Broncos head coach Gary Kubiak on second half struggles: 'It's been a little puzzling'

There is one reason the Denver Broncos are still fighting for a playoff spot right now – second half struggles. The issues have plagued them even longer than the, “No second-half points in the last three games,” stat you’ve been hearing all week. The Broncos haven’t scored any points in the third quarter since two days after Halloween in their big win over the Green Bay Packers. Since that point, the second half woes have been a big part of three losses (Colts, Raiders, Steelers) and nearly cost them another game (Bears).

This week, head coach Gary Kubiak was asked about his strategies when it comes to second-half adjustments.

“I’ve done a little bit of everything through my career,” he said. “I’ve not scripted plays, I’ve scripted plays. The bottom line is that you’re talking and making adjustments. How are you getting played? What are they doing to you? What do we have to go do in the second half? What are we going to come out and do? To be honest with you, it’s like anything else that you do in football. If it’s not going good, you find a way to change it.

“We tried to do that the last couple of weeks,” he added. “We did make some changes last week, they obviously didn’t work. We’re going to have to make some more this week. We’ll keep digging until we find a way to come out of the locker room the right way. It’s been a little puzzling, but there are a lot of other things that are puzzling, too. You have to work through them and keep pushing.”

While many see the struggles as a product of the Broncos being out-coached and out-adjusted in the second half of these games, Coach Kubiak see’s his team beating themselves as his biggest concern.

“The thing that I’m concerned about most in the second half – if you go back and look – is that we come out, we make a play like we did last week and then here comes a holding call,” Kubiak explained. “Now it’s 2nd-and-20 or things like that. I don’t know if I’m right, but I want to say that we had three or four big penalties in the first two touches of the football in the second half at Pittsburgh. When you do that on the road, you’re probably punting. There go a couple of possessions and nothing is happening.

“That’s the biggest thing that we’re trying to focus on,” he continued. “Is the attention to detail and having the same juice going throughout the course of the football game. You’re going to have issues like that, but you have to play through them and we’re not playing through them, so that’s a concern.”

Extra focus will be put on coming out of the locker room strong this week, but Kubiak explained you have to stay sharp in all areas, so you need to have balance in you emphases.

It’s like not being good on the goal line, so you put a special emphasis on it,” he told. “You can’t go beat the hell out of yourself because this is not going right, here. Well, do something better to make up for it and win the football game. There are 10 wins out there where we weren’t doing everything perfect, you know what I mean? When you have four losses and something’s not right, you’re obviously going to hammer it a little bit, but you want to make sure that you’re hanging on to some of the things that you’re doing well, so this is no different.”

Whatever Kubiak, his staff and the team need to do to to fix the issue, the need to do it quickly. The second half struggles in recent weeks have put Denver in a precarious position where a playoff birth is no longer a forgone conclusion to the regular season. Get it fixed and people may look back at it as a blessing that it came up sooner rather than later, don’t get it fixed and it may be looked at as the downfall of the 2015-16 season.