“I counted the cannons.”

MANSOUR: Everybody’s healthy. Nobody came off that field, nobody is on a table tonight, and there’s no list coming Wednesday because there’s nobody to put on it.

One thing and then you can go. Mike Rutenberg and Brandon Lynch changed what we were doing in the first quarter, and they did it while I was on the other side of the bench doing something else. So when you get there, put it on them.

Okay. Go.

Mary Kay Cabot · cleveland.comTampa Bay scored twice in eight minutes and then went 0-for-11 on third down and never reached your red zone. Not once, the whole game. What is that?

MANSOUR: That’s Mike and that’s Brandon, and it starts on the second series after the eighty-seven.

We opened almost entirely in man. That’s mine and I’ll get to it. They took us out of it and into off-zone with the safeties late, so the picture before the snap is one thing and the picture after it is a different thing, and Baker reads the first one as well as anybody alive. So you make the first one a lie.

Then Ephraim’s zone pressure sits on top of it. Four men rushing who are not the four who looked like it.

Eleven third downs. They didn’t get one. I’ve never seen that.

Mary Kay CabotWas that built for Mayfield this week, or was it already there?

MANSOUR: Since camp. Brandon’s had that install since July.

Daryl Ruiter · 92.3 The FanWho made the call and when.

MANSOUR: Mike’s. Second series.

Daryl RuiterYou had nothing to do with it.

MANSOUR: I asked him one thing.

Daryl RuiterAnd?

MANSOUR: He’d already done it. He was two calls ahead of me and I’m standing there with a headset on being a fan about it.

On Sundays that channel isn’t mine. I said something about the inside receiver at the end of the first and he told me it was off the sheet already, and then I went back to my own —

National reporter · CBS SportsDarnell Savage gave up more than 150 yards in that first quarter, including the McMillan touchdown and the eighty-seven to Godwin on the first snap after you pinned them inside the fifteen. Most staffs take that player off the field. Why didn’t you?

MANSOUR: Because the first quarter is a coverage problem and the coverage is mine.

Look — you’re going to get this same answer every week and it isn’t aimed at you, that’s a fair thing to ask. I don’t take one man’s afternoon apart at a table. Haven’t since I got here.

I’ll give you the call sheet. We opened in man and stayed in it, and the reason was Egbuka and Otton working the middle — I wanted to bring five without anybody knowing five was coming, and what that costs you is a safety out there running with Chris Godwin and nothing behind him. I knew what it left open when I wrote it down on Thursday.

Then we punt, they’re on their own fourteen, and I’ve got us in the same picture I’d been in all quarter.

Two touchdowns, both mine. He had to go run at one o’clock what I wrote down on Thursday.

Zac Jackson · The AthleticTwo things. Was taking him off the field discussed on that sideline at all, by anybody? And does the interception in the fourth change how you evaluate the first quarter when you put it on Tuesday?

MANSOUR: The punt before the eighty-seven was fifty-three and it stopped dead on the eleven. Corey hit two tonight and both died inside the twenty. The only reason they’re on their own fourteen at all is that ball, and eleven seconds later it’s a fourteen-point game.

Sorry. What was the question?

Zac JacksonWhether benching him was discussed.

MANSOUR: No. Not by anybody.

Zac JacksonAnd Tuesday?

MANSOUR: Tuesday I’m grading a call sheet, not a person. The picture was wrong for a quarter and I’m the one who drew it.

Tony Grossi · ESPN ClevelandTwo weeks, two teams that are now 0-and-2, a combined 0-and-4 between them. Tampa has given up more points than anybody in football. Have you beaten anybody yet?

MANSOUR: No. Not yet.

Tony GrossiThat’s the whole answer?

MANSOUR: That’s it, yeah.

Tony GrossiYou don’t want to put anything on top of it.

MANSOUR: Not really. You’re right, so.

Carolina’s at our place Sunday and they went and beat Atlanta by a lot, so ask me in a week and it’ll be a better conversation. I watched the same two Sundays you did.

