Q.  How is LB Kiko Alonso?  Do you expect him back? You signed LB Najee Goode.  How is that going to play out?
COACH DAVIS:  Well, Kiko, still in the evaluation process, so we are crossing our fingers and hoping everything turns out for the best.  We are unsure about him but for this week, I don’t think he ‑‑ I don’t expect him to play.  So Najee is back up inside, we are real comfortable with that.  Very surprised nobody picked Najee up.  I thought he had a great preseason.  So we’re anxious to see where we go from here.
 
Q.  How about LB Mychal Kendricks?
COACH DAVIS:  Mychal is day‑to‑day with a hamstring.  There’s an outside chance we pick him up this week but it will be hard for him to get back.  But he has a shot at doing it.
 
Q. And DE Cedric Thornton?
COACH DAVIS:  Ced has a break of the hand and I think he’s going to be out a week or so.  I don’t know the length of anybody’s injury but I don’t know if this week he’ll be up.
 
Q.  CB Byron Maxwell, does he have to make an adjustment to just the overall number of snaps that he’s played with this defense these first two weeks? It looks like maybe he’d never really encountered that before.
COACH DAVIS:  I think everybody’s encountered it.  The other night I think the biggest problem, the separation of the snaps, was our 23‑play drive.  I don’t think I’ve been part of a 23‑play drive ever and that’s where the separation of the 60 and 80 plays came. We tired ourselves out by having all those penalties and having that long of a drive happen.  That’s a long haul right there.

I think everybody’s in good enough shape and I think we’re fine.  I don’t see any issue with conditioning or anybody getting too tired.
 
Q.  The last touchdown that Maxwell got beat on, it didn’t look good. The path didn’t look good and a little bit of the effort didn’t. What did you see?
COACH DAVIS:  Earlier in the game, we played the exact same call.  They were going with a lot of empty, so in empty you can fall back and rush three; you can rush four and go five.  We knew we could hit the quarterback and all their empties.  So I went with the blitz and early in the game, Max played it perfect. There was a slant ball, came right to him and he played right inside out of it.

When he got a little wide in his alignment, and the technique and the alignment, right from the get‑go, put him in harm’s way and then the slant ball got him and outran him.  I thought [LB] Brandon Graham had a nice charge off the edge.  We hit the quarterback like we wanted to do.  When you blitz in empty, you know two things are going to happen:  You’re either going to make the play and it’ll be a big play our way, or we tackle the catch, and if we don’t, it’s a big play their way and that’s what happened.
 
Q.  Are you satisfied with the effort on that play?
COACH DAVIS:  On everything, our effort overall has been great during the season.  The ball ran away from him.  He came after it but it just outran him.  His alignment was worse than anything.  He drifted a little bit outside and in that all-out blitz, you can’t.
 
Q.  Who is most likely up in place of Thornton?
COACH DAVIS:  We’ve only got a couple. You know the rotation. You’ve got [DE] Brandon Bair, you’ve got [DE] Taylor [Hart], a lot of guys in there.  There are only so many ‑‑
 
Q.  What do you like about Taylor?  What have you seen so far in the two games?
COACH DAVIS:  Taylor is really coming along now.  Taylor is great at the technique that we play with shock and shed and the way he gets his hands on people and then disengages and gets to the ball, Taylor is going to be a good football player for us.
 
Q.  Maxwell referenced fatigue on the play.  It didn’t look like he finished the play.  Are you expecting more out of a guy that you guys spent so much on in the offseason, as a leader, as one of your top players? Are you expecting more out of him?
COACH DAVIS:  I expect the same out of every player we have out there.  Every player we have out there has to handle his business and handle his job, down-in and down-out.  Max played better in this game than he did in the first and I believe he’ll play better in the next game.  We have to.

We have got to make it to where we can win that 6‑3 game, the 10‑3 game.  We have got to be able to win that defensively and that means 60 minutes of playing great effort and technique.  So the standard for a player is the same no matter where you came from, how much money you’re making, what round you were drafted in.  Defensively, the expectation is the exact same.
 
