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Transcript: Falcons vs. Buccaneers

Head coach Mike Smith
Opening Statement:
"We talked during the bye week, if you had a Falcons logo on your helmet you were expected to step up and make plays. Whether a young guy, old guy, we all needed to do that, and I thought we did that. I felt we had a lot of positives in the game today in terms of coming off our bye week. We started fast with the strip fumble and the touchdown, which was a big play. We made a lot of corrections in the bye week. They didn't all show up this week, but we are going to continue to work and take it one day at a time, one game at a time."

On the offense:
"I thought we put together a very good plan to utilize the strengths of our players. I thought the coaching staff did a great job. Matt distributed the ball very well. I believe he was close to 150 in his quarterback rating in the ballgame, and he did a very good job distributing it to our playmakers."

On Harry Douglas:
"Harry had a career day. Everybody's role changes in the NFL. Harry's role changed two weeks ago because of our situation at wide receiver. He stepped up to the plate and did an extremely good job today. Harry is a very good wide receiver; he just hasn't had an opportunity to be the number one receiver, and he was the number one receiver in the game today."

On William Moore:
"I thought that we did a nice job defensively, putting pressure on the quarterback.    A lot of that pressure came from our secondary's coverage; they did a very good job understanding what routes they were going to see. Their quarterback had to hold the football and we were able to get some pressure on the quarterback."

On what they did differently to get pressure on the quarterback:
"We had a rotation that was a little bit different in terms of who was actually participating. As we said in the bye week, we were going to look at everything, and there were a lot of changes out there on the football field, on the sideline, in the press box. We looked at everything."

On DC Mike Nolan being on the sideline:
"We've thought it would be in our best interest. We weren't playing as efficiently and as good as we would have liked to, and we thought it would be in our best interest to bring Mike down. Mike has called games from the press box and from the sideline. It was a discussion that we had; we felt it was in our best interest to put him down there. That was the decision that was made last week."

On Darius Jonson:
"Darius has been on our roster, on our practice squad. He's done a very good job. He has earned the right to go out there and play, had a crucial catch for a first down in the game. He is a very athletic, not a big receiver, but athletic receiver with good speed. It was good to see him get his first catch in the National Football League."

On getting more takeaways:
"We only had one, it's a start. We had some opportunities, we had some ball disruption. I thought there were a couple other opportunities to take the ball away. There was a ball on the ground on a sack they ended up recovering, which we would have liked to get that turnover, but it is a step in the right direction in terms of what we want our defense to do."

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