Camryn Justice · News 5 ClevelandThey’d just gone eighty-seven yards on one snap to make it 14–7. What was that sideline like?

MANSOUR: Loud. Bad. I was scared.

Camryn JusticeDid you say anything to them?

MANSOUR: Not much that was any good.

There’s a version of me that stands here and tells you I knew. I didn’t know anything, I was doing arithmetic. Grant said four words to me and I don’t remember what they were, which is embarrassing, because they were the right four.

Then Harold catches the seventeen with two seconds left and everybody could breathe. That’s the game. That happened in the first quarter.

Ashley Bastock · cleveland.comTwenty-nine carries, eighty-four yards. 2.9 a carry. The run game was supposed to be the priority.

MANSOUR: Our backs had forty-six yards on twenty-one carries.

Ashley BastockThat’s the number you’d use.

MANSOUR: That’s the fair number. The other one has Shedeur’s twenty-nine in it.

We could not run the football. At all. Not inside, not outside, not on the two short ones where I called it anyway because I wanted to see it once. I kept going back and it kept not being there, and that’s me, that’s not — I called every one of those.

Ashley BastockWhy wasn’t it there?

MANSOUR: Vita Vea.

Rick Stroud · Tampa Bay TimesExpand on that.

MANSOUR: Oh, I’d love to.

Rick StroudPlease.

MANSOUR: Six tackles for loss. Six, from a nose. That’s a thing you put on a screen in April and tell a rookie to watch four times.

There’s a snap in the second, second-and-six I think, where we’ve got two men on him and a back chipping off, so that’s three, and he takes all three of them about four yards into our backfield and then he throws the outside one off and makes the tackle himself. Three people. He wins.

And then it does a second thing to you. Because he holds up with two, Todd never has to put an extra man in the box. Not once, all afternoon. They played us light and dared us to run it and we couldn’t, and then I went and did it again on the next series.

He’s thirty-one, in that, with four hits on the quarterback. How long have you been watching him?

Rick StroudEight years.

MANSOUR: Yeah. Lucky.

National reporter · NFL NetworkSo what replaced it? You threw it thirty-five times and put up 393 net passing.

MANSOUR: Travis. All of that is Travis Switzer.

National reporter · NFL NetworkMeaning what, specifically.

MANSOUR: He came down the bench at the end of the first, right after Harold’s — and said the run game’s gone today, here are three things that replace it.

Quick game off the same run action so it still looks like a run. The RPO menu out of twelve personnel. And one with the back out of the backfield I hadn’t looked at since April and would never have found this afternoon. On the back of a play sheet, in a hundred and one degrees.

That’s his job. And when I call the offense and it goes well my name is the one that ends up on it.

Albert Breer · Sports IllustratedShedeur Sanders was 26-of-35 for 328, two touchdowns, no interceptions, a 122.1, plus a fifteen-yard touchdown on the ground. He leads the league in completion percentage, passer rating and yards per attempt.

MANSOUR: He was good. Really good.

Albert BreerWhat stood out to you?

MANSOUR: What I liked wasn’t the throws — okay, it was some of the throws. The one to Denzel on the seventeen is a throw.

But he took one sack all day with a pocket in trouble on about a third of the dropbacks. That’s a ball coming out on time forty-five times in a row, and nobody puts that on a highlight.

I’m not doing the other conversation about him tonight. Two Sundays.

National reporter · ESPNHe also ran one in from fifteen.

MANSOUR: He did, yeah. That was not the call.

(Laughter.)

National reporter · ESPNWhat was the call?

MANSOUR: A give. It was there, too. He kept it, he was right, and I want it in the transcript that I called something else.

Camryn Justice · News 5 ClevelandDenzel Boston went up over Zyon McCollum on the seventeen and came down with both feet in. Eight catches, 105 yards.

MANSOUR: McCallum — McCollum, sorry. He’s a big corner and he played that as well as it can be played.

Denzel boxed him out like a rebound. Christian Jones runs a drill with those two where the ball is in the air before either of them has turned around. It looks stupid. Then it’s the seventeen.

