Justin Simmons shares piece of Sean Payton’s post-game team message

The Denver Broncos have officially started their season 0—1 with a penalty-ridden loss to the Las Vegas Raiders. Not the best start for head coach Sean Payton.

It also wasn’t the best day for new defensive coordinator Vance Joseph, who led an ultimately disappointing pass rush.

Safety Justin Simmons shared his perspective on the loss and what comes next. Along those lines, he was asked about Sean Payton’s post-game speech to the team.

“It’s Week 1,” the safety shared, “In the next four-week span, we have to find ways to improve drastically. No one is throwing in the towel.”

Simmons assured that the plan is to make corrections tomorrow and be “back on Wednesday ready to go and get ready for another home game against the Commanders.”

Another reporter asked Simmons whether the overall performance of the team was on-par with what he expected and he confessed that, from his perspective, the defense essentially got “off the field” by the end of the game.

“We had two opportunities there to give our offense the ball and go down there and score and win the game and potentially have us in a two-minute [drill],” he admitted, “That is what you want, so we just didn’t execute. End of story.”

The safety noted some positives in their red zone defense, but that they obviously gave up too many points. “Getting down there at times seemed a little easy, so we got to get on and fix that,” he explained, “That is part of my job of leading in the secondary and getting guys in the right position and things like that. I’ll get that fixed.”

Overall, Simmons acknowledged that some things were done well defensively and others were sloppy. “I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but you got to be able to fix those [sloppy plays], and we will. I like the guys that we have in the room, I like the team going into it. There are a few things we didn’t execute on, there was communication. We’ll fix those things and we’ll get better as time goes on.”