Good morning, Broncos Country!
There’s a tendency in sports to throw out the “trap game.”
Where a team looks past the current opponent to one coming in the following game or week.
For the Denver Broncos, if there was a time for that to happen, it could be this week. The Broncos (4-2) just got out of the six-game gauntlet to start the regular season and now face the Arizona Cardinals. The notion goes that the Broncos perhaps don’t take Arizona (2-4) as seriously as they should, since they play the Kansas City Chiefs the following
week.
Denver head coach Sean Payton isn’t buying that, as he said to the media on Friday:
“The first thing I thought about was, ‘Who do we play next week?’ It has to be. I’m trying to not be cliché. It has to be the focus. You come back after the weekend, and you’re like, ‘All right, we have a three-game stretch. Here it is. Here’s Arizona. Let’s focus on Arizona.’ These guys are smart enough that they understand enough of our league.
“These guys (Arizona) just came off a real impressive win against the Rams. When you have the schedule like we do in the NFL with 17 games, I couldn’t tell you after the bye. I have no clue. I know where we’re going at some point; I just don’t know when.”
Payton then expanded on the key to not overlooking an opponent.
“I think a little bit gets back to who you’re bringing in the building,” he said to the media. “The makeup and the guys that are smart. They understand how this league works. So that experience, that makeup certainly helps me when we’re focusing on this game.”
What helps a veteran coach like Payton is knowing the type of message to deliver to his team. And that changes each week.
“You learn to understand what’s important and then what’s not important,” Payton said. “When you’re a young coach, you’re talking about everything, and when you talk about everything, pretty soon you’re not really covering anything because you’ve hit everything. What you learn, maybe with a little bit of experience, is what to ignore, even with your team, as you prepare.
“But very in touch to the challenges today, and the challenges within each week. I would say I think about that race all the time. What’s going to be this week’s theme? All of that. Probably too much sometimes, but your mind races relative to what’s necessary for this win.”
