On Latavius Murray:
Penn:"He trusts us, just like everybody else trusts us. There's just something about him. He finds those little creases and gets through it and gets to the second level. He's a big guy. He's hard to bring down. Whatever he's doing, I want him to keep doing it."
Q: What has been the success of the offense these last three games at home?
Penn:"I don't know, I just think we're playing better football. We're still working as hard as we've been working all year. It just seems like stuff is starting to fall in place and starting to go our way a little bit better the past couple of weeks, and we have some momentum going, so hopefully we can use that going against a good Denver team that's coming off a loss. You know they're going to give us their best shot, so we keep that momentum going and take it into this offseason, that'll be good, and a big key going into next year."
Q: You were talking about trusting. Has the team become more cohesive and trusting towards each other? You guys seem like you're having more fun than you were those first ten games.
Penn:"You're always going to have fun when you're winning. It's not fun when you're losing. I think we've been cohesive all year, that's why you haven't seen people turn on each other. You haven't seen anybody get mad at each other. You haven't seen anybody pointing fingers at anybody, so I think we have been tight all year and that's what has made us keep fighting and keep staying positive and coming out here and working hard every day. Even when we weren't winning any games, we were coming out and practicing hard. Guys were pushing each other. That was good cohesiveness and it's only getting better. I wish it was like Week Four of the season when we got stuff going, but we have one more game; we have to finish it strong."
Q: It seems like running well can really take a home crowd out of things.
Penn:"My opinion is any time you run the ball, and you run it successfully, you should win. At any level of the game I feel like that's just something that's key. When you run the ball well you have a better chance of winning the game and as you've seen in the past, when we have done that, we have a chance to either be in the game and win or we won the game. We have to keep doing that. We're still running the same plays we've been running from the beginning, now we're running them a little better and they're starting to come out and it's something we have to keep getting better at, and this is the last week, so we have to finish strong. Cincinnati opened up a couple things that we saw on film from Denver so hopefully we can use some of that stuff going in this week."
Q: There haven't been many rookie quarterbacks to throw for 3,000 yards and 20 touchdowns, DC [Derek Carr] has done that. What can you say about his intangibles growing this season?
Carr:"He has all of them. He's a good quarterback, a good guy, a good quarterback. I think he's going to be very good in this league and his work ethic is very, very, very strong and very hard and I think that's what shows why he plays so well. I'm one of his biggest fans and I can't wait to keep watching him get better and better as the years go on."
