Fo a while now, we’ve known the teams the Denver Broncos would play in their 2016-17 schedule and where they would play them, we just didn’t know when. On Thursday, the all-important “when” became available and, as head coach Gary Kubiak explained, the “when” is very important.
“The biggest thing you do as coaches is see who you’re playing early because there is a bunch of prep work that you do before you get to the end of the summer and the end of OTAs,” he said. “We’re opening up with a great football team that won 17 games and that we played last. There is a lot of familiarity there with them. It’s a tough schedule. We knew it was going to be that way and that we’re going to play on a lot of different types of days. We’ve got to get ready to go and have got to do everything we can to be as good as we can be.”
As you now know, the Orange & Blue will open at Sports Authority Field with a Super Bowl rematch against the Carolina Panthers and things don’t get much easier after that, they’ll turn right around and face the Indianapolis Colts the next week.
“We have to get off to a quick start and we have to be ready to go,” said Broncos general manager/vice president of football operations John Elway. “Carolina only lost two games last year and one of them was to us in the last game of the year. They are a very good football team [along] with Indy. I’m sure Indy, with a healthy [QB] Andrew Luck will be ready to go.”
As expected, the Super Bowl Champions don’t get too many breaks on the schedule, in terms of who they’ll play, and they’ll have a target on their back week in and week out. But they did effectively catch a break with a Week 11 Bye and two other “byes” that Kubiak pointed out.
“We’ve got a couple of breaks in there. That’s one of the things that I look at. We’ve got a couple of Thursday games with the opener. We’ve got another one late,” he explained. “Our bye week is kind of late, too. It gives you a chance as a coach to get players a little bit of a break, your coaches a little bit of a break. We’ll start to work around those things. I know one thing: you play one a week. That is the most important thing—being the best you can be.”
A bye may be the closest thing an NFL player or coach gets to a holiday and they’ll have to make the most of that because they’ll be playing on Christmas.
“I don’t know how much my wife will think of that, but that’s part of it,” Kubiak said with a laugh. “I’ve done that many times before. It will be a tough place to play [at KC]. We always have great games there.”
The schedule is in place, free agency has wound down and soon the picks will turn into players. It may just be time to start tending to that Super Bowl hangover.
“We’re on to 2016,” Elway said.
