Broncos head coach Vance Joseph, who got the job due to his work as a defensive coach, knows that he’ll need to get more out of his new team’s offense. Appearing on Wednesday’s PFT Live, Joseph explained his plans for doing that.
“I want our offense to be able to score points,” Joseph said. “I want us to be up-tempo and put pressure on defenses. Sometimes when you have a great defense intact you kind of lean to the defense too much and you kind of get spoiled when things go bad, let the defense have it. I don’t want that, I want an offense who wants the responsibility of winning games and scoring points.
“So I want to be attacking, I want to be innovative, I want to play fast with tempo. I want to attack defenses, Mike, and that’s the way I kind of envision our offense being along with a dominant defense. If you can get both of those things going now you’re hard to beat every Sunday.”
The defense will indeed remain dominant, in Joseph’s assessment. Though he was disappointed in the decision of one of his “football fathers” to leave for the Rams, Joseph hopes the defense will improve with Joe Woods replacing Wade Phillips as defensive coordinator.
“This defense should not take a step back it should take a step forward,” Joseph said, adding that the team will use the same system and approach. “I can’t guarantee that it’s going to be exactly the same but the foundation won’t change because the players like doing what we’re doing here and they’ve been successful at it. So the foundation won’t change. Now can we add some different tweaks in coverage and front and pressure stuff, absolutely. But most teams every year do the same thing. So it’s going to be the same attacking defensive style you saw from Wade.”
It adds up to high expectations for 2017.
“Since Mr. Bowlen bought this team it’s been one goal, to win championships,” Joseph said. “But that being said no one’s going to give you the wins that put you in the playoffs. So it always starts with going to work, OTAs, training camp, winning your division, those things won’t change. Every year teams change but those things won’t change so for us to go and obtain those goals every year it starts with work. It starts with OTAs, with training camp. It starts with winning your division so those steps won’t get skipped. We understand that and at the end of the day we’re going to work hard and pick our heads up and see where we are.”
Where they very well may be a year from now is getting ready for the AFC title game, which they won a year ago en route to a Super Bowl championship.