Falcons’ Jessie Bates III on loss: ‘Don’t give up explosives for touchdowns’

JESSIE BATES, safety

On loss: “We just gave up explosives for touchdowns.”

On what they can draw from the loss: “Don’t give up explosives for touchdowns.”

On how the defense moves forwards: “Don’t give up explosives for touchdowns.”

ARNOLD EBIKETIE, outside linebacker

On defense: “It was tough, especially knowing what team we are. Knowing what we are capable of. Just coming out here and not being able to get the job done. It’s hard. We have to keep our heads up. Get back to work tomorrow and get back on the drawing board.”

On plan for Derrick Henry: “The plan was just to be physical. Just not let him break loose. We knew he was going to be a volume runner. We knew we had to keep hitting him down after down.”

KHADAREL HODGE, wide receiver

On getting some work after Drake London went down: “It felt good, but the most important thing is winning. We came up short. It wasn’t the best. I’ve got to figure out a way to get my speed up so I can take that to the house. It felt good.”

On how they adjusted to Taylor Heinicke: “We have a next man up mentality for this team. We are coming together as one. We rallied together. We are praying for Des (Desmond Ridder) and his health, but we are trying to come together as a team in any situation no matter, who’s up or down. We just rally when we can.”

RICHIE GRANT, free safety

On if this was a step back: “Hell naw this definitely was not a step back. At the end of the day, you can only go up. Nothing is intentional. You’re out there trying to make plays. Player-makers out there trying to play. You can’t win a game when you are giving up those type of plays. We just have to come back and focus. It’s not a setback by any means. We are going to learn from it and grow.”

JONNU SMITH, tight end

So, coming back to Tennessee for you, just kind of walk me through some of the emotions maybe in the beginning of thia games. “To me it was just another game. We got to be professional at the end of the day. We came in here ultimately, trying to win a football game. That’s the approach I had. Definitely great seeing some of the guys that I played with, some of my former teammates. But at the end of the day, it’s a business trip.”

I think you and Arthur (Smith) were the ones that were smiling the most pre-game, kind of like seeing all these people that you used to work with so closely. Did you ever talk to him, I guess throughout this game, like, ‘Hey we got to have something for this game here. “’Like I said, me and Arthur understand this is a business at the end of the day. We can’t let the main thing go unhandled. We’ve got to keep the main thing the main thing. It was definitely — we’re human, we all got those emotions, and we built relationships with a lot of these guys. So of course, it was great coming back. But at the end of the day, we ultimately came here to get a win. And we didn’t do that today. So got a lot of evaluating to do and get better and we’ll keep moving forward.”

A lot of guys have pointed to the surge kind of late for you guys as an offense, as something that’s positive to take away. With Taylor (Heinicke) coming in, what were some of the differences that you guys’ kind of felt on offense? “I think just as a unit we understood whoever is in there, we just got to play better. It wasn’t necessarily one person coming in and changing the dynamic of it. Guys went down and guys stepped up and made plays and we needed to make those plays no matter who was in there. So, it got kind of, like you said, we got a late surge, but it was kind of too late. You can’t play from behind. It’s the NFL. Every team has the ability to win games so, you can’t pick them all.”

Calais (Campbell) was saying ‘we’ve got to stop beating ourselves on all phases of the game.’ How confident are you guys moving forward on offense that you can do that? “Oh, extremely confident. We’ve seen us – and I won’t even say we’ve seen us at our best – but we played at a high level and still got a lot of things to improve on. So that’s encouraging. So, I think that when we continue to play our brand of football, like I always say, I say it week in and week out, when we play our brand of football, we find a way to win games and we don’t lose games.”

CALAIS CAMPBELL, defensive end

When you say, we need to not beat ourselves, is that defense or do you mean the whole team kind of needs to work on things different? “Well, it’s definitely the whole team. It’s all phases today. Today there was, it was all phases. You can go down the list if you want to but at the end of the day, I think it was in all different phases of the game. Especially on defense where I feel like it’s my domain. We just got to improve and make sure that we just go back to doing our job and making sure that we just play football. At the end the day, they’re going to get some. They’re good players, D-Hop (DeAndre Hopkins) had a big day, right. He’s had plenty of big days in this game. He’s a good player. Will Levis, first time playing, coming off the bye, you got to give him his respect. He came out here and played like a veteran and they did some things that was kind of a big ask for a rookie quarterback and he handled it very well. So give him his respect, and it is what it is. They’re in a whole different conference so we won’t worry about them anymore, but we’ll learn from our mistakes, and we’ll go from there.”

When we talked to Jessie Bates, the only thing he kept answering our questions with was ‘We got to stop these explosive plays that we gave today.’ You’ve been on, I’m sure, teams in games that that’s been a problem. How fixable is that for a defense and how do you kind of move forward as a defense knowing that you can limit that? “Yeah, most of the time when you see an explosive play like that, something didn’t go the way it’s supposed to, right. If a guy gets beat in position, you can live with that because that’s usually just somebody making a play. Which I think one of those was that, right? But the other, there was three big time explosives where you got to watch the tape to figure out exactly what happened. At the end of the day, one thing that we pride our team on is that we didn’t panic, we didn’t flinch, we just kept fighting, we gave ourselves a chance to win at the end of the game, which is huge. That’s who we are. So, at the end of the day, today was just their day. I mean, they’re players. You got to give them their respect. We kept fighting, we had a chance at the end of the game, and that’s all you can really ask for in this business.”

The Bow Tie Chronicles