He’s twenty-two, he had eight catches in that, and he came off and asked me about a route he ran badly in the second. So.

Zac Jackson · The AthleticCarson Schwesinger. Eleven tackles, four for loss, a sack, two interceptions, four passes defensed. He’s the AFC defensive player of the week and he leads the league in passes defensed.

MANSOUR: He was the best player out there and it wasn’t close.

Zac JacksonThe coverage change took one series. Is that him?

MANSOUR: That’s the only reason it was possible, yeah.

He’s twenty-three, he wears the green dot, and you can hand him something mid-quarter and he has it by the next series. Most defenses can’t install anything on a Sunday because the middle of the field can’t carry it. Jason Tarver’s been building that plate since — how long. March.

Both interceptions are him reading a route combination and leaving early. We didn’t teach him that. I don’t know where that —

Daryl Ruiter · 92.3 The FanFour-for-four on fourth down. You were 0-for-2 in Jacksonville.

MANSOUR: Yeah, I noticed.

Daryl RuiterDifferent week or different calls?

MANSOUR: Different calls. Last week’s were bad.

Daryl RuiterThat’s all of it?

MANSOUR: Two were the same thing out of a different formation, which I’d never normally do twice in a half, and it worked twice. The fourth one is Travis’s. I’d have punted.

National reporter · Yahoo SportsSeven red-zone touchdowns on eight trips. Nobody in football is doing that.

MANSOUR: That one’s real and I’ll take a piece of it, which I don’t normally —

No, sorry, that’s Travis and Mike Bajakian on the walkthrough version. We rep goal line at three-quarter speed on Fridays and it’s the most boring twenty minutes of anybody’s week. Somebody complained about it in August.

We were five-for-thirteen on third down, though. Five-for-thirteen. That was not good today.

Nathan Zegura · Cleveland Browns DailyAndres Szmyt was 2-for-2 from thirty and forty-five and had an extra point blocked.

MANSOUR: The block is ours. It’s a protection thing.

Nathan ZeguraFixable?

MANSOUR: Byron will have it done Tuesday and then he’ll make them do it again Wednesday for no reason.

National reporter · ESPNYou are leading the National Football League in scoring. Forty-four and a half points a game. Does that mean anything to you tonight?

MANSOUR: Forty-four and a — thirty-five and fifty-four, that’s eighty-nine, over two. Okay. Huh.

The ship out there. The cannons go seven times for a touchdown. Seven. I counted them on the second one because I was standing there with nothing to do, and I got to seven, and then I spent the rest of the afternoon thinking, that is somebody’s job. Somebody is down there. And I don’t know if they fire them for us, but if they do, that man did forty-nine of them in a hundred and one degrees for a team that flew in this morning.

Is it a person? Does anybody know if it’s a person?

(Nobody in the room knew.)

Okay.

Rick Stroud · Tampa Bay TimesThere’s no defensive coordinator in that building. Bowles does it himself, and they’ve given up eighty-six points in two weeks. From where you stood, what’s wrong with it?

MANSOUR: Nothing I could see.

Rick StroudYou scored fifty-four.

MANSOUR: We did, and I had four things drawn Wednesday I never got to call because he took them off the board before we got there. He’s hard to prepare for.

Is it a hard building right now? I don’t know how it is in there.

Rick StroudIt’s tense.

MANSOUR: Yeah. I’d imagine.

Mary Kay Cabot · cleveland.comBaker Mayfield threw four interceptions.

MANSOUR: I’m not doing that one either.

Mary Kay CabotNothing at all?

MANSOUR: Two are our guys making a play on a football and two are what happens when the picture keeps moving late in the down. He’s been hard to beat for a long time and I’d rather talk about our —

Albert Breer · Sports IllustratedI want to put something to you directly, because it’s on the record now and not just at bars. I spent two days on the phone with men who have coached in this league for twenty and thirty years, and two who played. The word one of them used was insult. That a job like yours is what they gave their lives to, and you have it and it appears to be going well. What do you say to them?

