Wow. For the first time in a long time, our standing SBNation Reacts confidence pollelicited a very gloomy outlook from Broncos Country.
Not even half believe the Denver Broncos are headed in the right direction after that embarrassment we called a football game on Monday Night Football.
Now I’m one to overreact in the moment (just look at my game-day Twitter account), but losing one game — even in horrendous fashion — is still way too soon to lose confidence in the direction of the team.
Unless you
really think Sean Payton and his coordinators have no idea what they’re doing, the Monday night loss should be viewed for what it was — one really bad game. And until this team has a string of those, it seems a little premature to lose confidence in the overall direction.
Let’s pump the brakes on that sentiment until we get a few more games on the season and can actually assess whether this team is falling off the rails.
But complaining about and figuring out why the MNF was so atrocious is valid — making the results on our second poll of the week very understandable.
And also pretty predictable.
Talk all week since Monday’s game (and during it) has focused on Denver’s extremely poor tackling.
“It’s all of the above. It’s technique, attention to detail,” head coach Sean Payton said about the reason for so many missed tackles. “It’s all of those things.”
The coach wouldn’t give details on how the team plans to fix that issue, but he did plan to fix it.
“I won’t get into the drills, and the sequencing of how we handled it, but we are fixing it,” he said. “Certainly there was a lot we had to clean up.”
Defensive lineman Dondrea Tillman believes more tackling drills is the answer.
“More hats around the ball. Everybody is making sure they’re running to the ball and working on their angles,” he said. “Honestly, just putting a body on a body instead of just wrapping up. You’ve got to put bodies on people.”
All-Pro cornerback Patrick Surtain said the poor tackling overall can be blamed on poor effort and a lack of intention to hit and hit hard.
“Tackling is one of those things where you have to be intentional with it. You have to bring pads, feet and you have to wrap your arms,” he said. “I just feel like we were assuming that the ball carrier was going to go down at the moment rather than finishing at the end of the day.”
Edge rusher Que Robinson believes Surtain’s point is exactly what the problem was on Monday night. Players were going about 80% and couldn’t wrap up to bring guys down.
“Instead of just chasing the ball and hoping we get them on the ground, we’ve got to be more intentional,” Robinson said.
