There has been a lot of talk about Jim Schwartz's post-game comments on Sunday, so I figured I would post them and let you take a look for yourself. Via the Lions, here they are:
Opening statement: "Obviously a very difficult loss to take, particularly when we had a 10-point lead as the game rolled down the fourth quarter. The end of the game, we failed to execute the way that we needed to and that's the head coach's fault. That's my fault. I didn't do a good job enough with the players in those situations, not only on defense, but on offense and on special teams. The game came down to one point. We had a missed extra point and there's no question that Ndamukong is our backup field goal kicker. He's done it in practice. We have a lot of confidence that he could kick it. It put him in a difficult situation because he went out without any warm-ups, where a kicker that's not playing a position generally has time to take his time. Probably should have called a timeout, given him time to get ready. At the time, when Jason got roughed on the play, it looked like it was a big advantage for us, because it put us at first and goal at the 1. We were able to get a touchdown rather than a field goal. But in the long haul, that actually hurt us worse than it helped us, with the missed extra point, then also our kickoffs and the way the field goal team was at the end of the game."
On QB Matthew Stafford's condition: "He's very sore. He hurt his shoulder and wasn't able to finish the game. You guys know how tough he is. If he could have he would've. We're going to take a pretty serious look at it."
On if he re-injured the same separation he had before: "It's his right shoulder. I don't know if it's even related. We took enough time with it that we thought that any re-injury would be a new injury. We'll see where he is with that. That was a tough situation because he had green grass in front of him and had his chance to break out of there and run. But some of those plays we just need to throw it away. We didn't want to throw incomplete passes in those situations. He ran it."
On if there is a reason that the errors happened at the end of the game and if it's due to having young guys on the field: "There's no excuses there. Even if you're a younger player, if you're not a younger player we need to be able to execute at the end of the game. We're eight games into the season. There are no rookies anymore, there are no young players. We need to be able to execute. There were breakdowns at the wrong time at the end of the game."
On if K Jason Hanson's injury is long term: "Well, he was able to go back in and kick an extra point, after getting his knee taped up and a bunch of other things. He couldn't have gone from very much farther than that."
On DE Cliff Avril: "Avril wasn't able to finish. He has a leg. We'll see where all those guys are. Jason's had some injuries that have been his none kicking leg over the last couple years. He's missed time in training camp with those. This was his kicking leg. Like I said, at the time, you're like ‘Hey, there's a flag, could we get a chance to get a touchdown out of this?' Obviously we didn't do a good enough job with it."
On how they will regroup after such a loss: "I think our players take a lot of confidence in the way 54 minutes of that game went. I think when we look at the final 6 minutes; we can see a lot of reasons we weren't able to close that out. Like I said, big plays allowed on defense - that had nothing to do with keeping their clock going. There were some big chunks that were there at the end of the game. We failed to execute: missed tackles, letting guys out of bounds, personal fouls moving them into field goal range, and then us failing to keep the clock going at the end there. There were a lot of situations. And then the missed extra point, that makes it a touchdown at the end rather than a field goal."
On if he thought of putting Hill in, had the Lions received the ball in overtime: "He was active only to hand the ball off. He couldn't have done anything other than take a snap and hand the ball off, so there was no consideration. A little bit like Matt a couple weeks ago. It was only up in case of a dire emergency."
On if he was disappointed in the running game: "We knew the run game was going to be difficult against these guys. They load the front with a lot of 46-type stuff which is designed to stop the run. We knew it was going to be tough. We needed to keep on running to keep them in that to open up our pass game. I thought later in the game, we started breaking a few runs here and there. We knew it was going to be tough against that group. I don't know where they are in the NFL in rushing, I think second or something like that, but there's a reason for that. They stack that run front and make it very, very difficult to run. So we started making a little bit more progress in the second half but not enough."
On if QB Shaun Hill could be ready next week: "We'll see. That will close in right around the time that he'd be healing. We'll have to just wait and see and see where he is and his ability to be able to handle the football and also throw and take a hit and do everything you need to do in an NFL football game."