Orlando Franklin: What went wrong against the Patriots, and how we fix it

Denver Broncos offensive lineman

Orlando Franklin is giving Yahoo Canada Sports an exclusive first-person account of life in the NFL. Franklin grew up in Toronto before playing at the University of Miami and was drafted by the Broncos in the second round in 2011.

Sunday’s loss to the New England Patriots was very hard, it’s a hard loss to stomach. Any time you lose it makes you angry, especially when you have a team like we do. We feel that we can play with any team in this league; we just have to go out there and prove it. Any time you lose a game it’s going to motivate you. We feel like we have a team that should not be losing any football games.

I think the Patriots came out and they were able to execute better than we were. They were able to capitalize on our mistakes. Any time you play a team as good as the Patriots you have to play mistake-free football, and we didn’t.

The good thing is it’s better to lose in the middle of the season than to lose in the postseason. Right now we’re still grinding each week and trying to create an identity for ourselves. It’s never a good feeling to lose but we do understand that we need to get better. It’s definitely an eye opener and we can’t be lax in our preparation each week. We lost one football game, our second of the season – it doesn’t mean we have to change what we do. We just have to execute better on the field. Each person has to do their jobs, and concentrate on doing it for 60 minutes.

As far as the Manning-Brady rivalry goes, any time you have two players of that caliber there’s always going to be people making a big deal about it. You always want to go out there and win for your quarterback. Unfortunately we weren’t able to do that. When we’re playing the Patriots, it’s not just going to be the Broncos versus the Patriots, it’s Peyton Manning against Tom Brady and unfortunately we weren’t able to do more for our quarterback.

This week gotta focus on the Oakland Raiders and try to focus on being 1-0 after this week’s game. They’re a good football team, I checked out some film on them. They have a bunch of guys who can get after the quarterback. They’ve got a good front seven; they can stop the run so it’s definitely going to be a challenge. You can’t look past any team in this league.

And we really want to get better at running the ball. As an offensive line we know we have to get better. We have to get better at running the ball and we will. Last week was not a great performance by us as a team, but we will definitely get better.

It’s pretty much a new season, the first eight games are gone and we’ve got eight left so we just have to try to get to 1-0 this week.

Hopefully we get to play the Patriots again – that can only happen in the playoffs. You always want to face the team that beats you again. But in the postseason you don’t really prefer who you play, you just want to get to the postseason. At the start of the season there are 32 teams and we all have one common goal. But at the end of the year only one team gets to raise that trophy and say they’re world champs. We want to be that team.

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More from Orlando Franklin:

-How football led me down the right path, and to protecting Peyton Manning

-Giving thanks to the mentors who helped me get where I am today

-On being part of history, and what it takes to win big games

-A look inside the week-long grind of an NFL player

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