Q: How do you feel?
Asomugha: I feel a lot better this week, best I have felt.
Q: Head Coach Tom Cable has said that you have been limited almost every day with you and today he said full. It has been a while right?
Asomugha: Yeah, it has been a while since I have had a practice and went through the whole thing, and I was able to get through it , but it was good. I am not where I was before the injury, but it is a lot better than what it was.
Q: Are you looking forward to Reggie Wayne?
Asomugha: Yeah, absolutely, we talk only when I see him in the off-season. We do not get to play each other that much. It will be good to go against him. He's one of the top guys.
Q: What makes him so good? What are his strengths?
Asomugha: I think he is deceptively quick and fast. He kind of has that sudden movement at the end, like Antonio Gates as a tight end. You do not know all the time what his route is going to be because he waits until the last second to make his move. I think that probably separates him from a lot of guys.
Q: What about Reggie Wayne's hands?
Asomugha: I think that he has some of the best hands in the entire league. I think that everybody pretty much knows that on our team. You see him catching slants with his fingertips and stuff like that. He had that one handed one on me in the '07 game. It was a big play, a one hand falling out of bounds. I still do not think he caught it, but he says he caught it. We will keep going at it. He said there was a debate on YouTube as to whether or not he caught that ball. He has great hands.
Q: On facing Peyton Manning...Do you enjoy that kind of challenge too?
Asomugha: The thing that we have stressed during the week to the young guys, to the guys that have not faced Peyton Manning, is that you do not want to get in there and start getting nervous because it is Peyton Manning. What I was trying to tell them is that you have to cover the receivers. You are not covering Peyton Manning. If you can dominate the receivers that you are facing then you will make it tougher for Peyton Manning. A lot of times the guys think, 'oh the quarterback is going to light everybody up.' If they handle their business they should be okay.
Q: You guys were nearly as good as you are now, and they were probably better than they were now, and it was close.
Asomugha: Yeah, offensively we were not putting up any points compared to what we are doing now. We played them really well until that last drive where they went down and scored. It was a lot closer than a lot of people thought, them being a playoff team and us at that point had three wins or something. And we are better now. We have a lot of confidence going into it.
Q: When did you guys get so much better against the pass? You guys are 5th against the pass.
Asomugha: I think we have been pretty good against the pass. Not as long as I have been here but four out of the last maybe four or five years. I remember in 2006 we were 2-14 but we were number two against the pass or something at the end of the season. I think that we have always fared well against the pass.
Q: Is there a danger with Manning in worrying so much about what he's doing that you lose sight of your own strengths?
Asomugha: Yeah. You can't worry about what he's doing; all the checks that he makes, and he's calling guys out. You know that he's inordinately gifted mentally. He just is above mostly all the other quarterbacks in the league so you can't worry too much about what he's doing there because he's going to try to fool you and you'll think he's making checks that he's not making and that sort of stuff. But if you take care of your own business I think you give yourself a better shot.
Q: Do you think that the fact that your defensive style anyways is 'here we are, here are our four men that are going to rush, here are our four guys that are going to cover,' as opposed to a ton of different packages and trying to out-fox them with Manning would be to your advantage?
Asomugha: I guess you might think that could work both ways, it depends on how good you are, if that's what you're going to do. We've been able to do it well, being pretty straight forward with how we're going to attack you and dare you to beat it. A lot of times with a guy like Peyton you're like 'you don't want to do that' because he knows what you're doing every time; he knows exactly what you're doing and can take advantage of it. But if you're doing it well, then like I said, you'll be okay.
Q: Does Manning ever say anything that makes you laugh? All the stuff he's saying, has he come up with anything that you just go 'come on?'
Asomugha: I can't hear him because I'm too far away but I do hear guys that'll come back to the sidelines; I remember in '07 they were shocked that he's calling out plays like 'okay this guys coming here, 52 is coming here, 53 is doing this.' He'll tell exactly what is getting ready to go on and the center will do the same thing. They all know what's going on in the front seven so it's pretty funny and sometimes kind of freaks guys out like how in the world do you know this? But he's a guy that sometimes it seems like he's clairvoyant, like he knows what's about to happen every snap. It's what he prides himself on, so we have a challenge.
