LB Jonathan Casillas
September 7, 2017
Q: What is it like starting the season against the Cowboys?
A: Oh, you’ve got to love it. I’ve been here three years and we’ve done it every year. You know everybody’s going to be watching, primetime game against ‘America’s Team’. And they think they owe us something, which is fine. It’s a good team down there that we’re going to go to play and we’re ready to go.
Q: Do you think this team has Super Bowl possibilities?
A: Yeah, I mean, I thought that last year too, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to make it at the end of the year. We’ve got to be able to take each game one at a time and a good start is trying to win the division, that’ll be a good start.
Q: A lot of people talk about the Cowboys having a great offense, do you think they should talk about the Giants having a great defense just as much?
A: I don’t really care what people say. You’ve got to give [the Cowboys] their due respect. They’re very talented on the offensive side of the ball, the numbers speak for themselves. They did a really good job. [Running back Ezekiel] Elliott was the leading rusher in the NFL by far and yards per carry, he did really well. Their offensive line is good. And not only that, you’ve got backups like [running back] Alfred Morris, who rushed for 1,200 yards three times in his career. Like, you know, they’re loaded and you’ve got to give them their respect. We respect them and we know that we’re going to go down to Dallas and it’s always going to be a fight, a war, a battle, every time.
Q: Do you feel that you match up well with the Cowboys?
A: I mean, we beat them twice. I don’t really have to say we’re that good. I think if you just look at the record from last year and it’s like, ‘Okay, we beat them twice,’ and they were a high-powered offense. How many points did they score the second game? [seven].
Q: How do you prepare, defensively, for a team with that many weapons on offense?
A: Well, you’ve got to be prepared for everything. A running back like Ezekiel Elliott, he’s a downhill runner, but he can bounce outside. That doesn’t really make sense, but it does because he’s very versatile. He can be aggressive, he can duck his head and get those grind it out yards. But then he can beat everyone to the edge because he’s that skilled, he’s that fast, he’s that explosive. So, you know, we do have to be on point, everybody has to take care of their job and do their job on every single play. Or they will expose us. That’s point-blank, period. I feel like we’ve done a good job last year playing against these guys. The one touchdown they got in the second game, our eyes weren’t right and they got a free play because there was no one covering that guy. It wasn’t even a challenge and he just caught it. We can’t allow those. If we allow them to beat us by making mental errors and miscues and stuff like that, there’s a chance we can go down there and get blown out because we’re not on point, because they’re that good. We’ve got to be on our A-game – dot all of our i’s and cross all of our t’s – and go down there and play a perfect game, basically, to beat this team because they’re that good.
