Mike McCoy wants to see the Broncos offense ‘eliminate the little mistakes’ in the red zone

The biggest difference between the Denver Broncos blowing out the Dallas Cowboys and falling short to the Buffalo Bills has been red zone consistency. It’s a problem that Broncos offensive coordinator Mike McCoy is trying to figure out.

“I think we’ve made a few too many—we’ve kind of hurt ourselves,” McCoy said of red zone consistency. “There was a play in Buffalo where there was a protection breakdown and we had a chance to throw D.T. a touchdown. There’s a third down here that we might not have converted for one reason or another. We’ve had a couple critical—we had two penalties down there. Your third and manageable and all of a sudden you become third and long. There’s another one I believe where Trevor [Siemian] scrambled and then we get in the red zone, so that counts as a trip to the red area. There’s a number of different reasons. We all know when you look at that, we score touchdowns these games won’t be close. That’s something that you look at the past two weeks that we’ve played games and the number of points we’ve scored, we’ve settled for field goals which we don’t want to do. It’s different every week and every series down there. We just have to eliminate the little mistakes.”

It is such an obvious problem that the red zone period has been emphasized in practice. And despite McCoy down-playing it, he wants this offense to eliminate those little mistakes that are killing scoring opportunities for Denver.

“I think we’ve done a great job practicing all year long,” McCoy said of practicing in the red zone. “The tempo and the way our guys work. We all understand as an offense, like we just talked about, what we need to do to clean those things up. That was the great thing with the bye week, kind of look at those things and evaluate them. We talk about that stuff every week. We just have to eliminate the pre-snap penalties and I can help them with certain things. We’ll do better.”

They certainly can do better, because we’ve seen it. The biggest knock on the Trevor Siemian-led offenses of last season and now this season has been consistency. Unlike 2016, he has all of the tools and weapons - and scheme - to be consistently good this year. It’s time to see it.

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