Nick Sirianni

Q. On Miles Sanders only having two runs. Was that part of the game plan?

NICK SIRIANNI: “The first half, just with how that went, without getting a lot of plays, those numbers get skewed sometimes. I know what they are what they are but when you don’t have that many plays in the first half, because you have penalties that stop drives, defense was on the field quite a bit, and then you’re in a position in the second half where you’re down two scores the whole time, that’s where that kind of comes into play. I know you’re trying to get him the ball on some screens but, obviously he’s a good playmaker and we want him to touch the ball more and, just the way the game went, we weren’t able to do that.”

Q. On the amount of penalties through the first three games.

NICK SIRIANNI: “We’ve got to get that fixed. The ones that you don’t like and the ones that are most troublesome are the pre-snap penalties. We’ve got to take care of that. That’s just us being disciplined and we’ve got to go back to work and get better at that because that’s obviously unacceptable and we’re all in this together. It starts with me and it’s unacceptable on my part. We got too many penalties.”

Q. On Dallas’ offense coming in.

NICK SIRIANNI: “We wanted to make sure we were able to keep up with them. We knew they were an explosive offensive. We wanted to be able to push the ball down the field and hit some of the underneath zones that we saw while also obviously mixing the run game in there. In the screen game, again, you fall behind a little bit and you have to get off that game plan a little bit. We knew we had to score with this team because we knew they were able to score and score quickly.”

Q. On what the biggest problems were offensively.

NICK SIRIANNI: I just felt like, you get the ball to midfield and then you stall out for different reasons. Either I didn’t call a good enough play, whether there was a pre-snap penalty or a penalty, whether there was some pressure, it was coaching, it was execution, we all had a hand in this.”

Q. On the interception early in the game with Jalen Reagor being similar to the one last week. Was there a part of you wanted to “get this play right this time” and that’s why you called it?

NICK SIRIANNI: “There’s options for him on all plays. They gave us a look but the option was to take the vertical route there. I kind of made it a point to go to the offense and say just remember that. You get a first drive and it stalls out there and then you punt and you get the ball at the one. That’s as good as a punt right there. Obviously, you never want it to come down to that but you saw that happened after that. You’ve got them backed up. The defense made a heck of a play and Fletch scored on that play. Jalen’s going to tell you he’ll want that throw back and to get it out. I thought Jalen had decent positioning on it. We just didn’t execute but that’s just what the defense gave us and we took it. I like his aggressiveness there.”

Q. On what he knows about Isaac Seumalo’s injury.

NICK SIRIANNI: “Guys, I apologize because I’m not going to be able to answer injury questions until I talk to the trainers and usually I’m not talking to the trainers until I’m in here with y’all. I’ll have more updates when I talk to y’all on Wednesday.”

Q. On if he would want to slow the game down by running the ball more in retrospect.

NICK SIRIANNI: “When your game plan doesn’t work and you’re lose by 20 points, you’re always going to say yeah, let’s do the opposite thing. That’s for you to say after the game. When it doesn’t work and you lose like that, yeah, you think to go the other route. That’s just the nature of this business. I’m just doing my job.”

Q. On why he punted twice in their territory in the first half if he felt that he needed to score with them.

NICK SIRIANNI: “I’m looking at the chart and deciding when to go for it and not go for it. I felt comfortable following the chart there and the chart said to punt in those situations.”

Q. On how much pressure he feels as a play caller to keep up when the other team starts scoring.

NICK SIRIANNI: “You’re going to have to keep up, there. I don’t want to say it puts unnecessary pressure on me. You’re going to have to call the game a certain way when you’re down multiple scores. I don’t feel like that put pressure on us. We just had to go and execute the plan when we were down two scores but we didn’t do that.”

Q. On what he thought of the defensive performance.

NICK SIRIANNI: “First of all, I want to give credit to Dallas. Dak, to see him in person and see him play and operate in person, he’s a heck of a football player. Kellen Moore’s a really good coordinator and I thought he did a good job. Dak really did a good job of taking what our defense was giving him. Our goal is to limit big plays. We had a coverage early on that Lamb got behind the defense on. Credit to them. We played a lot of middle-of-field-open. We tried to limit the big plays and Dak took what the defense gave him. He was content taking the underneath routes. And they also did a good job of running the football with some of those softer boxes. They executed, we didn’t and hats off to them.”

Q. On Jalen Hurts moving around in the pocket as they tried to keep up with the Cowboys. Did you get a sense that he was being pressured to move out?

NICK SIRIANNI: “I’ve got to look at that. I’ll be able to answer that for you on Wednesday. There are a couple of times where I thought, “Could he have stayed in there,” but I’m not seeing what he’s seeing. I’m seeing it from one side and I’m not seeing if there was any push in the middle or if there was a breakdown somewhere. I’m going to have to watch the tape before I answer that question.”

Q. On what he said when Derek Barnett took a costly penalty and if discipline is an issue with Derek at this point.

NICK SIRIANNI: “No, I don’t think so. I was frustrated with the pre-snap penalties regardless if it was Derek or if it was anybody. We had them on offense. We had them on defense. I don’t think we had any pre-snap penalties on special teams. It was my frustration with the team as a whole and it starts with me. It’s my responsibility to get the penalty thing right. It’s on me. I don’t blame any player for that. We’ve just got to get better at it and it starts with me.”

Q. On this game being a setback.

NICK SIRIANNI: “We’re on a short week. You know, Monday Night Football, you go on a short week. No one’s going to feel sorry for us. The Chiefs aren’t going to feel sorry for us, so we’ve got to rest our bodies, get our bodies right. We’re going to have plan in practice on how we need to get our bodies right on this short week because we’ve got a good football team coming in. It’s dog mentality, be able to recover from this. You’ll learn from this game but you don’t have that day where you’re just spending it on this game. We’re going to have to watch this game on the way home, get the corrections to our guys written down and they’re just going to have to look at those on their own because we’re going to have to be moving onto the Chiefs really quick. Nobody’s going to feel sorry for us and we’re going to have to move on.”