
On Tuesday, Executive Vice President of Football Operations John Elway and Chris Hall of DenverBroncos.com discussed the Broncos’ win over the Chargers, running back Willis McGahee’s injury and the upcoming game against the Chiefs in the latest installment of Elway Access.
With the Broncos’ 30-23 win over San Diego on Sunday, the team improved to 7-3 and took a three-game lead in the AFC West over the Chargers, who fell to 4-6. The victory puts the Broncos in firm control of the division race with six games remaining.
“I think that any time you get a win in this league, you have to be thrilled, especially against a divisional foe,” Elway said. “And if you look at the position we’re in, really being three games up, by winning this it puts us four games up with the tiebreaker on the Chargers with six to play. It was a big game for us to be able to put ourselves in the situation that we were.”
Though San Diego was able to hang around and keep things interesting by cutting the lead to seven with less than three minutes remaining, the Broncos prevailed despite the offense not firing on all cylinders. Elway was pleased with the bottom line, but said the performance left room for improvement.
“I think when you look back, we would have liked to have been able to get this thing over quicker than we did,” Elway said. “But the Chargers kept hanging in there and we had a chance to make some plays offensively, we just didn’t quite hit them. Defensively we played tremendous the first half. And they got it going a little bit in the second half to stay in the football game. These are always lessons learned from wins. This is another situation that we had some chances to close this thing out a little earlier than we did, but weren’t able to do it. We’ll look back and hopefully learn from this and be able to close some people out as we go forward.”