Broncos coach on Drew Lock’s performance in preseason opener: ‘I was hoping for more’
It was the first preseason game of the 2019 NFL season, so maybe the bar shouldn’t have been set too high.
But former Lee’s Summit High/Mizzou quarterback Drew Lock made his debut Thursday night with the Broncos and received low marks from his coach and the Denver media.
Denver beat Atlanta 14-10 in the Hall of Fame game, but Lock didn’t lead either scoring drive. Lock, who played from the start of the second quarter until early in the fourth quarter, completed seven of 11 passes for 34 yards.
Broncos coach Vic Fangio wasn’t impressed with Lock, who was the Broncos’ second-round pick earlier this year.
“I was hoping for more, but (I’m) not surprised,” Fangio told reporters after the game. “He’s still got a lot of work to do. I thought his accuracy wasn’t clean all the time along with his reads, but that’s to be expected. We’ve got four more games and we’ve got to get him ready — more ready than he is right now.”
Mark Kiszla of the Denver Post wrote a column with a secondary headline of: “Lock might be an effective NFL quarterback one of these years. But that year won’t be 2019.”
Here is part of what Kiszla wrote: “At age 22, the rookie quarterback from Missouri is a project, not a wunderkind. The Broncos have not found their Patrick Mahomes.
“After waiting 60 years to become a head coach at any level, nothing was going to stop Fangio from leading the Broncos onto the field. Battling a kidney stone that refused to pass, Fangio got out of a hospital bed to do it. It’s as close to the agony of childbirth a man can experience. So sympathy to Fangio. But his stubborn refusal to take a sick day only adds to the shot-and-a-beer aura of Uncle Vic.
“The reasons Lock fell out of the first round in this year’s draft are becoming more obvious. As a quarterback, he is so raw it frequently hurts to watch. OK, it’s not kidney stone painful. But it’s painful enough for any Broncomaniac to grab a beer out of the fridge for medicinal purposes.”
Not exactly glowing reviews, but Lock has been in Broncos camp for roughly two weeks. He sees room for improvement, too.
Lock also noted the date of the game.
“I’ll rate it as a learning game,” Lock said on the Broncos website. “There’s definitely things I’ll learn there, but I’m excited that I’m sitting here and that was the first time ever stepping out on the field.
“It was the Hall of Fame game. It wasn’t the Super Bowl, it wasn’t the playoffs — so there’s a lot of things for me to learn, a lot of things for me to look forward to, to progress a little bit.”