Press Pass: Frank Reich

my experiences, it's usually a little bit overrated. Um, so you still debrief, that's the thing to do, but you you still focus on on your plan and what you know. You only got in the end zone against the Redskins once in the two games. Um, what was it about their defense that where you weren't able to score more? They played well? They put pressure on us. Uh, they put pressure on the quarterback. We were in a lot of long yardage situations, you know, didn't We weren't in

sync really in any of our faces. So, um, we have to be better in all areas against this team. I mean there they can be a good defense. They have good players that they had a good plan against us last year. Um, we just need to be better

this year. Providing that you know. I think for every quarterback, there's a great feeling that you have as a quarterback when you're either in the shotgun or under center and you kind of look out there and you see your guy, and you look across and you see who's covering them. And when you have a feeling as a quarterback like he's always open, he can always win, it gives a quarterback a lot of confidence. And that's you can't can't

underestimate how important that is. And I think that's a primary thing that now Sean brings to the table as a quarterback. When you have a guy like that, does it take a little while to understand that in game situations that even if he's not open, he's open. I do think it's I do think it's always developing and where you can throw it and where those windows are.

And certainly you know he's got big catch radius and excellent ball skills u and versus different corners on certain different routes, on contested catches, on a slant route, it looks different than on the go route and where you place that ball. So some of that you do grow and developing and reading his body language and finding just how far you can stretch him because he does have a big catch radius. Lane's first game of his suspension

was the at Washington game last year. What have you noticed from him as he's gearing up for, you know, a season where it looks like he's he's up for a little bit of redemption. I mean, I think Lane has you know, Lane just looked great. I mean, he's had a great offseason, great camp. Lane is in a he's a leader in a lot of ways. He's not the most vocal leader, but love the way he practices.

Love is intensity. You know, he's a very intense individual, and I think you can see that when he's in the meeting room, when he's on the practice field, and we're looking forward to a great game and a great

season from him, for sure. Visit a more balanced game plan, I suppose the last year bought to this year with the Dolphins line plans, we envisiting play yeah, I mean, I think you know, we go in every week wanting to be balanced, you know, and there's always a ten percent margin either way on that is what balanced is. Let's just say for example, and you just don't want to go to the extremes very often, you know, it's

going to happen. In the course of sixteen games. You know there's going to be games where you're a little run heavy, and there's going to be some games where you end up being pass heavy. It usually usually always happens, but in the perfect world, you know, we can keep them off balance. As an offense, every offense wants to do the same thing. You want to dictate the tempo and you want todt and you want to impose your

will on the defense. And what that means is that you want to be able to run the ball when you want to run it, and throw it when you want to throw it, and do the different kind of things that you know, the drop back stuff, the empties, the movements, play pass, you know all those things. You want to mix those and you have a plan on how you're gonna tack. You have every phase of this.

You emphasize certain things certain certain weeks based on the opponent you're planning and who you have, and then as the course of the game goes, you adjust and you get a feel as a play caller, and which I think coach does a great job of where where we're excelling at and so yeah, I think we want to we want to be balanced, like going into this week

knowing you have your quarterback in place. He has a full year of experience under the belt as opposed to last year, when you know the trader was just made and here they talked, well, Carson su quarterback, you got to get him ready. I mean, how much of a difference is that. There's a huge difference in every way. It's not that he's you know, I mean, he's Carson. He's prepared, he's emotionally and physically and in every way he's a better player. And you still got to go

improve that and it starts this week. But he's proving it in every phase of the off season. We've been able to see it. Everyone can see it. I mean everyone can see um the improvements that are made, his complete command of the offense, his leadership on the team. I think those are of all been expected strides. But I would say he's exceeded he you know, at some incremental level, he's exceeded the strides that you want. You know, you can't go from here to here. You can't jump

to three steps in a year. No, no player just doesn't happen. You'd like to think that, but you can go in small increments and and uh and I think that he has done that and really exceeded where I think you would expect him to be. Like last year at this time, you know, put together a game plan for the opener, and like with a quarterback who barely played like during the preseason and wondering if he can

handle all this stuff and everything. Yeah, I mean, obviously there was a real big focus on keeping it extremely simple. You always want to be able to play fast, but certainly when you have a rookie quarterback like we did last year who really didn't play much in the preseason. But a credit to Carson was he was prepared. He was mentally prepared. I mean, he's off the charts smart.

