‘Losing sucks.’ Don’t we know it.

Good morning Broncos Country!

Well, you may have embraced the tank, but players insist there is no such lack of motivation within the Broncos locker room.

Even if it’s mostly so they have a job - somewhere - next season.

“You’ve got to play hard. You’ve got to try and find a way to win the game. Not only are you playing for if you want to be in blue or orange next year, but you’re also playing for 31 other teams, too,” said C.J. Anderson. “No matter the situation, I love the game of football. This is something I’ve always wanted to do. You have to take the ups and the downs. I came in with a lot of ups, and this is one of the downs of my career. At the end of the day, I’m going out there and doing what I love to do.”

But it’s hard not to speculate that many of these current players are motivated more by what they need to do for their contracts next season than actually helping the team win its final four games.

A few free soon-to-be free agents may be thinking as much about the offseason as they are about Week 14 such as Virgil Green, Todd Davis, Donald Stephenson, Jamaal Charles and Cody Latimer.

“I’m always motivated. I’m playing for the team, but I’m also playing for myself as well,” said Shaquil Barrett, who will be a restricted free agent next year. “I want to be as good of a player as I can possibly be. No matter what our record is, if I’m personally having a good season, then I’m going to be looking good...If I’m down on myself and playing bad, then I’m going to lose my job. I won’t be able to play football anymore. I’m playing for myself and the team.”

Anderson - who’s hoping still to hit the 1,000-yard rushing mark this season - also just hates losing, and he believes winning a game will be good for everyone in the locker room.

“We all are sick and tired of losing,” Anderson said. “I don’t know if y’all understand how much losing bothers people because y’all are not in it. You don’t feel it. It’s like going to your job everyday and it sucks. It just sucks. You’re talking to other players around the league and you’re seeing fun celebrations that you never got a chance to do. It just sucks.”

Barrett noted that the losing has been hard on everyone.

“It’s really hard because we reset and reset, but the same thing happens week in and week out,” he said, noting that the way the team is losing - blowout losses - is the toughest part. “We’re playing like we’re at the bottom of the NFL, and we have way too much talent on the team to be playing like that. We just have to figure it out and get it together.”

Anderson believes the key is just playing clean football - something the team hasn’t done since before the bye in Week 4.

“Can we just play one clean game of football and see how it comes out?” he asked. “We’ve proven that if we play a clean game of football we can dominate football games. We have not been playing a clean game of football in 60 days.”

But how to do that seems to be this team’s main problem.

And that begins with the quarterback.

Trevor Siemian isn’t quite sure what it is about his game that has fallen apart, but he believes “a little bit of everything” is behind it.

“The times I haven’t played well, there hasn’t been a real rhythm with me and that trickles all the way through the offense,” said the quarterback. “It’s just the way it’s played out. It’s one thing here and one thing there. We stall out or we don’t make it happen. Then you’re saying, ‘hey, I have to make this thing go.’ That’s when bad things happen. It’s good to learn from, no doubt.”

There’s no real evidence, however, the offense is learning too much.

Siemian was benched after a three-interception game against the Chiefs a month ago, but on Sunday in his first start since, he threw another three interceptions, including a pick-six.

“When things aren’t going well, you want to make a play,” Siemian offered as explanation. “You want to do something. You want to fit a ball in. You want to make sure you don’t miss a play and that’s when bad things happen. For me, I just go back to feeling the flow if the game and not trying to do too much.”

When the Broncos take the field at Mile High on Sunday against a Jets team that is playing good football, they’ll get another chance to try “not doing too much.”

Coach Vance Joseph told the team on Monday not to “just survive” for the final four weeks. They need to still compete even though Vegas gives the Broncos less than 1 percent chance they can make it to the playoffs.

“You have to win, not just compete. We want to win these football games and everyone’s engaged today to win a football game, not to just compete,” Joseph said. “It’s the NFL. You have one result on Sunday, and that’s to win or lose. That’s our goal Sunday, to win.”

Lofty.

Horse Tracks - docllv’s pick of the day

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Horse Tracks

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Vance Joseph can survive the losses.

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