Dan Quinn Quotes

For me, it was watching the New York Giants growing up, with Bill Parcells and Lawrence Taylor and that whole crew coming up through the ’80s. And then, as I moved on to college, I thought I’d want to coach for sure.

As coaches, any work you may do, it’s been done long ago.

Number one, from a tackling standpoint, we teach strike zone hits, and we want to hit absolutely as hard as we can in that strike zone, and that’s absolutely what we call a batter in the batters box from the chest all the way down to the knees.

Communication isn’t just directing a guy on what to do: it’s passing the information along to the guy that’s next to you, and that’s where we make the calls come to life.

As far as the fouls go, we are not going to rely on anyone else to make the calls for us.

I would never recommend losing on a bye, so that one definitely stays with you.

Adrian Clayborn is somebody that relentlessly brings that attitude, energy, and toughness.

Our central theme is, How good you can get? How hard can I go to see how good you can get?

When it’s those division games, that’s when it gets ramped up for me.

I think some people have a rare ability to focus. As a player, Earl Thomas has it. When he was at practice or in a game, he was always on; he was right there.

I think different teams have different challenges as you go through.

Forever, we all had a real clear understanding of what Parcells’ teams looked like and played like: tough as hell and didn’t beat themselves.

For me, trying to connect our team together is so important. I know we’ll play really well when our team gets really tight. So I want to make sure I connect with the players so that I can help them be at their best.

We don’t spend so much time on the opponent that we forget it’s really about us.

At the beginning of the week, when we do our game planning, we look at the opponent and all the unique things they do.

In our league, it comes right down to the end.

Oftentimes, you have to be able to throw it in order to run it.

It’s that preparation that goes into each week. We have a term: ‘Trust your training, trust your teammate, and trust yourself.’

We talk about toughness as a quarterback: it’s not sometimes the physical part that you see; it’s the mental toughness and the ‘I’m going to stand in here, take this shot,’ and ‘I’m going to deliver it to my guy.’

We want to let our play be the judges.

We’re not Seattle East. We’re our own Atlanta, and there are definitely things I learned from Coach Carroll. He had probably the single biggest influence on my coaching career.

One of these topics we talk about with the team on our ‘Competition Wednesday’ is iron sharpening iron. That’s the process we go through to get each other ready, and that’s why we have some periods where we get to compete against one another.

Sometimes there are some matchups and man-to-mans that you like to match up on.

We want to play a really physical style ball, and so, for us tackling, we know we are shoulder-based tackling team, and we want to hit that strike zone just like you’re throwing fastballs into that catchers’ mitt just as hard as you can.

I’ve been around some really good guys from different teams.

Our intent of how we’re going to play doesn’t change.

That attitude and toughness that we want to play with, that, to me, is the most critical thing.

One of my strengths is connecting with the players.

I think that’s the ultimate sign of a teammate and respect is that they compete against one another so hard at practice that here’s a chance to share some knowledge inside. It takes some humility to do that.

Personally, it was a big honor for me meeting so many families of the fallen soldiers and hearing their stories.