I mean that's been well documented and discussed. But even though he wasn't getting physical reps, even while he was hurt in preseason, he was a real pro and extremely gifted and talented in that area to have a pretty

good embrace on the offense. Had players that talent was the ideal number of targets that they want to get to this repea you know, I think if you're looking at an ideal number of targets again, the flow of the game is going to dictate that, but I can Here's here's what I would say, is that we go through the game plan and you guys have heard us say this before. Is you know, we have our seventeen plays. You know, here's the plays that are designed to go

to seventeen. And sometimes in the course of a play calling, you can't you know, like we might have X number of plays that are that are where he's the primary guy, and you envision getting ten or twelve of those two him and the flow of the game goes a little different than you anticipated. So it's hard to put a direct number on it. But certainly he he is a primary playmaker for us who we're going to make a

conscious effort to get the football. A good sense Brancat, how you're going to deploy this this running back group. You have a guy to sort of hang your hat on. And when you I think it's I think I think it's exciting to think about how to deploy this running back group. Um, you know the by by committee thing and as coaches alluded to the hot hand thing. Um,

again that saw for the flow of the game. But again, when you're when you're putting together that plan, and you're and you're looking through and we literally at every skilled position, go through every play and say who do we win in on this play? Who who is utilized best on this play? And sometimes the answers, well, hey, we can have Lea Garrett m Wendo. You know, they both would

be suitable for this play. So sometimes there's more than one guy and we kind of keep that in mind and one time we'll run the play with one the next time we might run it with the other guy. If the one guy hits it hard and good the first time, we might just let him roll with it again the second time. And then there's things where obviously we're using Darren and mixing things up like that. So it's exciting to do to look through. It's not hard

to do, it's it's very tedious. It's the kind of detail that you have to do in game planning to go through every play, every position. Are we best utilizing our players? Because ultimately it's about players making plays, and we got it. It's our job to put him in position to do that. Carson's ability to expand plays, Frank, how much more time did you spend this summer on scrambled drills and things like that with him and the

receivers than maybe you did last year with Sam. And where are they right now as far as being in sync on that? You know, I think we've spent an appropriate amount of time drilling it in the off season. In seven on seven drills, we mix in scrambles, so we're obviously you know you're in the seven seven drill, there's no rush, but you know you you fake scrambles to get guys and try to get it SYNCD up, something that's hard to do without really being live. Preseason

games are the best for that. But and in practice when we have manufactured scrambler drills, you've seen some improvement we can coach off the tape on those things. So I think we've made progress there, But obviously be put to the test coming up here and be Parson down in his development as a player. Are you guys going to do more? Are you're going to go to the line and run the play or there will be time to run pass checks or or does he ad ability to change a play if he sees something. Is he

that far in his development? Yeah, he's absolutely that. He was doing a lot of that last year just because of you know, he has he has I think special ability in that area. But some of us not just a mat smart. Some of it's a matter of feel and reading body language and you know, hearing what the defense is saying and just feeling certain things that the great quarterbacks feel. You know, when they're showing you one look and you know you're laughing inside saying they're not

doing that. I know what they're doing, and but that's what great players do. And there was a lot of evidence that Carson has those instincts and abilities, not only the intellectual abilities, but the instinctive things that you need as a quarterback. So that comes very that comes in

very handy. You know, teams fake a big and all outblits and then they're going into coverage or they look like coverage and they're going all outblits, and as a quarterback, you know, we don't you don't want to put too much on them, but you have to be able to do enough to get you in and out of certain plays.

You don't want to have to do that thirty forty times a game, but there might be five or ten times that are absolutely critical and essential that you get You get us out of this play and get us to something that's going to work and then the runch X In the past, you know, we check run to run, run to pass, pass to run. We always mix that up so defense can't narrow in on us on what we're doing with our checks because they're all keeping all those stats of when you're checking plays are you're always

checking the run or you're always checking the pass. We track that pretty good ourselves, and we always make sure that they can't get too much on us in that area. There's a sprules that night's ferry leisure obviously, is that where you want to use them or to focus for our terms of space? Yeah, I think you know, obviously Darren is a great space. You know, get him out

of space. We can great route run or great hands do that as much as we can, but he can run the football and so and obviously you know we want to hand, we want to get to me and to us as a staff. He's one of our playmate, he's one of our primary he's another one of our primary playmakers. And we got to get in the ball and uh in the run game in the past game and they're certainly more certain runs that are a little bit more suited to him. But Darren's so strong. I mean,

everybody knows. Everybody knows that the legendary, right, this guy is one of the strongest guy's pound for pound probably in the league. So um, yeah, you don't want to run him up inside a zillion times. But he's not a slight guy. This guy's a powerful a powerful man, and so we have no problem mixing up the kind of runs we use. Certainly some more conducive for him than others, but at the end of the day, we

want to get him as touches. We've seen Nelson have a really strong spring and kind of summer, and he could be the first to tell you that it doesn't really matter until the games start coming. Is there still a level of skepticism that he's gotten over that hump heading into this season. I don't think there's any skepticism

in here. I mean, you have seen him day after day after day after day put together solid practices that he's looked great, So I have no reason to believe that that's not what's going to be what we see this season. There's always sort of unknown going until week one off off the off season, where are you most curious to see how it translates from from the off season preseason until we've won fast start and just score more points early. You know, I just think we need

to be more productive. We want to be more productive early in games. You know, obviously everybody wants to get ahead early and you want to score a lot of points. But um, you know, we we did some good things last year. We just need we need better production and situational football and at the end of the day, that needs to result in just more points scored. And certainly we want to get off to a fast start. And because it needless to say, that just puts our whole team in a good position.