Cardinals look to fix problems against Steelers
Oct 17, 2011, 7:59 PM | Updated: 10:01 pm
The Cardinals are coming off a much needed bye week, but now must re-focus on Sunday’s opponent, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Defensive tackle Darnell Dockett admits the break was nice but says football was always on his mind.
“It was good today to get out there and shake four days of rest off,” Dockett said Monday. “I think our team didn’t get any rest anyway, I think a lot of guys still had football on their mind. If you’re competitive and you love what you do that’s the mindset you’re going to be in.”
The Cardinals currently sit at 1-4, dropping four straight games since a Week 1 victory, prompting a meeting that hit the spot for Dockett.
“This is probably one of the emotional meetings that I’ve been in and we’re going to turn it around,” Dockett said. “We’re going to take things ten times more seriously than we ever have, we have a lot of guys on this team that depend on a lot of people and at the end of the day we got to just play together.”
The team is still learning the new defensive scheme Ray Horton brought over from Pittsburgh, but according to Dockett the fact that the defense is difficult to learn isn’t an excuse being made by the Cardinals.
Dockett says the biggest problem with the defense has been the lack of communication, something the team will need to fix before it’s too late.
“Communication, that’s been killing us for four games,” Dockett said. “When we mess up we say ‘alright that’s my fault’ but these next 11 games we can’t be having my faults, if you can’t get it done and you’re not trying to get it done then we got an issue. It’s one thing to not play the correct technique all the time and it’s another to go out there and not give your all. That’s our next step just playing these next 11 games like its our last.”
To fix the communication issues the team is studying harder and meeting more often.
“We just have to raise our standards up,” Dockett said. “Its not about what the media thinks of us, it’s not about what the fans think it’s about what these guys in this locker room think and what we have to do to get ourselves out of this situation.”
Dockett says it’s up to the players to get this team turned around.
“When we step on that field the guys with the helmet on and those coaches are the only thing that matters,” Dockett said. “Once we start doing it for each other, being accountable, this team can go a long way but if we don’t were just going to have to hear people talk bad about us.”
There’s that word again, accountable.
