Transcript of Saints Coach Sean Payton's postgame press conference:
Game Summary
Just a few things…any time you play in a division game like we did tonight on the road obviously it's a big win. I think this. I think the challenges were obvious with regards to logistics and it's something that you really can't as a coach come out and address. You know Thursday night games are one thing, but to play in a Sunday night game and come back and play in a Thursday, you can't, you can't really…because first off it's not an excuse for your players. You don't want it to be, but I would say it's crazy, it's silly, it shouldn't happen. Any questions on the game?
Aggressive play calling strategy or game situations?
Well, there's a couple of things that are influx in that game. They're playing nickel to some of our personnel. We don't know how much they're going to play. We got quite a bit of it. They had a new safety playing. He and Roman (Harper) were back there. They had a new corner at some point. Look, we wanted to have that balance. It's a real good team, a good defense. I was proud of how we kind of fought through some adversity. I think early on we had some long yardage situations. They had a penalty or a sack and those are going to become tough to get out of, but I thought as the game went on we were able to weather some early turnovers. Defensively we came up with some big plays. I thought we were outstanding tonight. They had a few big plays, but you watch Keenan Lewis – I just finished telling him he was outstanding. I thought we had good team defense. The turnovers were significant and in the end I think we just hung in there and kept battling.
Halftime
We looked at it as let's see where this ball takes us. We kind of got backed up a little bit. An incomplete. I think at some point you're trying to be smart, but not foolish with regards to what you're doing and then all of sudden you get across mid-field. Drew (Brees) does a great job of getting us down the field with a shot play, we get the pass interference. So there were these incremental decisions that are based on generally the play or two prior. You're very comfortable saying hey if we have to we'll punt it here or we'll run out the clock. Listen, Drew was outstanding in that drive. The same thing that happened in Miami in '09, we got to that 4th and a half yard. They're a 6-2 defense. He felt the linebackers depth was such that he was going to be able to get the half yard and he easily did.
Answer to their chance to tie the game
There's a couple of those moments. There was one in the second half. I thought us being able to run the ball-it wasn't always pretty and yet we were able to control the game a little bit and I thought that was a big plus.
Team record now
It is what it is right now. We've got to keep getting better. We've got to keep improving and we'll do it.
On Mark Ingram
Look, that's a group effort, from him, from the guys up front. It was solid, really good. Complimented some things we're trying to do. When you look at that linebacking group, there's some players there that make it very challenging to make positive yards, but we settled in on two or three schemes that were being the most productive and we ended up making enough plays in the end we needed.
