GENERAL MANAGER MIKE REINFELDT
(opening remarks)
Thank you for coming today. It's been a busy and hectic five days for us and we are all excited to be going back to work playing football. This week, starting on Monday we resumed activities and it's been busy. We signed 14 college free agents, nine draft picks, three restricted free agents, and two unrestricted free agents-Matt Hasselbeck, which I can formally now say he is in the building and he has signed, and Shaun Smith a defensive lineman. We have got 81 players in camp; everybody passed their physical so there will be no PUP candidates so we are ready to start practice. With the exception of one player, Chris Johnson did not show up for training camp. As most of you are aware, we re-did Chris's contract last year. We have had discussions with Chris and his agent. We are willing to sit down with Chris and his agent to talk about the contract; we just need Chris in camp to start those discussions. I think the important thing now is to focus on the 80 players that are here and the new coaching staff and there's a lot of excitement in the building and we are getting ready to play football.
HEAD COACH MIKE MUNCHAK
(opening remarks)
I will just say quickly that I have been waiting six months for the opportunity to coach some players and the last couple days have been great for me. We had the rookies in yesterday and did a little rookie orientation. All the guys were in town. Like Mike said we have 23 guys so the coaches and myself had the opportunity to get a jump start with them yesterday. Lot of energy, lot of excitement and the nicest thing is that they are all signed already so there is no delay. We are starting camp on time. This is what we projected back when I got the job that these would be our starting dates, so here we are starting on time. It was nice to have the building full the last couple days with all the guys coming in, the excitement to get back out to work and to see each other and with a new staff and new coaches to meet so there is a lot of good things going on. We had a good day so far with a lot of meetings as the first day usually is. We got them on the field for some run testes, some conditioning tests, and some weight tests in the building to get an idea where their strength is at and their conditioning is at. So we kind of got a feel for that so we can kind of gauge how we are going to go forward in practice the next couple days as we get started. So it's just great to be going again and I'm just excited about where we are going to head the next couple weeks. We have got a lot of work ahead of us as we know, so I'm looking forward to getting to work and I think the players are also.
GENERAL MANAGER MIKE REINFELDT
(opening remarks continued)
The other thing I was going to say is we do have 81 players and as most of you know we can go to 90. Now, there are still some things that we would like to do, there are some areas, offensive line, tight end, safety. There are some areas we are still looking at and addressing and increasing our depth at those spots. I think with the roster today with the different moves that people made between waivers and terminations I think there are 131 more free agents today on the market. So there are a lot of players out there. We have got a lot of work to do, but our job is to get the best roster we can get before we start playing games.
