The Broncos got on the field together for their first offseason minicamp on Monday, and new head coach Nathaniel Hackett loved how his players responded to new quarterback Russell Wilson.
“Everybody’s coming in, they’re so fired up, they’re so excited to get out there,” Hackett said, via DenverBroncos.com. “In the end, that’s what you want. You want guys to come out here, you want them to want to practice and want to get better. Russ leads that charge. This guy loves practice. Just out there at the end he was like, ‘Wait, we’re done? Can we do more?’ And you’re like, ‘Man, I would love to, but we’ve got to tone it down.’ Baby steps. He’s awesome.”
Hackett said the Broncos have a lot of work ahead of them to get his new offense installed.
“We have a very, very large playbook, and there’s a process of how you teach everything,” Hackett said. [It’s] kind of like the foundations of what you want to build. Sometimes you have to put plays in that you might not necessarily run, but that are in other parts of the playbook. It’s just kind of understanding it and learning it in the proper way so when guys are out there, they can react fast. It’s just a long kind of deal, all the things that we do. Today was just kind of the very basics of what we do and then we’ll slowly start expanding that with the guys moving forward through Phase II and OTAs.”
One practice in April doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of all that work the Broncos’ offense has to do, but there’s plenty of optimism in Denver that Wilson is going to make a very big impact.