Opening statement
"At the end of the day, we didn't make enough plays to put ourselves in position to win at the end. I thought our team played with great effort. We had opportunities to keep this game with the ball. We had the chance to go win it, even at the end, it was still an eight-point game. We didn't make enough plays. Going 2-and-14 on third downs is going to make it hard. [There were] 13 penalties for 131 yards—you're not going to win when you're doing that, so that was disappointing. [We] couldn't get much rhythm on offense. Our third downs felt like we were in third-and-10-plus almost the whole game. [It was] hard to get a rhythm going offensively and we did have opportunities. We had some drops and some things that happened that didn't allow us to sort of keep going. [We] couldn't get any rhythm offensively at all. Defense I thought we played pretty good for most of the game, but it was kind of the same thing. Some of those third-down penalties were critical. [I] thought we held them in check pretty good in the first half and it got away from us, because offensively, we weren't holding the ball well enough sustaining any drives and put those guys in some spots that were challenging. Despite all that, we got the ball back with an eight-point game in the fourth quarter on the road against a really good football team. This one we couldn't find a way to win."
On the penalties
"I'm just disappointed. I'm disappointed that I didn't obviously foresee that being the reason that would make the game really challenging. [I'm] disappointed. I thought we would be better than we were, and we weren't. We've got some things to clean up and we've got to get ready and go to the next one."
On the passing plays
"I was trying to be aggressive to see if I could get the ball moved out from underneath there. We got a little bit of rhythm, so [we were] trying to take advantage of some momentum potentially and it didn't really work out in our favor."
On the Broncos' touchdown in the first half
"That was a wild swing to the end of the first half. It's tough to overcome those when you push stuff in that spot and you're trying to be aggressive and see if we can get the ball moving back, forward, the other way, a little bit, and it didn't really work out for us."
On the horizontal passing
"We had a couple of aggressive play calls down the field, trying to work across the field with some man coverage they were playing. We just couldn't hold up long enough in protection and they covered it pretty well."
On CB L'Jarius Sneed
"I don't know about the snap counts. That was not his pitch count. He's between 20 and 25 snaps in the game."
On CB L'Jarius Sneed's pitch count
"I didn't say anything about it to be honest, but he was on it. He was on a pitch count."
On the run game
"We were trying to run the ball, so we don't draw back and face their pass rush every snap. That was part of it. We ran the ball decent the first couple series. Trying to keep those guys from pinning back and rushing the entire game, which is what happened in some of the second half and in those down distances. We had some production in the run game and had enough, but that's why you do it. You're trying to keep some balance and manage some third downs, which we weren't in any of them for most of the game."
On not capitalizing on turnovers
"[It is] incredibly frustrating. Those are opportunities to score points and put the game away when you do it."
On QB Cam Ward's back-to-back sacks
"You can't take a sack in those situations. It's a learning moment for him. This is a really tough test out of the gate as his first start against this defense in this stadium. There's plenty of things he's going to learn. He's going to learn a lot over the course of these games. None of us are perfect, he's not going to play perfect and there are things that we're going to keep coaching and keep harping on, and he'll learn quick."
On if QB Cam Ward's loss of yards could have been avoided
"There was potential. I have to look at it. I can't tell you what it looked like right now without watching it. He got beat in the rush pretty good. One of them, I know we covered, so I'll have to look at it. I'll get back to you tomorrow."
On what's improved since preseason
"I don't know. We will find out. We've got to do a better job in that area. Some of the things were disappointing, but some of the penalty stuff here at the mercy of who was throwing flags and what they see and how they see it and we've got to make sure we're playing within the rules."
On the penalties
"I thought we had grown from [them] and obviously we've got to do a better job still. We're not there yet. [I] was disappointed. The false start was an interesting one. I didn't know that he crossed the lines, and all the guy did was point and they flagged it. I didn't think he actually crossed the line of scrimmage and got back. I thought you had to touch a guy. Then the last one, he's playing hard, trying to play through the whistle, and he makes contact, and it looks probably a lot worse than it really was, but again, you're going to call it, so we've got to pull off of those things, and we've got to do their job."
On if he thought about challenging WR Elic Ayomanor's out-of-bounds call
"You've got to get a foot in bounds, too, which we didn't have a clean look at whether his foot was down as well. An elbow doesn't equal two feet, so his foot would have had to come down as well. We didn't have a clean look, so the call from upstairs was that it wasn't worth challenging."
On moving forward
"That's the NFL. The next game is coming in seven days, and we've got another good team (Los Angeles Rams) coming to our place, another playoff-caliber football team. We've got to get ready to go. We've got to clean up what we didn't do well and get ready to go play in our game. They come every week. There's no grace period. You've got to get ready to go again, make your corrections, you try to get better and you move on to go play again."
On QB Cam Ward
"The moment is not too big for him. He was poised, he was calm, he saw things well. There's a lot of positives from his demeanor and how he handled himself on the sideline in between series and on the field. I think he'll improve at a rapid rate."
On his message to the team
"I think there are some things that are encouraging, but I'm very much disappointed that we lost. I'm very much disappointed in the things that we didn't execute well enough and I'm disappointed in the penalty process. I didn't think that that was something that was going to show up the way it did today, for obvious reasons. There's plenty of disappointment, but the encouraging part is that we found our way to be in this game for most of it and we've just got to find a way to play better when we need plays to be made."
