“I counted the cannons.”

MANSOUR: Okay, so — health first, because I know that’s the first thing, and I’ve actually got nothing for you, which is the good kind of nothing. Nobody came off that field. Nobody’s on a table tonight, nobody’s getting looked at that I know about, and there’s no list coming Wednesday because there’s nobody to put on it. So.

Um. One thing and then you can go.

The thing that got fixed in the first quarter — that was Mike Rutenberg and that was Brandon Lynch, and they did it while I was about fifteen feet down the bench doing something else entirely, and I want to say that now, before anybody writes anything, because by Tuesday it will have my name on it and that’s just sort of how this works. So when you get to them, put it on them.

Okay. Go ahead.

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 — okay, so it starts on the second series, right after the eighty-seven.

We opened almost entirely in man. Which is mine, and I’ll get to it, don’t let me leave without getting to it. What they did is they took us out of that and into off-zone with the safeties rotating late, so the picture before the snap is one thing and then the picture about a half-second after the snap is a completely different thing, and Baker — I mean, Baker reads the first picture as well as anybody alive, he’s been doing that for eight years. So what you’re really doing is you’re making the first picture a lie and then asking him to be right about it anyway.

And then Ephraim’s zone pressure sits on top of that. So it’s four men rushing and they’re not the four who looked like it.

Eleven third downs and they didn’t get one. I don’t — I’ve been watching football my whole life and I don’t think I’ve seen that, and I’d, I guess like somebody to tell me the last time it happened, because I have no idea. Somebody look that up for me.

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

MANSOUR: Since camp. Brandon’s had that install since — July, I want to say? Early July, I could be wrong on the exact week. It wasn’t for Baker. It was just sitting there and this was the week it fit.

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

MANSOUR: That’s Mike’s. Second series, I think? Yeah. Yeah, second series, or right around there.

Daryl RuiterYou had nothing to do with it.

MANSOUR: I mean, I asked him one thing.

Daryl RuiterAnd?

MANSOUR: He’d already done it. He was, yeah, he was about two calls ahead of me the whole quarter and I’m standing there with a headset on being a fan about it, which is not the job, but that is what I was doing.

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 already off the sheet, and I said okay, and 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: Well, because the first quarter’s a coverage problem and the coverage is mine.

Look — and this isn’t aimed at you, that’s a fair thing to ask, you should ask it — but you’re going to get this same answer out of me every week, which is that I don’t take one man’s afternoon apart at a table in front of forty people. Haven’t since I got here. I’m not going to start doing it because we won.

I’ll give you the call sheet though, that part’s fair. We opened in man and we stayed in it, and the reason was Egbuka and Otton working the middle of the field — I wanted to be able to bring five without anybody knowing five was coming, and what that costs you, the actual price of it, is you’ve got a safety out there running with Chris Godwin and nothing behind him. And I knew that. I wrote it down on Thursday knowing that.

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

So, two touchdowns, both mine. He had to go run at one o’clock what I wrote down on Thursday. I don’t know how else to say it, it’s not complicated, it’s just not a fun thing to say out loud.

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: Well — the punt before the eighty-seven was fifty-three yards and it stopped dead on the eleven. Which — Corey hit two of those tonight and both of them died inside the twenty, and the only reason they’re on their own fourteen at all is that ball, and then eleven seconds later it’s a fourteen-point game and nobody’s going to write about the punt.

Sorry. What was the question?

Zac JacksonWhether benching him was discussed.

MANSOUR: No. Not by anybody.

Zac JacksonAnd Tuesday?

MANSOUR: Well — 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, so that’s the meeting, and it’s going to be kind of a boring meeting for everybody except me.

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 — no. Not yet.

Tony GrossiThat’s the whole answer?

MANSOUR: Yeah, that’s it. I mean, what am I going to do, argue?

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

MANSOUR: Not really, no. You’re right. You’re right, so.

Carolina’s at our place Sunday and they went and beat Atlanta by a lot, and Bryce Young is averaging almost nine yards a carry, which is an insane sentence to have to say out loud in September. So ask me in a week and it’ll be a better conversation. I watched the same two Sundays you did. I don’t have anything you don’t have.

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. It was — I was scared, I’ll just say that. I was scared. Nobody’s ever done that to me on a Sunday before and I’m standing there going, oh, okay, so this is what this is.

Camryn JusticeDid you say anything to them?

MANSOUR: Not — no. Not much that was any good.

