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Cardinals' Head Coach Bruce Arians*
*Opening Statement: Obviously, I am disappointed in the loss. I thought we had what it took to win two on the road. We had a great week of preparation. We played okay in the first half and then the first five minutes of the third quarter, we didn't come out and set the tempo. We gave points, and obviously, turned the ball over. That's not how you want to start the second half on the road. You don't want to fight out on the road game swapping field goals. We missed a couple touchdowns by inches. It's a game of inches. Today, we didn't do it right or well enough to get it done in all three phases. We have to play better. We'll regroup and come back for Baltimore.
Re: Darren Fells injury:
Darren Fells was the only one injured in the game. We don't know the severity of his shoulder.
Re: First half penalties:
We were beating ourselves. We had a chance to put a pretty good half together. It was penalty after penalty. I don't want to talk about the referees. The Steelers team did a better job.
Re: Landry Jones' style of play differing from Michael Vick's:
He's [Jones] totally different. They went back to some things. They threw the ball down the field obviously to some guys. He played very well. My hat is off to him. He played very well for a young guy to come in in that situation. He won the football game.
How do you fix all of the mistakes and penalties?
Stop doing it. Drag your foot closer and make a touchdown. Don't give up an 80-yard touchdown.
Did Palmer not see the safety on the interception toward the end of the game?
Yes. That wasn't a good play. For many of the good plays he had, that was not a good one.
Re: John Brown's fumble after having a good game:
It was a good play by them. He actually had the ball but he couldn't hold on to it in that pile. I was hoping his helmet came off soon enough that the play would have been dead. He's got to hold on to the football.
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Cardinals' WR Larry Fitzgerald*
*Re: One of those days:
Yeah, I mean, it was a bunch of different things. We played a good football team on the road and when you do, you just cannot settle for three. You have to be able to punch the ball in. We never really got the run game going well like we had the rest of the season. We got to passing the ball a little bit more, but three turnovers when a game is close on the road is tough to overcome.
Did you feel the game slipped away at any point?
Yeah, we were moving the ball down the field pretty well, it was not a big struggle. We were throwing the ball around the field. We just felt like eventually we were going to get down there and score that was just the feeling that you had. Unfortunately that never happened.
How did John Brown open the offense for you guys?
Teams have really been playing back trying to keep him from making plays and last week he finally was able to get behind a defense against Detroit. John has got game breaking speed and an unbelievable ability to go up and highpoint the ball especially for a smaller guy. We did that two times on the first play we went down and then another time on the left sideline. I do not know how many pass interferences he has got for us down the field. If you added up all the pass interference yards it has to be in the two hundreds. He makes plays for us even when he does not catch the ball for us. He has been tremendous to cheer for and his ceiling is very high.
Worried going forward?
No. Our issues on offense are pretty simple to me. We just have to be more effective in the red zone. We are getting down there, we have a ton of offensive red zone snaps. We just have to execute them better. Point blank, that is where it stops. If we are scoring touchdowns and we put 30 points on the board we walk out of here with a win. In both games we lost we did not execute in the red zone. So it is not a lot of problems we have to fix it is just one glaring one.
How did it feel to be back in Pittsburgh?
It was just a business trip for me. If I come back for a spring game or basketball game it is a little different. I was here just to take care of business. So it was not a very good trip if you wanted to ask.
Any comparison to this locker room from good teams you have been a part of?
We are much more talented than those teams back in the day. We have much more depth in all the positions. We have young guys that come in and contribute at a young age and make plays for us. We have a good mix of veterans, and I think we have a good nucleus of young and older guys, and we have some experience on this team in the system. Guys that have been together for three years under this system. These games are tough but it is going to build character. We have a game Monday night against the Ravens, so we do not have much time to lick our wounds. We have to get back at it.
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Cardinals' QB Carson Palmer*
*Re: On what he saw and didn't see during his last interception:
We just did a play action and I didn't see the safety. I never saw him. That can't happen. You have to see that guy and I didn't see him standing there in the middle of the field. I thought I had Smokey [John Brown] running down the post. I'm very frustrated with myself for not seeing that because I should have.
Re: On his emotions with having a good season but his losses coming down to the last minute:
I'm just frustrated, being here and having a chance to go down there and win the game at the end. When you don't win it, it's obviously very frustrating. It's one of those things where you can't let it fester. We'll look at it, we'll let it fester for another 24 hours. We will look at it [then] move on. We have a lot of football to play. Obviously, just very frustrated.
Re: On if it's true that these are easy fixes according to Arians:
Yes. I thought we moved the ball, for the most part, pretty well. Penalties and kicking field goals are what hurt us. We've been so good in some games in the red zone and then today wasn't good enough obviously. We'll continue to work. If there's one thing this team does is work. We'll continue to work and continue to get better. It seems the things we set our minds out to get going, we find a way to get it going, for instance, the run game. That's something we set our minds out to get going. We were in a situation where we were just throwing the ball there and weren't running the ball. We started running the ball effectively. We'll get the red zone ironed out and find ways to get seven [points] and not three.
Re: On if he's surprised by Smokey's performance:
He played well. I thought he played well, obviously, and Larry Fitzgerald made some plays. There's a couple that I wish we would have done a better job executing on, obviously, but he had a good game.
Re: On what allowed him to have that performance:
Well coverage dictated the ball to go his way. I don't feel like we've been off at all since the season started. They did a good job trying to double Larry and get two guys on him. Larry got open a couple times even in double coverage and made some plays but they had that mindset they were really going to force coverage to him. That opened up Smokey for a big day.
Re: On if it could have been a big day for Michael Floyd as well:
Close. On the road though, we have to convert those close ones. They're close and they're plays and we didn't do a good enough job on that.
Re: On if the Steelers dictated that they go away from the run:
It's just how it shook out –sometimes you come in with one game plan. They did some very unorthodox things today. They changed some stuff up. They did a handful of things that they hadn't done on film but we expected they might do. They won. They beat us.