MANSOUR: Yeah.

I think they’re right about most of it. And I want to be careful here, because I can’t fix any of that by being pleasant about it in a room in Tampa.

What they’re describing is a real system and it works. You come in at twenty-three doing quality control, somebody eventually lets you coach a position, you get fired twice, you move your family six times, and somewhere in there you learn a thousand things nobody wrote down. That’s how it moves. It only moves that way. And I skipped it. I didn’t beat it, I skipped it, and somebody let me.

If I’d done thirty years of that and I was sitting in my kitchen in January watching this happen, I’d have said something worse than what they said.

Dom Capers is in my building. He’s seventy-five. He built two football teams out of nothing and ran a defense in a Super Bowl, and he is on my staff, and there is not one day I sit in a room with that man where I don’t find out I was wrong about something. In March he drew a pressure on a board from — ’94, I want to say, Pittsburgh — and named the four men who ran it. Off the top of his head. Then he spent ten minutes on why we shouldn’t run it now. I had that same pressure in a video in 2021 and I called it something I made up.

(Laughter.)

About nine thousand people watched me explain the name.

George Warhop was coaching offensive linemen before I could read a sentence. Jacques played eight years and coached ten more. Duce. Travis, Mike, Brandon, Ephraim. All of them did it the way those men on the phone did it, all of them are in that building, and on a given Tuesday they are better at this than I am and I’m the one you’re asking.

And the — sorry. There was a thing about my dad I was going to say and it’s gone. It’ll come back at eleven tonight.

Anyway. Dom’s got the third-down cutups on my desk Tuesday morning and I’ll be in there at seven asking him things.

Albert BreerHave any of them said it to you?

MANSOUR: Two, yeah. Both on the phone.

Albert BreerHow did that go?

MANSOUR: One of them called me in February and talked at me for forty minutes and I took notes the whole time. He wasn’t calling to be kind to me. I’ve used some of it, which he’d hate, and the rest of it I —

Tony Grossi · ESPN ClevelandDoes it bother you?

MANSOUR: Sometimes. Mostly on the plane.

National reporter · CBS SportsBack to the secondary. Savage finishes with an interception and two balls broken up. Is that coaching or is that the player?

MANSOUR: Brandon Lynch. Mike. And Darnell.

National reporter · CBS SportsWhich one mostly?

MANSOUR: Understand what we asked. We changed a man’s job at — it was twenty to two in the afternoon. He learned it at a bench, on a folding table, in that heat, and then he goes out and runs it for three quarters and there isn’t one bust in it. Not one.

I don’t think most people do that on a Wednesday with a projector.

Mary Kay Cabot · cleveland.comYou came off the field without the game ball again. That’s two for two.

MANSOUR: Oh — is that a thing now?

Mary Kay CabotWho has it?

MANSOUR: Darnell Savage.

Mary Kay CabotDid he say anything?

MANSOUR: Nothing. He put it in his bag.

He looked at it like I’d handed him somebody else’s and then he kept walking. Which is fine. I’m not — I just didn’t want to carry it in here.

Daryl Ruiter · 92.3 The FanOne turnover all day. The Judkins fumble.

MANSOUR: That one’s mine.

Daryl RuiterHow.

MANSOUR: Second-and-nine, twelve personnel, against a front that had already shown me what it was, and I got him hit three yards deep by a man arriving from somewhere he can’t see. Two men on him before his head is up.

Fourteen carries for twenty-seven yards and he got a touchdown out of that anyway, and he was still running at people in the fourth quarter at forty-four to fourteen, which, you know. Nobody asked him to be.

National reporter · NFL NetworkHarold Fannin leads the National Football League in total touchdowns through two weeks. Three receiving, two rushing.

MANSOUR: Carsen Ryan’s block on the Abanikanda one is the best thing that happened on offense today.

Two catches for seventeen yards, and he takes the backside end and puts him on the ground on a one-yard run in the fourth quarter of a forty-point game. Seventh-round pick. I watched it twice on the board while we were kicking.

