Offensive Coordinator Jason Garrett
June 9, 2021
Q. You guys have thrown a lot of bodies, new coaches, Pat Flaherty joins at the offensive line in particular. Freddie Kitchens working hand-in-hand with you. With the lack of continuity in the O-Line coaches, could that be an issue with developing continuity with the players on the field, and how has it gone collaborating with so many coaches on developing the front?
JASON GARRETT: I think the guys have done a really good job responding to it, and obviously Pat Flaherty has coached in this league for a long time. He's a great coach and he's been a great addition to our staff. But Ben Wilkerson is still here as the assistant offensive line coach and exciting to have Rob Sale here as well. Seems like the guys have done a good job picking up some of the new techniques that we are trying to teach or some of the different things we are trying to do with our scheme and the guys have handled it well. Excited to be out on the field with our guys every day and you see them making progress really every time we go out there.
Q. Last season was your first season in a long time as a coordinator and play caller. Curious what your self-scout was like this off-season and do you feel like you need to make any changes going into your second year here?
JASON GARRETT: I think every year you go back and evaluate what you did and how you did it and ways you can do things better. Sometimes you say, ‘hey, we like how we do it that way’. Other times you say, ‘hey, we've got to teach that differently or come up with a new thought or a new idea’. I think that's just part of the process and that's how you grow and evolve as an individual coach and as a unit and ultimately as a team. We go through that process really every year and that's the process we went through this past year. There's some good things that we did. The biggest issue with this team going into last year was obviously the turnovers. Over the last couple years, really just not giving the team enough of a chance to win, when you're down 31, 32 on turnovers and turnover ratio and the early part of the year we didn't do a very good job of that. We continued that trend. If you look at us in the latter part of the year, we did a better job taking care of football and winning the turnover ratio, and that gave us a chance to win games down the stretch. That was a positive thing for our team. We certainly have to build on that and we have to become more explosive on offense, make big plays and score more points and that's a process we are going through. I do think young guys playing, give them a chance to get some experience, they grow as a result of that. We had a lot of young guys playing last year. I thought they got better as they went on. They will learn from that experience and continue to grow. We also have a couple new guys that we're adding to the mix to try to get them acclimated as quickly as we can and continue to grow day-by-day.
Q. You added a lot of different skill sets, Kenny (Golladay) can make plays downfield, Kadarius Toney, really explosive playmaker to use all over. How much does this give you to create a freedom to sort of go in there this off-season and say, hey, I can now put this in, I can open the playbook more than maybe you did last year?
JASON GARRETT: I think the challenge of last year for everybody around the league was you had limited time in training camp and no preseason games. It was hard putting a new system in at the outset. You're wondering what that volume is, what guys can handle, because the year isn't really a typical year. You don't get the reps on the field in practice and then the preseason games. So you had to grow and evolve and try to make those assessments as you went early on in the year and again I thought we got better as the year went on. To add a couple new pieces to the offense, I think the biggest thing we tried to do as coaches is try to evaluate the strengths of all of our players and try to feature them in that regard. The game starts up front as we all know so controlling the line of scrimmage both in the run game and the pass game will be critical for us just like it is for every team around the league and then you try to put the pieces in place, you put them together, you feature what they do best and hopefully you can make some plays and score some points.
Q. Do you believe the talent is in place for your offense to make a significant jump, and how important is it that your quarterback heading into his third year shows some significant improvement this year?
JASON GARRETT: Yeah, I think any time you add pieces, whether it's in the draft or free agency, you're obviously doing that to help improve your team, create competition, get guys out there that can help you and make plays and become more explosive. We are excited about the additions we have. We are trying to get those guys acclimated. We are also excited about the guys who were with us before and they have a year under their belt now. They will learn from those experiences and hopefully continue to grow. That's the process we are in right now. We take it day-by-day. We are excited about this opportunity today, Wednesday. You learn from Tuesday. You try to get better on Wednesday and keep moving forward. So the guys are working hard. We love their approach. They are embracing what we are doing and hopefully we are getting better each and every day.
Q. Is it important for Daniel Jones to also take that step of improvement this year?
JASON GARRETT: Yeah, it's important for everybody, everybody on our team. We talk about that every day, you improve day-by-day, with every opportunity you get, you build on the good stuff, you learn from the other stuff and you keep moving forward. His approach is outstanding. His leadership has been off the charts and we are excited to work with him.
