DENVER BRONCOS QUOTES (12/14/15)
HEAD COACH GARY KUBIAK
On if he has met with the quarterbacks
“No, I have not done that today. I just got through with the team and meetings. We were talking about the game. We have
some Pro Bowl [voting] stuff going on today and some other things going on today, but I will do that this afternoon. I’ll visit
with [QB] Peyton [Manning] here this afternoon before he leaves.”
On the starting quarterback this week
“I have to see where he (Manning) is. We have to talk through his situation and where we are. I’ll talk to [Head Athletic
Trainer Steve] ‘Greek’ [Antonopulos]. We went through a good week last week and gave him the weekend off, so we’ll see
where we are. We’ll have a plan in place by the time we get to Wednesday. We’ll see where we are today and kind of take
it a day at a time.”
On frustrations after the loss
“That’s a part of football. Frustration is a part of football. If you play long enough or coach long enough in this business,
you’ll be on the side that everybody says is doing something really good and you might be on the side at some point in your
career where people say it’s not too good. That’s part of being a team. We’re playing great defense right now. Obviously,
we played great defense yesterday. We played pretty good, offensively, for a half other than the red zone and then we
played very poorly in the second half. We’re a football team and we go about our day that way all the time. I don’t mind
frustrations at all as a coach because we work hard at what we do, but you get over those really quick and you go to the
next week and that’s what we’ll do.”
On if QB Brock Osweiler will play on Sunday
“Yeah, nothing has changed until I sit down and see exactly where Peyton is and where we’re moving this week. If we went
out to practice today—absolutely nothing changed today. I have not met with these guys yet.”
On why Raiders DE Khalil Mack caused disruption
“We handled it pretty well in the first half. We were getting the ball gone. We started throwing the ball a lot at the end of
the game trying to get ourselves in position to win, which caused our tackles to be in some one-on-one [matchups]. We
tried to chip with our backs. We tried to help out a couple of times and we didn’t coordinate that very well, so that’s
something that we have to do, but he’s a great player. He did a hell of a job. He did it on both sides with [T] Ryan [Harris]
and with [T] Michael [Schofield]. It’s tough to hold up in those situations, but sometimes you have to hold up and get some
people out to make some plays. It’s a fine line there as a coach. Obviously, you want to help every player you have, but
sometimes you have to get some guys out in some routes, too. We could play a lot better up front and we could have
played a lot better across the board catching the ball, blocking and all of those types of things. We’re all in this together.”
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On his confidence in Schofield
“Oh, I feel very confident in Michael. For a young player, I think that he’s played extremely well. He’s played against some
really good players. I think that he’s grown as a player each and every week. He’s been playing on a nicked up ankle for us
for a couple of weeks. Obviously, that’s a tough situation to get put in yesterday. I know that he’s disappointed. As a coach,
you look at it and say, ‘How can we help him some more?’ I’m very proud of Michael. I think he has a bright future.”
On dropped passes being a lapse in concentration
“Absolutely. There is no lack of effort. We had a few of them and we’ve had a few this year. You keep playing. You keep
throwing it to the guys. Those are the guys that have to make plays for you if you’re going to be successful. Sometimes it’s
confidence when it happens once or twice and you start thinking about it. As a coach, I have to get them to where they’re
making those plays from a confidence level. We have to go back to them again. We have to go back to [TE] Vernon [Davis]
again. We have to go back to [WR Demaryius] D.T. [Thomas] and all of those guys. We’ll do that this week. We believe in
those guys. We just have to play better.”
On how he can help with dropped passes
“Hopefully I can build their confidence that they’re going to make all of those plays. I can’t go out there for them. I’d love
to do that, but they won’t let me out there. I’d probably tell them exactly what I tell you, ‘I have confidence in you. The ball
is coming right back to you.’ We went to D.T. early in the game yesterday. We’ve been doing that. He had a great week last
week. He made a lot of plays in this game. I think he had 14 targets or something like that. Vernon made a lot of plays in
the game. In this league, you have to make them all. That’s the way that it works, so we’re going to try to make them all.”
On if Manning ‘coming back’ means coming back to practice or to play in games
“That’s the next step is that he’s coming back to practice. If you’re coming back to practice, then you’re working toward
getting back on the field and playing. Let me see where we’re at. I know how we ended last week, and I know what I’ve
been doing since five o’clock this morning. I haven’t talked to anybody. I’ve been doing a lot of evaluation and those types
of things. We’ll get started on all those other things here this afternoon.”
On S Shiloh Keo in coverage against Oakland
“Yeah, he got caught in a tough situation. Obviously it’s a coverage we should have handled better. He and [S Josh] Bush]—
Bush has been here two weeks, he’s been here one week—that’s part of our business. That’s tough. We’ve got a couple of
young guys back there playing who don’t have a lot of snaps under their belt. I know he’d like to have that play back. He
did some good things, too—did some good things on special teams and we’ve got confidence in those guys. As we try to
get [S] David [Bruton Jr.] healthy and [S] Omar [Bolden] healthy, those guys are going to have to play well for us. Obviously
there is a play we’d all like to have back, but it doesn’t work that way.”
On the status of S T.J. Ward
“I think T.J. will be close this week. I had a good conversation with him here a few minutes ago. I think he’s made a lot of
progress. I think it will be close, so I would say he’s day-to-day going into the week.”