National reporter · NFL NetworkAnd Fannin?

MANSOUR: Oh — Harold. Sorry, yeah.

Four for sixty-eight, the seventeen at the end of the first, the two-yarder. He asked somebody about the snap count on the way off the field. Ask him about the touchdowns and you’ll get four sentences on a hand placement he didn’t like. He’s out there now.

Camryn Justice · News 5 ClevelandKC Concepcion had seven catches for ninety-six with forty-six after the catch, plus three carries, and he leads the league in punt return average.

MANSOUR: Forty-six of the ninety-six after the catch. That’s half.

Camryn JusticeIs that by design?

MANSOUR: Most of those are seven-yard throws and he does the rest himself, which is the whole reason we — that’s why we moved up for him, and I’m not relitigating April tonight.

Winfield got him on one of those and he got up talking. No idea what he was saying. He was smiling, so.

National reporter · Yahoo SportsPeople are starting to say Boston and Concepcion are the best rookie receiver pair in football.

MANSOUR: That’s nice. Don’t tell them.

Zac Jackson · The AthleticThree penalties and one sack allowed on the road, in that heat, with this many rookies on the field. Procedurally that’s a clean afternoon.

MANSOUR: That’s George Warhop and the guys in his room, and I’m not going through them one at a time.

Nobody had to shout at anybody. In that noise, on a road opener — I keep waiting for that room to be a problem and it hasn’t been one.

The one sack was fifteen yards, though, and it’s the down where I gave Shedeur a picture with no second answer in it.

National reporter · Yahoo SportsBoth tackles were left alone all day against Rueben Bain and Yaya Diaby.

MANSOUR: They were. George earned that one.

National reporter · Yahoo SportsTwo weeks in a row.

MANSOUR: Two weeks. I chipped nobody outside all day, not once, and the only reason I can put everything inside is what those two did by themselves.

I’m not saying more than that, it’s two Sundays and they’re both —

George hasn’t got one thing wrong yet. Not one.

Rick Stroud · Tampa Bay TimesFifteen tackles for loss, two sacks, eight quarterback hits, four interceptions. Is that front ahead of where you thought it would be?

MANSOUR: I’d have to look at it.

Rick StroudInstinct?

MANSOUR: Jacques has four men in there and one of them is twenty-three. Mike Hall had three for loss playing about eleven fewer snaps than he wants.

I’ll know in six weeks. That’s not a dodge, I’ll just know then.

Tony Grossi · ESPN ClevelandYou’re 2-and-0. Denzel Ward comes back to Cleveland in eleven days on a Thursday night and Pittsburgh just hung thirty on New England.

MANSOUR: Carolina. Sunday, at home.

Tony GrossiThat’s a dodge.

MANSOUR: It is a dodge and it’s also true, Tony.

Carolina beat Atlanta by a mile and Bryce Young is running for eight point eight a carry, which is a number I have not slept on yet and will. Ask me about Pittsburgh every day and I’ll enjoy it every time. The answer’s Carolina until Monday week.

Ashley Bastock · cleveland.comDillon Gabriel came in and went 5-of-6 for eighty.

MANSOUR: He’s always ready. That’s a hard way to live and he does it well.

National reporter · CBS SportsLast one. Is there anything from today you already know you got wrong?

MANSOUR: The first quarter, obviously.

National reporter · CBS SportsBesides that.

MANSOUR: I ran it four more times in the third than I should have.

And I never got to Ephraim after the game. He built that zone pressure package in four days in August, two of those interceptions come straight off it, and I walked past him twice and said nothing, because I was —

I’ll call him from the bus.

(He thanked the room, then stopped on his way to the door and turned back toward the Tampa Bay writers.)

MANSOUR: The parrot. On the back of the ship. Is that new or has it always been there?

Rick Stroud · Tampa Bay TimesAlways been there.

MANSOUR: Okay. Thank you. Sorry.

(Laughter.)