I mean, a little bit more. We hear from coaches a lot that the NFL season has got a multiple seasons, combined in one, are you a ball, and you kind of have these different sections of the season. Obviously, the bi-week kind of brings in that kind of point, but does this, do you have like a focal message or point of focus that you want to kind of carry from the bi-week forward to the end of the year? Well, obviously, we need to, when we come back, I mean, we got a quarter of a season. We need to improve, and we need to go get us a win, starting with New Orleans, which will be a challenge, going down to the Superrealm, which will be fired up to go down there. I think you take it where you're at, and we were going on a pretty good clip since late July. You get a little bit of a breather, but week one's coming up, you know, that goes Labor Day weekend, and then the Thursday game was pretty late for us, and trying to get healthy. When you got a young team, too, it's a long season for them. So, it's by being this late, you try to take it as advantage for guys to mentally and physically kind of recharge. So, when we come back in here, we got this sprint to the finish, the four games left, and a whole quarter of a season. So, it's just you take it where you're at, where you think you're at with your team, and where it falls in the schedule. So, you can't control that. We can control how we handle it, though. That's painfully obvious.