Q.  At inside linebacker, where do you stand there, assuming Kiko and Kendricks are out? LB Jordan Hicks played quite a bit.
COACH DAVIS:  Jordan did a nice job stepping in.  DeMeco, we are bringing him back on a little bit of a pitch count because of the injury he’s coming back from but DeMeco Ryans is DeMeco. You saw the goalline stand, he made two out of the three plays to keep them out of the end zone.  We have nothing but confidence in DeMeco.
             
And Jordan Hicks is a very mature rookie.  He went out there and it was not too big for him.  I think the neatest thing that happened was when he got beat on the deep pass which he played poor technique on, he came back and wasn’t fazed and made some plays after that.  He wasn’t rattled or depressed or going in the tank and that’s what some rookies do.  He didn’t.  He went back in there and played some real good football for us.
 
Q.  Obviously depth was a strength of that position up until the other day, so what do you do behind those two guys?
COACH DAVIS:  Well, you bring Najee in and [LB Brad] Jones.  We’ll pull Brad back there, too.  [LB] Marcus Smith is now beyond his hamstring and conditioning is back, so you have Marcus where he can take that outside backer role again.  And you move Brad inside and let Brad still be a swing guy, but he’ll get some work inside this week.

We’ve got depth and we’re very confident with who we have in there.
 
Q.  You faced Jets QB Ryan Fitzpatrick last year in Houston.  What do you consider to be his strengths?
COACH DAVIS:  His competitiveness.  I would say above all else.  He’s in a great fit scheme‑wise for himself, him and [Jets offensive coordinator] Chan [Gailey] know each other very well, they know the system, they know each other’s strengths.  He knows what Chan likes to run. Chan knows what he does well.  He runs the offense very efficiently.  We’ve seen that in two weeks now, that they are a lot of empty, they are a lot of high efficiency throws, strong run game, and he is just a scrapper.

In that Houston game last year, I think we missed maybe four sacks on him where we had him in our grasp and he just out of a will to get away, got away and made some plays happen.  So an extreme competitor with a very good understanding of where to go with the ball in that scheme.
 
Q.  As a follow‑up to Kiko, you said he’s still being evaluated, what are they trying to determine?
COACH DAVIS:  The medical part. I just know they are still evaluating.  The details of that, I don’t know.
 
Q.  Has he been right at all this summer? He had the tendonitis in the knee and it did not seem like the injury happened on a hit or something.  Has this been something he’s been dealing with now throughout?
COACH DAVIS:  Not to my knowledge.  He’s gone out there and practiced very well and he’s running around, even during the game, you cannot see any hitch to his run or anything.  He’s running around after every play, he’s popping up and running back to the huddle like he always does.  So we’ve seen nothing wrong.  That’s just one of those things.  I was shocked ‑‑ I really don’t [know when it happened].  You’d have to ask Kiko.  He just felt discomfort in there at some point.  There was not one glaring play where you said, ‘Oh, there it is.’  Nothing.
 
Q.  With Maxwell, where was the improvement from Week 1 to Week 2?
COACH DAVIS:  Consistency and that’s what we all have to do. It’s easy to play one good down of great technique but when you can go 80 plays and holding that alignment, the technique, those things are really what the great defenses do. And the closer we can get to 11 men for 80 plays playing, focused-in, technique-sound, alignment, eyes, keys football; and I think there’s where he took ‑‑ I know that’s where he took the biggest step.  So we’ll grow him in this scheme.  He’s still got to understand all the checks and I think he does and he’ll continue to get better, I really believe that.
 
