Kevin Colbert Quotations

So many of the kids came out (early) last year, it weakened this year's group.

We've never been a big free-agency team because we don't believe that's the way to put a team together, exclusively. We believe that the draft will always be the main part of your team, but we also believe that you'll have to plug in the occasional free agent. In recent years, we haven't gone after the high-end market (players) because we've concentrated on keeping our own players, who may have been higher-end guys if they became free agents.

There aren't a lot of higher quality centers. There are a couple decent guards. The tackle depth is actually pretty good.

Jerome Bettis was a big part of what this team has done over the course of his career. Losing him from the field is one thing, and then losing him in the locker room is another thing. That is a big loss. Whether we are going to be able to address it or not, we will see as it goes.

Just looking at our history, we never have been (real active) and I don't think we'll change from that. We don't anticipate that. We'd like to get as many of our own guys back as we can, and add to it as necessary, and then go to the draft and get players that way also.

I think you pay attention to what everybody is doing this time of year. But you do pay more attention to your own division, for sure.

Those guys are finding that they're more at home being back in that room and back where they were.

We'll enjoy this today and tomorrow. But we still have one more game to win.

When it's this late in the year, you want someone who knows what it's all about. We knew him and knew he'd give us a good look in practice.

We feel good about Nate. Nate was a kid coming out of small college, and he had to adapt. He had to make a more dramatic leap than a kid coming from a bigger school. Throughout the year, he got better and better and better, to where he helped us win a playoff game. You look at him and say, OK, this kid's got a chance to develop.

We were unanimous in thinking Troy was worth the 16th pick. It worked out well for both teams. They got (running back) Larry Johnson.

We decided to take a chance, and it worked out pretty good for us.

We're anticipating having cap issues once that final number is determined.

We're happy with the way we operate, and if it's successful it will continue. They've been doing it this way a lot of years with success.

We are not going to lose in the first round. That is the way we are looking at it. I'm confident there are 32 players we can take as a first pick that will definitely help this team.

We're not in a situation where we have to tear it up. When you look at our team, we have a lot of guys under contract for a minimum of two years. We're kind of caught up right now.

We are going to spend as much time on the middle and late rounds as we do on the first-round guys. From our standpoint there is really not a lot of difference.

We're not going to sign everyone. We may have to move on without some of the players who helped us win a championship. That's the way the game is today.

We don't say one guy's a priority over the other. We do believe that we would love to have everyone back. It's hard to say where you can and can't go, because you don't know what's out there for the players yet, because they can't get offers from other teams. We want everybody back. Is that realistic? No. It's our challenge to keep this thing together the best that we can.

You go into it with a certain plan and you have to adjust as the game unfolds. Personally, I think it's exciting.

We could sign a couple of players (to replace the versatile Randle El) or address things in the draft. We've taken care of some of the players we wanted to take care of and we'll step back and see how things progress here with free agency.

The thing about Ryan as a player is that he was always at the right place at the right time. He was somebody who could set a defense and run a defense. Ryan's similar to the types of free agents that we've been able to sign, a young kid coming off his first contract as a starter. He was productive on a very good defense.

Once the situation is settled it'll go very quickly. But if it isn't, it's going to go real slow because it's uncharted waters. You don't want to make a move that you may not have to make, and we're uncertain of what we can do until this thing gets ironed out.

People say we haven't signed big free agents, but they lose sight of the fact that we signed significant players of our own.

There's nowhere you can go, because you don't know what the situation will be. It's hard to speculate. You have to be prepared for the worst and hope for the best. We don't know the specifics as to where we stand. It's all speculation at this point.

You're always looking for ways to improve. And each team goes about things in a different way.

Inside linebacker is probably the strongest group I've seen in the 20 years I've been doing this. It's strong at the top, strong in the middle, and there are some kids on the second day that will be contributors, if not starters.

As we say every year, I don't think anybody ever thinks that they had a bad draft. We are no different. We are happy with the way things turned out.

It's to their benefit to work out here. They'll never have a captive audience like they have here. Virtually every head coach, general manager and even some owners are in the stands.

It's probably just one group of guys came of age together where their contracts expired or reached a point where they were all available at the same time. It's a little unusual to have that many marquee guys available. I don't think it was any design or plan. It's unusual to have that caliber available right now.

I just hope that everybody sees the benefits on both sides to continue the success of this league.

I don't really pay attention to what other teams are saying publicly. I don't know how much you really can say. There's no reason to tip your hand. You put that much time into it, it's kind of crazy to kind of just give the information away. Much like ourselves, everybody's evasive at this point. There's no advantage to doing that. You're not going to trick anybody into thinking you're going to do something. ... You have a lot of friends throughout the league but at this time of year you don't really have too many friends.

I don't know if he's priced himself out. We don't know the interest level out there. Certainly we have an interest in keeping him, and we definitely want to keep him. I think any time you win a Super Bowl it enhances your value, sometimes artificially, too.

They'll never have a more captive audience than they'll have right here. That's what we tell them.

That really doesn't change anything. I guess it's different in that our challenge now is to keep this team together as best we can. So it's different from that standpoint. But our approach and preparation is the same.

There was so much in that last five minutes that I think it strengthened us as a team.

We felt that Brett was going to be a full-time player on our team.

It's a very highly competitive division and is only going to get better because these kids are so young. We liked Charlie Frye when we did the evaluations on him last year.

This kid put up some amazing statistics in productivity at Bowling Green. We still think he has some improvement that can really come upon him at the pro level.