Q: Do you think this week will provide a quality opponent to judge the team against?A: "Yes. I'm glad that we are playing a playoff caliber team that has won their division the past three years. I think it will be a good challenge for us. If you want a good challenge, you want it to be in this third preseason game because of the way that we want to work our substitution patterns. Not to take anything away form the other two teams, but this team is well established, they have a lot of weapons on offense that will challenge our young defensive players and they have a number of weapons on defense especially the pass rush with Shawne Merriman. It should be a challenge. It will be good for us because we are given an opportunity to work against a 3-4 defense We will be seeing the 3-4 (defense) quite a bit during the first quarter of the season."
Q: Is William Moore ready to play this Saturday?A: "We are planning on getting William some snaps early in the game doing some special teams. In the second half, we'll give him a couple of series and see how he handles those. We'll ramp that up a little bit more in the fourth game. He is way behind in terms of reps because he has missed about three weeks."
Q: Are there three or four things that you are most eager to see from this next game?A: "We want to see a fast start. That's something that we pride ourselves on and that's something we did last week. We want to see if we can sustain it this week. There are some young guys that we want to see play against their good players. I think that's the thing that we want to see. We want our guys to correct the mistakes that they made in the first two games."
Q: What is the status of Jason Jefferson?A: "Jason Jefferson had a procedure on this groin and he will not play. There are two guys that are definitely out, Jason Jefferson and Willie Evans. Willie (Evans) had a back issue that flared up and he will not be able to play."
Q: Can you tell us what the quarterback rotation might be?A: "No. We know that our starting quarterback is going to play into the second half. Right now the plan is to take all of our starters into the second half. This is to allow them to come back out and make adjustments. This will be the only time in the preseason that our starters will go into the second half before the first game."
Q: Are you giving Curtis (Lofton) more opportunities this year?A: "We are giving Curtis and opportunity to be our linebacker in our sub-package. I think that he has done a good job up to this point and we still have two games to evaluate him on that. We have a lot of tape on him in terms of what he was able to do as a base linebacker because he started for us last season. He is learning the sub-linebacker position and has done a nice job up until this point."