On if there is concern about S Darian Stewart’s hamstring injury
“Slight hamstring. We think he’s going to be OK. He will probably be day-to-day through the course of this week. We had
some guys play—I look at Darian, [ILB] Brandon Marshall, [OLB] Shaq [Barrett]—we had some guys play every down of
defense and special teams yesterday with where we were as a team. A lot of great efforts by some players to try to get it
done. Unfortunately, we wasted some of those efforts of not getting it done, but some guys really went above and beyond
the call of duty yesterday for us doing a little bit of both.”
On how he evaluates the offensive red zone struggles
“I think you have to look at everything. Obviously as coaches, you’re looking at your plan of attack. That’s what you’re
looking at. I’m looking execution-wise, I don’t think we had a positive run in the red zone yesterday. I could be wrong, but I
don’t think we had one. I can think of us getting the first down and then running backwards and end up with third-and-6. I
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can think of us missing a throw in the corner. I can think of us dropping the ball. We did a little bit of everything down there
not to score points in the first half. We end up 0-for-3 in the red zone and kick another field goal, I think, from the 23.
They’re 2-for-2 in the red zone. That’s what can happen in this league. Whether you’re dominating the game or not, if
you’re not making the key plays, you keep people in games. That’s kind of what we did yesterday and then eventually
helped them out.”
On if the high number of sacks is due to Osweiler holding the ball too long
“I think we were trying to get the ball down the field a little bit, especially late in the game. We can work with him from a
drift standpoint. You need to make sure you’re moving forward, you’re not drifting side-to-side when those tackles—you
know, when you’re playing a great player [Mack], that’s something he’ll learn. He’s done a good job. He’s been stepping
up. We threw the ball a lot yesterday—50-something times. Trying to hold up against that guy that many times, especially
when he knows its pass when you break the huddle, is very difficult. We can all learn from it, not just one guy.”
On the challenge the Steelers’ receiving core presents the secondary
“They’re playing really well—probably one of the hotter teams in football, a lot of big-play players that have been as good
as there is in this business, sitting back there throwing it, hard to get to, hard to get down, and having to go there and
play—they’re playing really well right now as a team. I had a chance to look at their game from yesterday. They played
really well defensively, too. Then 84 [WR Antonio Brown] is back there returning punts and those type of things. It’s
another big challenge for our team. We’ll have to play as good as we can play, we know that.”
On if the offensive line struggled in the second half because there was no time to make adjustments for Mack
“No, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think we played perfect in the first half. They don’t believe that because we just had that
meeting. There are a lot of things in the first half we didn’t do well either. We were 16 carries for 21 [25] yards in the first
half. I think in the second half, we got five carries for four more yards or something like that. We just weren’t running the
ball. I don’t think we were moving the line of scrimmage. I think we had really a lot of trouble on the edges, in the run
game as well as the pass game. It wasn’t just the pass game. We did some things to try to get rid of the ball quick, and we
did some of those well, some of them poorly. Then late in the game, we’re trying to make some plays down the field. Like I
said, you can leave a lot of guys in there and chip people and do all those things, but there comes a time when you’ve got
to get somebody out and make some plays. We needed to make some plays yesterday. They pretty much four-man rushed
all day long.”
On if the offensive tackles are fatigued
“I think there is fatigue throughout. That’s part of the long NFL season. We’ve played a lot of football, played in a lot of big
games, we’ve played Sunday’s, we’ve played in all of them, so that’s part of it. You’ve got to work through that. We
wouldn’t be real tired today if we would have scored in the red zone in the first half. We would have had control of that
football game. We wouldn’t be real tired if we wouldn’t have turned the ball over a couple times. We’ll stay focused on
those things we didn’t do well and try to improve upon those.”
On why G Evan Mathis did not play much
“He is struggling with an ankle. He’s pushing for us. We’ll continue to play [G] Max [Garcia] a great deal and try to get all we
can out of all three of them. I think [G] Lou [Vasquez] had kind of gotten out of the woods a little bit and he’s doing better.”
On how sitting out the game benefited RB C.J. Anderson
“We’ll see. Obviously, I think if he goes out and plays 10 plays and gets banged on it again, it wouldn’t have been good. I
thought [RB] Ronnie [Hillman] and [RB] Juwan [Thompson] played well. There wasn’t a lot of space for them, in my opinion,
but I think they stepped up. They played well. I think we got blitzed two plays or three plays. They stepped up, handled the
blitz well. I think those two guys took care of their business and hopefully C.J. is back at full strength this week.”
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On if he predicts OLB DeMarcus Ware’s workload will increase this week
“Yeah, he played I think 15, 16 plays in the game. The plan was for 20. We feel good about the progress. He came out
clean. I think he came out with some confidence after what he’s been through here over the course of the last eight weeks.
We’ll progress that this week. We’ll progress it in practice, and obviously he’ll play more in Pittsburgh.”
©2015 Denver Broncos Football Club. All rights reserved. The individual quotes cited in this document may be used for the purpose of news reporting and other
fair uses as defined by Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Duplication or posting of this quote sheet, in its entirety, or any other use of this material which is not a
fair use as defined by Section 107 of the Copyright Act is strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of the Denver Broncos Football Club.