Through 14 games, there aren’t many positives to take away from this Broncos offense. The offensive line is horrible, the running game has been nonexistent and the passing attack has managed to be worse than last season — and that’s saying something.

But where does the blame fall?

Yes, John Elway is the one who put the talent in place, but Gary Kubiak is the one developing it, and at the end of the day it’s the talent’s job to perform.

There’s not one thing that can be done to fix the offense’s ineptitude, and that’s what makes it so difficult.

Unfortunately, if things don’t get turned around quickly (as in now), the season is over. Here’s what Gary Kubiak had to say on the subject today:

On the defense being frustrated with the offense

“That’s OK. They played really well. Offensively, we didn’t score enough points for us to win. It’s OK to be upset. There’s pain in what we do and you put a lot into it. There’s no division. That’s battling and that’s part of football. Defensively, we should feel really good about ourselves and how we played yesterday. Offensively, we should look at it and say, ‘We did some good things, but we should have scored some points.’ That’s a great team that we were playing. We played well enough on defense to give ourselves a chance to beat them, but we did not play well enough offensively to do that. That’s football.”

On his message to the team

“I told them how proud I was of the defense and how they played. I told them that offensively, I think [QB] Trevor’s [Siemian] last three starts he averaged over 300 yards passing, but we’re not getting enough to show for it. We’re not getting enough points to show for it. I just talked about those things and some of the challenges we have right now. We have a tough road, but we’re still in it. We have to win 10 games to have any chance at all. We don’t have number nine yet. We need to stay focused on that.”

On what happened to the run game in the second half

“We had four three-and-outs. On the first drive of the second half, we dropped a big third down play. When you don’t stay on the field, it’s hard to do those types of things. The second drive, we had a 10-yard run, but we got a holding call, so we had 2nd-and-17 or 18. We don’t make that third down. We had four three-and-outs. When you do that, you are probably not going to have balance. That’s the disappointing thing. We went no-huddle yesterday, which I thought helped our football team and gave us some good tempo. We were OK running the ball. Most of our big plays were still throwing the ball, but we were OK. Once we went with four three-and-outs, we were in trouble. We were down two scores and trying to get ourselves back in the game.”

On the offense’s ups and downs this season

“We are struggling, but we’ve been different offensively. We’ve tried some two-back [and] we lost some of that. We’ve been at one-back and we’ve had some things going on, but there are no excuses. I have to do a better job with them. The guys are battling. I think Trevor is getting better. He is becoming a good football player. [WR] Emmanuel [Sanders] and ‘D.T.’ [WR Demaryius Thomas] are making their plays. They’re both in the top ten receivers in the league, but we need more consistency in what we’re doing. Really, I look at myself. I have to do a better job for them.”

On the red zone struggles

“We had a couple plays to make down there. We threw an interception on third-and-three. There was another place to go with the ball [and] Trevor will get better from that standpoint. We missed [RB Devontae] Booker. We had a match up we wanted on the linebacker [and] we missed him. That’s the difference when you play [New England]. They’re really hard to score points against. That’s why they are on top of the league. I look back last year [to] some of the big plays that we made in red zone and yesterday we had some big misses down there. Not only misses, but turned the ball over and they turn it into a touchdown. That was a big swing in the game. [We’re] disappointed in how we played down there.”

On Siemian running the no-huddle offense

“He has been doing a good job with it when we asked him to it throughout the course of the year, but I think that he is comfortable with it. He learned a lot from Peyton [Manning] doing it. Is our package maybe as expanded as it has been in the past, no, but I think we can get there if he continues to progress the way that he is doing.”

On starting Justin Forsett at running back

“Two things, I liked watching him practice last week [and] I think it takes a little bit off of Booker’s plate. ‘Book’ came in and played better. I thought he did some good things. They both picked up a lot of blitzes. They found ways to bring four and various ways to make our backs stay in, which they do a great job of, but we picked up some good blitzes. I just felt better about watching Justin last week. We’re still going to play both [and] down the middle, but just try to take a little bit off of Booker.”

On Jeff Heuerman‘s performance

“I’m impressed with what Jeff did. I think we were probably going into the game and [TE] Virgil [Green] and [TE] A.J. [Derby] were going to split time. Jeff [was] going to play a little bit. It ends up that Jeff plays [28] plays and we all have to be very encouraged about how he played.  Hopefully we’ll get a lot of work out of him here in these next two weeks, but I’m very encouraged about how he responded.”