There’s a version of me that stands up here and tells you I knew. Right? I had a feeling, we were fine, I could see it. I didn’t know anything. I was doing arithmetic. I was standing on a sideline doing arithmetic about how many possessions were left, which is not leadership, that’s just a guy with a number in his head.

Grant said four words to me and I don’t remember what they were, which is embarrassing — I’ve gone back to it about four times since — because they were the right four. And then Harold catches the seventeen with two seconds left in the half and everybody gets to breathe. That’s the game right there. It happened in the first quarter and nobody watching knew it yet.

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 on twenty-one carries.

Ashley BastockThat’s the number you’d use.

MANSOUR: Yeah, that’s the fair one. The other one’s got Shedeur’s twenty-nine in it, so it kind of flatters us.

We could not run the football. At all, not — not inside, not outside, not on the two short ones where I called it anyway because I wanted to see it one time with my own eyes. And I kept going back to it and it kept not being there, and that’s me, that’s not — I called every single 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 of them, from a nose tackle, which is the kind of thing you put up on a screen in April and make a rookie watch four times without saying anything.

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

And then it does a second thing to you, which is the part nobody’s going to write about. Because he holds up with two, Todd never has to put an extra man in the box. Not once, all afternoon. So 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 like an idiot.

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

Rick StroudEight years.

MANSOUR: Yeah. I don’t know, that’s — you got the good version of it, is all I’ll say. Anyway.

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: So he came down the bench at the end of the first, right after Harold’s — and just said, you know, the run game’s gone today, here’s 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 then one with the back out of the backfield that I hadn’t looked at since April and would not have found this afternoon, I promise you, I would not have gotten there. On the back of a play sheet. In a hundred and one degrees.

And that’s his job, that’s what he’s there for. It’s just that when I call the offense and it goes well, my name’s the one that ends up on it, and I don’t really have a fix for that except standing here saying 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. I mean, he was really good.

Albert BreerWhat stood out to you?

MANSOUR: What I liked wasn’t the throws — okay, it was some of the throws, obviously. 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, and that’s a football coming out on time forty-five times in a row, which nobody is ever going to put on a highlight and which is basically the entire job.

I’m not doing the other conversation about him tonight, the one everybody wants to have. It has been two Sundays and I am going to keep saying that until it stops being true.

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. Which was also there, for the record. But he kept it and he was right, and I would like it in the transcript somewhere 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, I’m going to get that wrong again at some point. He’s a big corner and he played that about as well as it can be played, you know.

Denzel just boxed him out like it was a rebound. Christian Jones runs a drill with those two where the ball’s already in the air before either of them has turned around, and it looks stupid, like it looks like a bad drill when you’re standing there watching it in July. And then it’s the seventeen.

He’s twenty-two. He had eight catches in that and he came off the field 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 in the middle of a quarter and he’s got it by the next series. Most defenses can’t install anything on a Sunday, and it’s not a coaching thing, it’s that the middle of the field can’t carry it. Jason Tarver’s been building that plate since — how long, March? 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, I think. Last week’s were bad.

Daryl RuiterThat’s all of it?

MANSOUR: So, two of them were the same thing out of a different formation, which I’d normally never do twice in a half, and it worked twice, so what do I know. The fourth one is Travis’s. I’d have punted, and I want to be clear I’d have punted, I wasn’t talked into it, I was overruled and I was wrong.

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 not right. That’s Travis and that’s Mike Bajakian on the walkthrough version. We rep goal line at three-quarter speed on Fridays and it is the most boring twenty minutes of anybody’s week, and somebody complained about it in August, and I’m not going to say who but he did not complain about it today.

We were five-for-thirteen on third down though. Five-for-thirteen. That was not good today and it’s going to matter against somebody eventually.

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

MANSOUR: Yeah, the block’s ours. That’s a protection thing.

Nathan ZeguraFixable?

MANSOUR: Byron will have it done Tuesday and then he’ll make them do it again on Wednesday for no reason, which is why he’s good at his job and also why nobody wants to be in that room on a Wednesday.

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, so that’s eighty-nine, over two. Okay. Huh.

Can I say something that isn’t about that? The ship out there. The cannons go seven times for a touchdown. Seven of them. 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 kind of a lot of the afternoon thinking about how that is somebody’s actual job. Somebody is down there. And I don’t know if they fire them when we score or if that’s only for them — is it only for them? — but if they do it for everybody, then that man did forty-nine of those 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. Well. I’d like to know that at some point.

