Q:How important is Devin McCourty's versatility in your secondary group, with his ability to flip from safety to corner and vice versa?
MP:I think it's just critical for everyone on defense as we've talked about in the past. We have a handful of players that really do have multiple roles on this team from week to week and really being in different positions. Certainly Devin being an extremely strong player in our defense is a key cog for us [who] can do that and has that ability. When you're a player that does that, it's a very unselfish thing that you're doing, obviously for the betterment of the team. Devin, obviously as a leader and a captain of our defense of our team, understands that and just wants to do whatever he can to help us win and certainly fir him to be able to do that and continue to kind of be a multi-faceted player for us is very beneficial for us and a credit to his work and his preparation every week.
Q:Chandler Jones had a couple of important quarterback pressures late in yesterday's game. Can you talk about his contributions?
MP:Like we talk about every game that we play, every play within that game becomes more critical. When you get towards the end of the game that is obviously the most critical time of the game and to be able to come through, whoever the particular player is, makes a play or has some plays, we certainly shared that effort across the board defensively at the end of the game with everybody. So, it was good to see the guys trying to really step up at the end of the game when it counts and try to do the right things to help the team to win. Chandler obviously was in line with that along with Jerod Mayo and Dont'a Hightower and Patrick Chung and really the whole defense in general, I think, tried to step it up from a situational standpoint at the end of the game and try to come through successfully.
Q:It seems like Dont'a Hightower has been on the field more lately. It seems like he is getting more repetitions in the sub defense packages alongside Jerod Mayo and Tracy White.
MP:Yeah, I think it's more a product of him coming back and getting healthy and being able to stay out on the field a little bit longer. We have a couple linebackers that can rotate through and give us some good production. You know, Dont'a, being one of those guys, a little bit of a multi-role player for us in different instances or alignments or positions, can be more of a point-of-attack position to make some plays. It's good to see him come through and play well and keep trying to improve like we're trying to do every week. It's a situation where yesterday we take a look at the film and we're always going to look at it from the standpoint of, 'What can we do better?' and certainly there are things in film that we need to improve on but obviously [I'm] very proud of our group for working hard to handle some of the situational things that came up and just play better when we really needed to have it and try to improve as the game went along. I think it's, every week in the NFL, it's an extremely difficult game. We always talk about how we throw out the stats and throw out the records because it doesn't mean anything and I think any given Sunday is an extremely difficult task. We never really know what we're going to get or what we're going to run up into. Obviously it was a testament to our guys to just keep battling until they got in under control and played well enough to make enough plays to win. That's really what we're trying to do.
