Tuesday Media Transcript: Head Coach Pat Shurmur

Head Coach Pat Shurmur -- November 6, 2018

Opening Remarks: Welcome back. All the players are back, you noticed Nate (Solder) wasn’t here, had an appointment with his son this morning. He’s here, he’s in the building, and he was excused from the morning portion of this. With that, I’ll try to answer your questions.

Q: You said on the radio after last week that Kyle (Lauletta) was going to face consequences. Will he be suspended for this game?
A: No, not suspended, but we have internal consequences. I released a statement that I’m just disappointed in the way that went down. I’ve spoken to him numerous times since the event, and we have internal ways of handling it, but it will not include a suspension.

On whether the incident hurts his chances of playing:
A: Well, I’m disappointed because I think especially with a quarterback, you’re looking at decision-making in all facets of a player’s life. He’s back to work, that will take care of itself. We’ve kind of stated what we feel about that, but he’s back to work trying to get himself ready to play.

Q: According to the timeframe provided by the police, it was right around 8 o’clock and they said it also happened Monday. Was he late or was he in danger of being late, if he was still in Weehawken at 8 o’clock?
A: Yes.

Q: So he was late two days in a row?
A: No. The first day, he didn’t have to be here quite as early. That day, he was in danger of being late.

Q: For a quarterback with a possible opportunity to play as a rookie to be late, says what?
A: He was late. I know what we’re all getting at here. The whole event is disappointing. The whole event.

Q: Had there been previous issues of him being late?
A: No, I don’t think there’s anything about being late, but the way I look at it, quarterbacks should be early.

Q: How close do you think he is to being able to play?
A: He’s working himself in a position to play, he’s done a good job out here in practice. He’s a small school quarterback, so there was a lot to learn and there is a lot to learn about how to prepare in the NFL, and he’s going through the process of doing that.

Q: Is Eli (Manning) starting Monday?
A: Yes, Eli will start Monday.

Q: Is he definitely going to start the rest of the season?
A: I spoke to Eli a couple times this weekend and I explained to Eli that he’s going to start Monday. I also explained to Eli that everybody needs to play better and as we go through this, it’s important that we’re not ‘almost’ in these games, we do what we have to do to get it over the top and win football games. We’ll just take it from there. But I spoke to the team about that, and then I also spoke to Eli about that specifically.

Q: How much do you expect from Jamon Brown?
A: He’s a good looking guy and we’ve spent – what we’ve been allowed to do this weekend – time with him. He was here all day yesterday, and he’s picked things up fairly quickly. You saw he was out there already, and I think Hal (Hunter) and Ben (Wilkerson) have done a good job getting him up to speed. We’re going to try to get him in there as quickly as possible. This guy started the whole season, had a little incident where he’s no longer starting, and we were thrilled he was available. He’s a big man, he’s athletic, and he certainly looks the part in some of the reps I saw today. We’ll get him up to speed quickly.

Q: Why did you feel it was necessary to have that conversation with Eli? I’m guessing you didn’t call a lot of other players.
A: Because it’s the quarterback. Those are the things as you move forward, part of what you do during the bye week is get back to basics, try to see what you did well and do more of that, see what you didn’t do well and try to minimize that, and so some of that, we, as coaches, have to do the things that he does well, and we all need to just be better.

Q: You didn’t communicate anything beyond Monday for him to start?
A: I told you, he is starting Monday. You roll with it how you want, with the idea that he’s going to get us on a run here and there will be no decisions to be made. In other words, part of the conversation was, we trust you, we want to work with you, and we trust the fact that you’re going to get in there and help us win football games.

Q: We’ve talked a lot about Kyle Lauletta. Is Alex Tanney – who has been active every game – is he a guy who you would consider playing in a game?
A: Absolutely. It goes without saying, we’ve had him as number two throughout. We just don’t stack them up willy-nilly. Based on when we started this, Eli’s starting and Alex has been the backup. Again, when you bring in rookie quarterbacks, there is a process they have to go through to develop and some guys have to develop further than others. Once the world quits seeing the training camp practices, that continues and guys pick up things at different paces. You can look at all the first round draft pick quarterbacks – Donovan McNabb didn’t start until Week 8, and he was a first-round pick. Some of these other guys have started right away and they were picked higher, and so I don’t know what the world is expecting, we’re just trying to get him as good as he can be so that when he goes in there he has success.

Q: You’ve been hesitant to have a depth chart pecking order. Whenever we’ve asked you about the quarterback depth chart, you’ve said we’re assuming things.
A: We haven’t talked about it since training camp, right? Then when we played our first game, we had Eli as our starter and Alex as our backup.

Q: How about RJ McIntosh?
A: He will be activated. He will be ready to go, which will require a roster move, so we have some conversations to go through.

Q: As you looked at (yourselves) over the bye, what did you find as the common denominator offensively?
A: It comes down to points. When you look at it, if we score one more touchdown a game, then for the people that crunch numbers, that’s a good thing, and for the people that crunch numbers, that puts us in a position to win half those games we played. Scoring in the red zone is an important thing when we get down there, and there’s tactical things that we need to do better. Then there’s certainly things that players can do better. Those are the things you look at, you think of the situations in the games, the players you have in the games available, how you’re trying to get the ball to certain people, so you go back and revisit that and do it at a pace where it’s much slower than if you were getting ready to play a game.

Q: After those first two trades last week, a lot of people thought more were coming. Are you happy to see the team remain intact, and did you talk to any of the guys whose names were out there as reportedly (on the trade block)?
A: No, I didn’t, because sometimes things that get written and said are not true. Quite frankly, it’s people surmising that you may or may not do things, so no, I didn’t talk to any of those people. Quite frankly, I know of a small list of guys that were talked about being traded, I don’t know the full list, so I didn’t feel it necessary to talk about it.

Q: Happy to see the team remain intact as is?
A: Yeah, I’m happy with the guys we have. We’re moving forward, we’re much healthier than we were a week ago. You saw we have (Alec) Ogletree back and (Chad) Wheeler is out here, so that was all good.

Q: Activating (RJ) McIntosh, how do you see his role fitting into that D line rotation?
A: He will fit into the rotation, we’ll see how he progresses. He’s done a good job so far, we’re just learning about him. The question was if he was behind a while back, he’s not as far behind now. Attempt at humor. We’ll just see how much he can handle. We feel like he’s got a future, we had to deal with a medical issue that we were not aware of when we drafted him, so we helped rectify that. As long as he’s a Giant, we’re working with him and we’re looking forward to seeing him do good things.

Q: On Jamon Brown, you said you want to get him in there as quick as possible. Is Monday a possibility that he’s in the starting lineup?
A: It’s a possibility. Again, he’s only been here hours, it’s not even days yet, but what he’s done and how quickly he picks things up, there’s a chance he could be in there.

Q: Is there a difference between an offensive lineman picking things up that he needs to pick up versus a receiver or a running back?
A: Certainly being here longer helps him, but we’ll try to structure it so he knows what he’s doing.