DENVER — Let’s call it what it was — Teddy Bridgewater made a business decision when he pulled up and decided to not tackle Darius Slay in the third quarter.
That, along with Melvin Gordon’s fumble, which led to Slay trotting 83 yards to the end zone to unofficially end Sunday’s game, was the talk of the town after the Denver Broncos’ embarrassing 30-13 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles.
But after the game, the finger was not pointed Teddy or Melvin’s direction.
Instead, it was pointed at the defense.
“We just had a hard time stopping them in the first half with a combination of [Jalen] Hurts on the gun-run game and [Jordan] Howard,” Vic Fangio stated. “We struggled stopping their run, obviously.”
Denver’s run defense was, in fact, abysmal. The Broncos gave up a season-high 214 yards on the ground to a team that was missing their starting running back.
Dre’Mont Jones didn’t holdback at all after the game when talking about who was to blame for the struggles.
“I’ll call it a combination of us not executing, and probably coaching,” the defensive lineman stated, throwing his coaches out there. “Pretty simple.”
The honest 24-year old put the blame not just on the players, but on Denver’s coaches too.
When pressed if the defensive scheme wasn’t set up properly to stop the Eagles run game, Jones didn’t back down.
“It’s a combination of both,” Jones said, putting the blame once again on the players and coaches. “The scheme was probably a good call, and we didn’t do it the right way. It’d be a bad call, and we couldn’t execute it. We just got to do a better job of intertwining both.”
Shortly after Jones’ explosive quote, Mike Klis reported Fangio’s message to the locker room after the game was that it was part execution and part coaching. In that case, Dre’Mont was merely just echoing his head coach’s message.
However, before Jones’ quote, when asked what his message to the locker room was after the 17-point defeat, Fangio did not mention that.
“We’ve got to learn from this and come back and be ready to play,” Fangio said, explaining his message to the team after the game. “[We have to] take each day one day at a time and play each game one game at a time moving forward. But ultimately, we’ve got to learn from it, fix what’s fixable from a learning standpoint, and move forward. We’ve got to get past this. We’ve have seven big games left, and we need to take each one of them as its own entity.”
Regardless of what Fangio’s message to the team was after the game, Dre’Mont Jones went further than any player has gone this year by publicly calling out the Broncos’ coaching.
