What The Bengals Are Saying About Monday Vs The Steelers

C Kyle Cook on if Monday is a Must Win: “It’s the way we look at the season. Every game is a must win…I’m still mad, I’m sure a lot of guys are, the lingering effects from the last game. We kicked ourselves in the foot. It just goes to show you if you make critical errors at a critical times, it doesn’t matter. Special teams, defense, offense, you can lose a game to a team you shouldn’t have lost to or a team that’s better.”

Coach Marvin Lewis on the Steelers: “As we prepare for Pittsburgh, it’s an important game. For us, it’s the season opener at home. It’s a division game. You want to get off to a good start at home, and defend the home turf as they say. It’s a big football game for us.”

Lewis on the Steelers losing Maurkice Pouncey: “They’re plugging in a new player in (Kelvin) Beachum. They’ve got a guy that played quite a bit of football from them last year, and he stepped right in and went to work. They feel very confident in him and their guys around him. That’s a team that has a lot of experience that understands that they’ve lost players before. They know that the next guy gets up and steps in, and everybody else tries to play above it.”

Lewis on keeping track of Troy Polamalu: “You account for Polamalu all the time, yes you do. You have to account for Troy. He ends up in the darndest spots. He knows the defense inside and out. He does a great job of studying the opponent. He knows your formation tendencies and personnel tendencies. He does a great job of getting himself in position to make plays. You have to account for him, and you have to understand that if this is something unfolding the way you ran it the last couple weeks, he’s probably going to beat you to that spot if you don’t get there in a hurry.”

Andy Dalton on the different look of the Steelers D in 2013: “There’s not a whole lot of changes. They’re still doing a lot of the same stuff they did in previous years. It’s kind of how their defense has been. They just plug new guys in, guys that they expect to play well. Unfortunately they’ve had a couple of injuries and lost a couple of guys, but we’re still expecting the same kind of defense. They played well last week and we’re going to get their best effort this week.”

Dalton on how big the game is: “It’s a big game for us not only because we’re playing the Steelers, but Monday night adds more hype to the game. Also we’re 0-1 right now. We want to get to 1-1, and the Steelers are the team we’re playing in the second game of the year. I think all that makes it a big game, but you can’t do anything different. We’ve got to go out and play our best. We felt like we played well last week, we just turned the ball over and it hurt us in the game. We felt if we don’t turn the ball over, it could be completely different. But we’ve got to fix those things that hurt us, and I think we’ll do that.”