Jeff Legwold, ESPN Senior Writer 10y

Broncos look at the good, the bad, the ugly

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. -- A day after a gritty overtime loss to the Seattle Seahawks, Denver Broncos coach John Fox said good isn't good enough and close isn't close enough.

That, when all was said and done, the 26-20 overtime loss in CenturyLink Field wasn't redemption, revenge, or even all that acceptable, as the Broncos entered their bye week.

"Do you mean is there a moral victory? The answer to that would be no," Fox said Monday. "But like all games, you have things you do well and things you don't do well. We call it the good, the bad and the ugly. We ended up on the short end of the stick. It was our first loss of the season. We're disappointed about that but we'll look at it."

Monday, the Broncos players went through the game video from Sunday's loss and while the team made a significantly better showing than it did in the 35-point loss in Super Bowl XLVIII, a little time to sleep on it didn't make anyone in the Broncos complex feel any better about how things went.

"That's important every week, regardless of who you play, it's a physical, combative game every week," Fox said. "I think to go on the road in an environment that's proved to be tough to win at over the course of three years, yeah I think that's always important. It's going to be important the next time we go on the road. Did we have a chance to win the game? Yeah, but we didn't finish it and we need to figure that out. We're going to be doing everything we can to do that, regardless of who it's against."

"We played better, we did some good things, but it wasn't what we wanted," Broncos defensive tackle Terrance Knighton said. "We didn't play to be close, be better than the last time. We always want to win. We'll go through things and get it right."

The Broncos will do some on field work this week -- Fox said Monday the team would likely practice in some fashion Tuesday and Wednesday -- before giving the players four days off for the bye weekend. Some of that time will be used to try find some solutions in the run game -- the Broncos are averaging just 3.2 yards per rushing attempt -- and to get things a little more dialed in on offense as a whole.

Quarterback Peyton Manning's eight touchdown passes put him second in the league, to Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck, but Manning has thrown just one of them to any of the team's wide receivers (Demaryius Thomas). Tight ends Julius Thomas and Jacob Tamme have five and two touchdown catches respectively.

And while there is some take-what-the-defense-gives-them at work there, it is also a sign things are not running quite as smoothly as the Broncos had hoped.

"I know everybody in there, coaches included, need to improve," Fox said. " ... I don't know that it's really people doing a lot of things differently (against the Broncos). I think it's fair to say that we might be more balanced now. That's really kind of how I'd say it. I think it's important in football to have that balance and not be one-dimensional. That's what I'd say up to this point. I don't think our offense has been lacking. We're just trying to win games. Right now, we're 2-1."

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