by Brian Biggane
Coach Joe Philbin defended his defense Monday, a day after

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“I have a lot of confidence in our defense,” Philbin said. “I like the way they play the game. Obviously, that wasn’t one of their finer performances. When you’re a really good football team, which we’re not yet, because our record states that, as [much] as our defensive guys are disappointed, they made a stop when they had to and we had the ball first and 10 on the 50-yard line with two and a half minutes to go.

“We didn’t play very well on defense, but you have to win those games. I’m not overly concerned about the yards. The points, entering the game I think we were fifth in the league in scoring defense. That’s not a bad collection of work for seven weeks, (and) 23 points I don’t think is going to drop them down to 10th.”

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“Where do you want to start? I wish we could put out finger on one thing. We used multiple calls. We used zone. We used man. We spied. Again, I’m going to say they executed very, very well in that phase of the game, better than we did.

“It wasn’t always the pass rush. At times our discipline in our pass rush lanes wasn’t great. At times our coverage wasn’t very good. At times we maybe had some shots to get Luck down and we weren’t able to do that. Give him some credit. We have to do better. It wasn’t one thing. There were 19 third downs. There was enough (blame) to go around

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Philbin isn't going to say much in a press conference, but you know he and Coyle lit them up.