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, yeah, and I had four things drawn up on Wednesday that I never actually got to call, because he took them off the board before we ever got there. He’s hard to prepare for. That’s a real answer, that’s not me being polite about it.

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 it is.

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

MANSOUR: I’m not doing that one either.

Mary Kay CabotNothing at all?

MANSOUR: Two of them are our guys making a play on a football and two of them 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 the middle of all that you learn about a thousand things nobody ever wrote down anywhere. That’s how it moves. That’s the only way it moves. And I skipped it. I didn’t beat it or anything, I just — I skipped it, and somebody let me, and I don’t have a good story about why.

If I’d done thirty years of that and I was sitting in my kitchen in January watching this happen on television, 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’s 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, and then spent ten minutes on why we shouldn’t run it now. And 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 most of them 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 to me at eleven o’clock 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: Well — one of them called me in February and just talked at me for forty minutes, and I took notes the whole time, you know. He wasn’t calling to be kind to me. I’ve used some of it, which he would 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 him to do. We changed a man’s job at — I mean it was twenty minutes to two in the afternoon. He learned it standing at a bench, on a folding table, in that heat, having just had the worst fifteen minutes of anybody’s season on national television, and then he went back out there and played a good three quarters of football. So I don’t know how you’d split that up, and I’m not sure I want to.

Ask him. He’s better on it than I am.

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? Are we counting?

Mary Kay CabotWho has it?

MANSOUR: Uh, Darnell Savage.

Mary Kay CabotDid he say anything?

MANSOUR: No. Nothing. He put it in his bag.

He sort of looked at it like I’d handed him somebody else’s and then he just kept walking, which is fine, that’s — I mean that’s completely fine, I’m not telling you that to make it a thing either. I just didn’t want to be the guy carrying it in here.

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

MANSOUR: Yeah, that one’s mine.

Daryl RuiterHow.

MANSOUR: Second-and-nine, twelve personnel, against a front that had already shown me exactly what it was going to be, and I got him hit three yards deep by a man arriving from somewhere he can’t possibly see, so there’s two of them on him before his head is even up. That’s not a ball-security thing. That’s me.

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

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

MANSOUR: Okay, can I do a different guy for a second? 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, when there is no reason on earth to do that. Seventh-round pick. I watched it twice on the board while we were kicking and I don’t think anybody else in the building noticed.

National reporter · NFL NetworkAnd Fannin?

MANSOUR: Oh — Harold. Sorry, yeah, that was your actual question.

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 about four sentences on a hand placement he didn’t like, so, to be fair, go and do that, it’s better than anything I’ve got.

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 of it.

Camryn JusticeIs that by design?

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

Winfield got him on one of those and he got up talking. I have no idea what he was saying. He was smiling, so, whatever it was it can’t have been that bad.

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 that.

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 that’s the guys in his room, and look, I’m not going to go through them one at a time because I’ll leave somebody out and then I’ll think about it on the plane.

Nobody had to shout at anybody out there. In that noise, on a road opener, with the number of first-year players we had on the field — I keep sort of waiting for that room to become a problem and it just has not been one yet.

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

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

MANSOUR: They were, yeah. George earned that one.

National reporter · Yahoo SportsTwo weeks in a row.

MANSOUR: Two weeks, yeah. I chipped nobody outside all day, not one time, and the only reason I get to put everything inside is what those two did on their own out there.

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

George hasn’t got one thing wrong yet. Not one thing, and I keep looking.

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: I mean, 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 to be playing, and he has mentioned that to me.

I’ll know in six weeks. And that’s not a dodge, I’m not doing the thing — I will actually know then, and I don’t now.

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, so.

Tony GrossiThat’s a dodge.

MANSOUR: It is a dodge, and it’s also true, Tony, which is the annoying part for both of us.

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 I am going to. Ask me about Pittsburgh every single day and I’ll enjoy it every single time, and I’m still going to say Carolina until Monday week, so we can just do this again on Wednesday if you want.

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

MANSOUR: He’s always ready. Which is a hard way to live, and he does it really well, and I don’t think I’ve said that out loud to him.

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

MANSOUR: I mean, the first quarter, obviously.

National reporter · CBS SportsBesides that.

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

And I never got to Ephraim after the game, which is the one that’s going to bother me. 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 in that hallway and said nothing to him either time, 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.)