The No Bull Review: It is officially time to be concerned

I’ve been one of the constant voices preaching patience with this Denver Broncos team. With this young coaching staff, new QB, new system, etc the Broncos were never going to come into the season lighting the scoreboard up.

But we’re officially at the point where it is legitimate to be concerned. The offense looked for a couple of weeks like it was starting to get online. Then this game happened.

I’m going to take a step outside of my normal format for this week’s review and talk about this team at a higher level now that I’ve seen 5 weeks of games from them (keep in mind that I’m an eye-test guy).

Defense

Photo by RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

The defense under Ejiro Evero is getting 0% of my ire. They are absolutely killing it over this five-game sample size (with the exception of the Raiders game where they forgot how to stop the run for 4 quarters).

The story on defense is one of a barrage of injuries. We’ve lost our starting and backup safeties, one corner, one defensive end, and have a few linebackers miss time.

Through all of that, this defense is still finding a way to play sound defense and keep the offense in the game regardless of their ineptitude.

That screams good coaching and a bunch of players who are bought in to what their Defensive Coordinator is doing.

Offense

Here’s what the fecal matter hits the oscillating device.

This offense looks consistently unprepared to execute on the field of play. And the truth is, there’s no way to know for sure what exactly is behind that.

If I look at the first 3 weeks, I’d say Nathaniel Hackett’s performance was to blame largely from a play calling perspective (and I still think that’s part of the problem).

If I look at this past week, I’d say Russel Wilson is to blame as he’s consistently screwing up plays with poor execution. He’s overthrowing and underthrowing routes (I’ve been mentioning this for a few weeks). He’s misreading plays completely. He’s throwing to clearly covered players and it is starting to cost us turnovers. Honestly, in this one game, he looked about as poor as any QB we’ve had in the past six years.

There’s also some shade to be thrown at the receivers on the team who are dropping passes they should catch.

Let’s not forget that the run game has not been working the way it is supposed to. The line consistently looks like they have at least one guy losing his battle or missing an assignment.

When you look at the whole picture, it isn’t looking good for Hackett and his offensive staff.

Because while I can point to problems in every area of the offense, the big problem is consistently poor execution, and that just points to poor coaching.

This offense should have been working in the preseason games.

The coaches should be holding their players accountable to what they need to see execution-wise. Wide receivers that drop passes need to improve or be replaced with someone down the depth chart. Linemen need to be coached up on how to run their protections so we don’t have a free guy coming at the QB so often.

And most importantly, our QB needs to have his ass chewed. He’s missing easy reads, open receivers, and is making me as a Bronco fan wonder just how much worse was it when we had Tim Tebow starting (And let’s be clear…we should NEVER wonder about that).

It isn’t the roster

This is just my opinion, but among all of the problems I see from our team, mostly I don’t think the problem is one of a lack of talent on the roster. I think this roster is very strong with talent all over the place. Sure, I think we could upgrade ILB and TE, but the guys we do have are at least serviceable.

It is time for Nathaniel Hackett AND Russell Wilson to dig deep

Photo by RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

If this team in its current iteration is going to have any success in the near future (with Hackett keeping his job), the two leaders of the offense have GOT to figure it out. Both of them need to be putting in the time and requisite work to improve.

And that requires being humble (which I haven’t seen much of from either of these guys). You have to honestly and authentically own the problems you are bringing and start working on improving them. Be willing to scrap what isn’t working and build the necessary skills to get a better result at the end of a football game.

Because 15 points per game didn’t cut it over the past 6 years and it sure as hell isn’t going to cut it when you look at what the rest of our schedule looks like.