Gary Kubiak sat down with 610 the other day to answer a few questions, and our good friends at Sports Radio Interviews transcribed it for us. How is the embattled coach feeling about not being able to talk to his rookies? Spoiler alert: he doesn’t like it.
What are you up to these days?
“I tell you what boys it really is tough. It’s great time of year for us to work with our players, all of them, but especially our young players that we’re trying to make a big jump and help us out going into next year. We would normally be in week two of our OTA’s, but you know it’s difficult and we’re all dealing with the same situation and hopefully it gets solved here sometime soon and we do have a normal training camp and get ready to play in 2011.”
What is your biggest concern? The rookies?
“Yeah, basically we spent a little bit of time with J.J. [Watt]. We got to bring him in after we drafted him, but other then that a phone calls to those other guys we drafted and that’s been about the contact, so that’s been very difficult and we’re counting on some of those guys to help us very quickly, but I think number one for us really is Wade [Phillips] getting his hands on our defense and getting that installed and getting to work on that. I’m concerned with some of the players coming off injuries when you talked about DeMeco [Ryans], you talk about Brian Cushing come off a knee surgery, Connor [Barwin] coming off the surgery last year, Mario [Williams] is coming off of missing basically the last month of the season, so my biggest concern is getting our defense going and taught as quickly as we can.”
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We are almost past the OTA period here. What is your level of concern in terms of developing the 3-4 defense if we move past mini-camps and have the lockout still going on?
“Well it’s obviously a concern, but I think the great thing we have going for us is Wade [Phillips]. His defense to me is not very complicated and he’s also shown he can get this thing done very quickly in some places he’s been and just being around him everyday with his confidence once he gets his hands on these guys and having Reggie [Herring] with him from Dallas, bringing Bobby King, a young coach with him from Dallas. I think that these guys can make up a lot of ground very quickly, so that does give me a great deal of confidence.”
Kubiak continues to put a ton of trust into Wade Phillips’ defense to fix everything, which is not a surprise given how fast they needed the defensive turnaround. They’re probably still a few free agents away from actually having a good defense, but I’m more confident about them than I would’ve been with Frank Bush.
Not that saying that implies much, since I would be more confident about the players coaching themselves than I would be with them being coached by Bush.
Also, this is not a slam against Gary Kubiak’s passion for his job or profession, but boy, it sure would suck to get paid a lot of money to not do anything.