Q.  Will this alter the pitch count for DeMeco?
COACH DAVIS:  A little bit.  It will up his reps. 
 
Q.  Your impressions of Jets WR Brandon Marshall, and do you have to play more zone against a guy like him who wants to try to get isolated on a cornerback?
COACH DAVIS:  You have to mix it so you have the proper match up, or your zones have to give a little bit more attention to his side.  Your mans have to give a little bit more body help with two guys on him instead of one.  They do a great job of moving him around a little bit.  He’s a big run‑after‑catch guy, more than you think.  He’s such a big, strong guy. He muscles up and makes the catch, and then he’s a tough tackle.  He is absolutely the primary weapon in this offense in the passing game.  They do a lot of empty sets and you’ve got to find him, and then kind of mix in the zone, the man and then the pressures.
 
Q.  On Sunday, you went to dime with Hicks. Does Najee allow you to play more nickel now?
COACH DAVIS:  He could, but the dime package is still a good matchup for us on third down.  We like the matchups. The Jets come out with four‑wide receiver packages a lot.  We’ll continue to mix dime and nickel.  I’ll just practice a lot more dime than I have the last two weeks.
 
Q.  Why CB E.J. Biggers over DB Eric Rowe there?
COACH DAVIS:  We just felt putting E.J. out there with the experience right now, we are going to rotate them.  They will both get a little work in there.  Right now, we just felt E.J. has a little one up on Eric as far as where they are mentally.
 
Q.  What has S Malcolm Jenkins done to seemingly take a further step in this defense the second season?
COACH DAVIS:  I think what you’ve seen is him in the nickel.  He’s making a big difference in the nickel spot.  He’s an extremely intelligent, hard‑working ‑‑ he studies the game as much as any veteran I’ve been around.  For instance, even the play that [Cowboys QB] Tony [Romo] got hurt on where we pressured the empty, the formation told you a lot about what the play might have been, and Malcolm went to play, which made the quarterback hold the ball.

But he’s tenacious down there in the nickel spot and you need a guy like that, where whether it’s a run or pass or even a blitz that they threw the screen on down in the low red zone where Malcolm made a huge play on the quick wide receiver screen.  He’s on top of his game and he’s playing very aggressive down there low.
 
Q.  Do you feel comfortable basically instead of going matchups from game week‑to‑week, just having him in there and S Chris Maragos in centerfield from now on as the nickel package?
COACH DAVIS:  Right now, that’s our nickel and dime package with Chris on the field with Malcolm down low.  We can adjust a little bit ‑‑ we had plans to adjust a little bit last week with [S] Walt [Thurmond] playing down there if we had to. It didn’t happen because Jenk, we were really in control of that spot, we felt.  We were doing a nice job of third downs getting off the field.  We were happy with the way the nickel was playing out.
 
Q.  I know you do a lot of cross training at all positions.  Any thought of moving Rowe into a more full‑time safety spot?
COACH DAVIS:  He’s taken reps at the safety and outside corner in the nickel spot.  But it takes time for the safety.  We like him at corner.  He’ll play some corner but the cross training of the safety spot, we cross trained him a little bit at nickel early in camp, we’ll continue to grow him at safety in the nickel but we’ll keep him at corner for now.
 
Q.  The play that DT Beau Allen made on the first and goal. What have you seen from him so far this season?
COACH DAVIS:  Beau Allen?  He’s doing a nice job.  He’s getting better and better.  That particular play, the center went up for the linebacker, Kendricks, and the guard tried to cut him and he beat the cut block and then he and DeMeco hit the running back head on and finished it.

He’s just, like you want out of most young guys, he is playing and working on his technique, down-in and down-out, and as his technique gets better, you see him make more plays and Beau has really done a nice job of just playing within the scheme and playing within his world, and he’s growing at a nice pace.
 
Q.  What’s your comfort level right now with Maragos when you put him in in nickel on the back end?
COACH DAVIS:  Chris is a great quarterback for us and I talk a lot about our safeties being quarterbacks.  He and Walt have really had a nice rapport back there, who comes down when, in the different calls, who is playing deep, who is playing down, when and why we are doing it.
             
They are both highly intelligent guys that help us game plan and kind of move in and out of disguises and still not get in harm’s way.  So Chris’s study habits and his experience as a veteran safety is really what makes us feel the most comfortable with him back there.