The Denver Broncos got their world rocked by the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday, and the Denver defense is especially unhappy about what went down. They gave up 34 points and got carved up by Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence, and linebacker Nik Bonitto blamed himself for what happened.
“I don’t think I played to my standard,” said Bonitto, who was held without a sack for the second straight game, in a piece written by Nick Kosmider of The Athletic. “I can play much better.”
The coaching wasn’t top notch, either. Defensive coordinator Vance Joseph has had a great season, but he couldn’t come up with a scheme to get the pass rush home, and Joseph definitely didn’t have an answer for the bad tackling that plagued the secondary in this one.
“For all of us playing defense in the last month of the season, it’s tough because it’s 14, 15 games of tape out there,” Joseph said. “Everyone’s giving you their best stuff versus what you don’t do as well. We have to weekly improve on the things that you’re not doing well and make the proper adjustments. If you don’t, you’re vulnerable to it. It’s a tough league, and it’s 15 weeks of good football on tape. You have to adjust accordingly.”
But these aren’t new adjustments that needed to be made. Tight ends and running backs have been running free in the middle of the field against the Broncos for some time now, and the problem dates all the way back to Denver’s loss to the Indianapolis Colts in Week 2.
The Broncos also failed to produce a takeaway for the seventh time this year, according to Kosmider, and they’re currently ranked 20th in the NFL in turnover margin. Add in 50 defensive penalties, a number that leads the league, and the margin for error gets very thin. Coach Sean Payton knows that, and he was blunt in his assessment of what happened.
“I said this to the team: ‘Part of this process is not fooling ourselves,'” Payton said. “They beat us tonight. They beat us good in all three areas, and it starts with me. Even though that hurts going down, you can’t spit it out and you have to swallow it.
“That’s the truth. They beat us in all three areas. We have to coach better. We have to look at what we’re doing. We have to make sure we’re not doing too much, and we have to do that all on a quick turnaround. So that’s kind of how I saw that game.”