Josh McDaniels used Monday’s day off to meet with his staff and design a plan for his injury-plagued team. Today and tomorrow will be dedicated to correcting mistakes from the first week of training camp, and Thursday will be the first day the Broncos start to prepare for Sunday’s preseason game at Cincinnati.
“We had a productive day yesterday,” McDaniels said during his 12-minute news conference before today’s practice. “We took inventory of where we are with our scheme and the things that we have done during training camp. The next few days will be dedicated on us and what we need to do to clean up the first week of training camp.”
After watching their players drop like flies through the first week of practices, the Broncos expected to have Brian Dawkins, D.J. Williams, Chris Baker, Dustin Fry, and Spencer Larsen back on the field for today’s practice. As expected, Knowshon Moreno, Correll Buckhalter, Demaryius Thomas, Eric Decker, Lendale White, Jarvis Moss, and Chris Kuper are out.
Thomas, who injured his surgically repaired foot during Saturday night’s practice, is not practicing today despite x-rays coming back negative. The timetable for his return is unknown. McDaniels confirmed that linebacker Elvis Dumervil had surgery on his torn pectoral muscle today, leaving his chances of playing this season in jeopardy.
Ryan Clady’s return to the team by the Sept. 12 season opener is “hopeful,” according to McDaniels.
“But I don’t want to say that he will because I don’t want to put any unnecessary pressure on him to be ready before he really is ready,” McDaniels said. “I know he is working as hard as he possibly can to be ready for that game, so we’ll see how it goes.”
Today’s practice will focus on schemes that both the offense and defense haven’t seen yet, but will compete against during the course of the season. Most of the work the Broncos have completed during training camp has been geared around their own playbook. Today, the offensive unit will practice against four-man defensive fronts that they expect to see in the near future against Cincinnati on Sunday, Detroit on Aug. 21 and Jacksonville in the season opener on Sept. 12.
“Defensively, there’s certainly some things that offensively we don’t do that we’re going to see as we go into the season,” McDaniels said. “We’re going to take inventory of what we have shown our players. Some of the things that we need to work on a little bit more to improve to get to the point where we want them to be.”
Losing key players during practices has slowed the process of developing his players to that point, but rather than concentrate on the training room, McDaniels sees the silver lining. During his first training camp with the Broncos, McDaniels reminisced on when he lost eight players late in training camp. He noted the timing of this year’s injuries has been better.
“It affects us, no question,” McDaniels said of the injury bug. “As a coach, it might be better for us to have it happen now. There’s other teams that are going through some of the things that we’re going through. There’s nothing we can control with that, so we’re just going to try and focus on improving with the group that’s out there and coaching those guys as hard as we can.”
