The Denver Broncos may have excuses lined up, but there’s no getting around the fact that they lost at home to the Oakland Raiders. That’s about as bad as it gets.
And that’s not to say that this is a bad football team; they’re not. But the Broncos, as we wrote last week, have a very serious problem: They cannot score.
It’s been seven quarters since the Brock Osweiler-led Broncos have reached the end zone, and after Sunday’s second-half collapse, the Broncos have now gone two straight games without scoring a point in the second half. More importantly, yesterday proved that no matter how great this defense is, Denver isn’t going anywhere of importance with an offense like this.
And again, this was against the Oakland Raiders; just wait until Denver is having to keep pace with the Pittsburgh Steelers this weekend.
Here’s what the team had to say about the offense’s performance following their loss to the Raiders.
Gary Kubiak on how the offense let them down:
“Yeah, I mean we were really poor in the red zone. I think we had [224] yards at halftime. I think they had negative yardage, and you’re up 12-to-nothing. We had a chance to really do some damage in the first half, didn’t do it and then obviously helped them in the second half with two turnovers, I think four or five drops and we lost the line of scrimmage offensively, in my opinion. We played great defense and just didn’t ever finish the football game offensively or put ourselves in a position to finish them.”
Kubiak on losing the battle at the line of scrimmage:
“I thought Brock in the first half handled himself really well. We lost the line of scrimmage. I’ve got to go back and look at it. There is no doubt we got pushed around. We did not run the ball well at all. They were in our backfield. I think we had 16 carries for [25] yards in the first half. Came out in the third quarter, I think we had four three-and-outs and we dropped a few balls, turned the ball over—just added that to the we were struggling at the line of scrimmage. We had many, many chances to get it done and didn’t get it done.”
Brock Osweiler on if drops affect his confidence:
“It doesn’t affect my confidence. The biggest thing, I think, in this business for an offensive football player or a defensive football player, for that matter, is playing the next play. You have to have a short-term memory. Whether you had a good play the play before or a bad play, that one is behind you and you have to move on to the next one. That’s what we did all night. Unfortunately, we kept making mistakes. I wasn’t making the right reads at times. I wasn’t making the right throw at times. It culminated in a loss tonight.”
Osweiler on the offense’s inability to finish in the red zone:
“I believe in each red zone appearance that we were seeing different things. We were seeing different coverages. We were seeing different fronts and we were running different plays. I don’t think that any of them bleed together. The biggest thing is, as an offense, that it all starts and it stops with me. I have to find a way to get our offense into the end zone and scoring touchdowns. Anytime a defense holds a team to 15 points, I believe that you should win the football game. It’s your job as an offense and as a quarterback–I’ll take full responsibility for it, but it’s your job to not kick field goals and score touchdowns in the red area.”
Osweiler on fixing the offense:
“The way that you fix it is that it starts with tomorrow. Tomorrow you go and you evaluate the tape and you really look at the red area hard. You say, ‘How could we have scored touchdowns? Was it me missing a read? Was it me missing a throw?’ That’s what we’ll do. We’ll look at the tape extremely hard tomorrow. We’ll see what we did wrong in the red area, but like I told you guys before, I believe that it’s the quarterback’s job no matter how the day is going, good or bad, to get his team in the end zone. I didn’t do that today. I’ll figure out a way to fix it and we’ll move forward.”
Owen Daniels on the change from the first to second half:
“I haven’t been a part of a game that was such a 180 from one half to the next. We felt in total control in the first half, but not getting touchdowns is starting to become kind of an issue. Getting four field goals and having a chance to put the game away in the first half really, and not being able to do that and letting a team like that hang around, they gained some confidence and some momentum. We didn’t do anything to help ourselves in the second half though.”
Daniels on where the offense goes from here:
“I think the offense has to take a hard look at what we’re doing, our attention to detail and things like that. I think our defense played awesome, considering the situation we put them in, the guys they had down. It really just fell on today.”
Vernon Davis on the offensive struggles:
“It’s frustrating. It’s very frustrating. I think going out there, we could’ve done a better job as far as getting points, especially when we were in the red zone. It didn’t go our way today. Like I tell everybody else, it starts in practice. We get another opportunity to get back in practice and correct some of the things that we weren’t able to do out there today. We’ve just got to keep our heads up and keep moving forward.”
Demaryius Thomas on mistakes hurting the team:
“That’s what happened in the game. We had a couple turnovers. They scored on one of them. Me and [TE] Vernon [Davis] had a drop on third down where we should have converted. It’s just stuff we’ve got to go back to the drawing table, stay after to catch more—whatever we’ve got to do.”
