I was going to cover Wade Phillips’ press conference today on time, but I was having trouble getting the stream. Buffering, evil buffering. I caught some of it, then went back and listened to the rest later. Here’s a paraphrase.
On the injury front, Kevin Burnett has a thigh contusion, Anthony Henry is getting out of the boot and they will evaluate him, Keith Davis and Oliver Hoyte are progressing and Terrell Owens has a hip contusion.
Wade expressed the same wonderment at the Cowboys victory that we all did. Lots of talk about the defense playing well, about turning the ball over six times, two for TD’s and still winning. Wade also noted that in the stats we outplayed the Bills, except for those pesky turnovers. He wanted us to know that some of those things that happened at the end weren’t luck, they were things they worked on in practice. Like the onsides kick, the drive for FG’s at the end of the first half and at the end of the game.
He didn’t think that Romo’s problems were caused by exotic coverages from the Bills, or the pass rush, or anything like that, it was just one of those days. I agree, on the DC Fanatic Radio Show today I said much the same thing. Romo was just inexplicably, horribly off for most of that game. The key; don’t let it carry-over to next week.
As if there was any doubt, Wade said he never thought of pulling Romo in that game.
Wade hates the rule about calling timeouts right before FG’s. He doesn’t think it’s fair.
Wade explained how they do replay reviews like the one on the Terrell Owens’ incompletion. He said the replay official doesn’t look at the replay before he buzzes down; he looks at the offensive team and sees if they can get another play off. If he thinks they can then he buzzes, so he buzzed down to the field before we spiked the ball. If we hadn’t been able to spike the ball though, it wouldn’t have mattered if the pass was incomplete; at that point the game is over. So if we hadn’t been able to spike that ball, we would have lost. We wouldn’t get the time back even though the pass was incomplete. But the replay official saw that we were about to spike it in time and buzzed the on-field official. At least that’s what Wade says.
On the last FG drive, we were able to get the two completions to Barber and Crayton by beating the Cover-2. They Cowboys had been running the corner route on that defense all night forcing the corner to stay back and leave the flats uncovered. So they did that both times and on the last drive and picked up the extra yards for Folk.
Wade had a lot of love for Jay Ratliff running 70-something yards to recover Newman’s fumble. He talked the Rat’s play up for quite a while.
Noted that Jason Hatcher had a good day, he took advantage of his plays in there this week and he thought Anthony Spencer was dominate against the run and did all things well. Wade thinks that Terence Newman wasn’t in great shape yet because he hasn’t been able to run much since he was injured, so that might have had something to do with Lee Evans running him down. But he also said it could be the Big 10 track champ is faster than the Big12 track champ.