Bo Nix isn’t panicking.
Far from it, really.
The Broncos quarterback said Thursday that when he watched the film from Monday nightap 31-10 loss, he thought it didn’t look as bad as he expected.
Not nearly good enough, but also not any reason to “freak out,” as he put it.
“You watch the film and there’s a couple good things and then all of a sudden we’re back because of a penalty or something and you just can’t win in this league like that,” Nix said. “Overall, we’re not going to press the panic button and we’re not freaking out. We’re not starting from scratch or anything. We feel like we’re still in a good spot.
“We just didn’t play great by any means and we’ve got to play better.”
Nix said he thought Denver had a clean operation for the most part with offensive coordinator Davis Webb calling plays. The Broncos offense had a delay of game and burned a timeout to avoid another in the second half, but overall, Nix said he thought his group was good in and out of the huddle, players knew what they were supposed to do and the communication was good.
“I would say itap just a technique or a couple things here or there that we didn’t follow through with on the play,” Nix said.
Nix himself had an uncharacteristic night, fumbling the ball three times and losing one. He fumbled only four times all of last season (lost two) and three times as a rookie without losing one.
“It is an anomaly and we treat it like one and we don’t make that a habit by any means,” Nix said of the fumbles.
He said he didn’t do a good enough job of keeping two hands on the ball in the pocket and also once he broke the pocket before actually crossing the line of scrimmage.
Marvin Mims, Jr. misses practice with foot issue
Broncos wide receiver Marvin Mims, Jr. didn’t practice Thursday due to what the team called a foot injury.
Mims was hurt and missed time during Monday nightap game against Kansas City. During the game, the Broncos said Mims was questionable to return with a hip injury. He did, indeed, get back into the game and overall played nine offensive snaps and four special teams snaps.
After the game, Mims said of the injury, “It was just some old stuff coming back up and trying to toughen through it.”
Mims hurt his foot in Denver’s preseason finale against Minnesota and missed time earlier in training camp with a hip or groin issue.
The past two days on the injury report, he’s been listed as not practicing due to a foot issue.
Head coach Sean Payton declined to say whether Mims was at risk of missing Sunday’s game against Jacksonville but did say that the reason Mims wasn’t in for the opening kickoff against Kansas City was gameplan-related.
Mims, an All-Pro return man, returned punts when he was available against the Chiefs but not kicks.
“He’s going to be returning punts and kickoffs,” Payton said. “A lot of it is just each game plan and how we want to approach it. Fair question, because itap really looking at, ‘Hey, how do we see this game going relative to the wind?’ We went into Kansas City with him being the featured punt returner and a rotational kickoff return player.”
Tackling the tackling woes
Broncos players mostly think their abysmal night tackling against the Chiefs was an anomaly.
It may not have been a coincidence, though, that Payton had the team in full pads on Thursday, the first day of practice this week.
“Today was our first day of practice,” he said. “I won’t get into the drills and the sequencing and how we handled it, but certainly there was a lot we had to clean up.”
Payton said there’s a mental element and a physical one to cleaning up tackling mistakes. Teams don’t typically tackle live during training camp practices or during the regular season and they only get so many days in full pads once the regular season schedule begins.
“Itap all of the above,” Payton said of tackling work. “Itap technique, itap attention to detail. Itap all those things.”
