Hardly a full 3/4 of the game.
Regardless, if Orton wasn’t able to practice all week, then he shouldn’t have started. Orton got put in after McD had enough of Simms holding the ball and missing reads.

…just trying to come up with a theory. Maybe they thought Simms would be better and decided it was hopeless…I don’t know.

As quick as he got the hook, he might be on waivers by the end of the day tomorrow. That seemed like a big vote of zero confidence to me.

And the Moreno fumble today wasn’t his fault. He was trying to score, and Hochstein put his knee up and knocked the ball out while Moreno was beginning to reach out to the endzone. At least he is trying to secure the ball better, running with both hands on the ball through the hole, and keeping it high and tight when he breaks through. He is trying to correct his faults, which is a good sign for a young player. If anything, Marshall could learn a few things from Moreno, instead of chastising him on the sideline for something that wasn’t his fault.

Zogernaut saw where I was going with them. Let me repeat them.

1) Orton was NOT 100% (makes sense to start a guy who is 100 healthy and let your other guy rest right?)
2) The longer Orton is on the field the GREATER his chances of reagrivating his injury (if that one hit from Merriman tweaked him a little, what do you think playing the WHOLE game would have done to his ankle??)
3) Simms did not get propper reps or prep for the game he crapped out in. (Maybe McD thought there would be a different player under center if he got all the same prep that Orton usually gets… sadly this wasn’t the case, but it was very worth trying. Did you see Orton grimmacing out there, I mean c’mon… even if you want to win the game, look at what the guy is going through. He needs to heal up, and every single minute you can save him from running from angry 300+ pound division rival players the better!)

You should get the idea with those. It’s a silly question to be asking. I thought the answer would be obvious but let me type it out black and white as it happened before and during the game in Josh McDaniels logical, practical brain:

“Orton needs to heal, we need him for the rest of the season. Simms wasn’t prepared for that game, but if he gets practice maybe he can do enough to get us by until playing Orton isn’t a major injury risk. Simms has a rough start, wait crap, his second drive isn’t going well. Should I put in Tom, no, he’s as unprepared as Simms was last week. Let’s put Orton in now this game could get away from us.”

a.k.a. We need him alive and well for the remaing 6 games. Why risk the season on him for one win, when you sacrifice it for multiple wins later?

Utter idiocy by the officiating crew. I knew the game was lost at that moment.

Yes, you make a legitimate point. But it just didn’t feel right. It’s not like it was an outright fumble doing something stupid. He was stretching the ball out in an even more protected fashion that Brandon does (who stretches it out with ONE hand when he’s nowhere near the goaline or EVEN a first down) and it was an unfortunate bump from our own player’s knee, not the opponent’s swinging hand. Not a single thing a person has said to the media with regards to Moreno even at all indicates a selfish, defensive attitude (the kind of attitude that has plagued Marshall for as long as we’ve been enjoying his company) that would spark a reaction like that. And I didn’t just see it once. When they played the full clip of it later I rewound it and watched it again. Marshall started it, and got into his face rudely enough that the passionatly game-focused Moreno had to address.

No, I wasn’t there on the sidelines. No, I haven’t been inside the lockeroom. But you don’t have to be to see a problem like that when they put the evidence out in plain sight. The surrounding teamates were quick to silence the exchange (which means that the rest of the team had the right goals in mind) but at that moment in time Marshall and Moreno had two very different opinions about something and it WAS causing a division between them at the moment. That’s not good for the team, no matter how you cut it.

As far as the points go we lost possesion in field goal range once (3 points) and Moreno’s TD/Fumble (7 points, or 6 if you want to get technical to a tune of 9 or 10 total points for us) both possession changes SD scored on (14 points), effectively taking away at least a possesion and a half clock-wise (as they’d have gotten the ball back anyways after scores, but a continued drive would have eaten a bit of the play clock and possibly eliminated their final scoring drive so maybe settling for a field goal, which would be 10 points, not 11). Anyways, I was just throwing some numbers out there based on what I felt, because you can “what if” everything to make it a 30-3 Denver win if you want to, but I try to be fairly realistic.