Fangio on Drew Lock's Performance vs. Bills: 'We Didn't Help Him'

The Denver Broncos got trounced by the Buffalo Bills on Saturday, at home, to the tune of a 48-19 beatdown. Naturally, those inclined to point the finger have largely settled on Drew Lock as the scapegoat.

However, head coach Vic Fangio doesn't want to hear it. When it come to the onus of this embarrassing loss, Fangio says to place it on the entire team.

“I thought in the first half, it was pretty good," Fangio said post-game. "We moved the ball and we had some first downs. We had a chance for 17 points, which would have been a nip-and-tuck game. In the second half, we just couldn’t get anything going until late. We didn’t help him with the rest of the team either, we had a hard time slowing them down. It was a total team failure in the second half.”

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Fangio concluded by "giving Buffalo credit" for being really good but such compliments are cold comfort to a Broncos fan base that is alarmed at Fangio's team posting three 25-point losses amid a fourth straight losing season. The Broncos gave up a whopping 534 total yards on Saturday, plus 41 of the Bills' 48 points.

There was virtually no chance Lock was going to be able to keep up with that, even coming off a strong performance the week prior. Fangio's point about Lock shouldn't be lost in the shuffle.

Just a couple short weeks ago, fans would have killed to see Lock lead the Broncos offense to not one but two touchdown drives in the first half. Despite Josh Allen and the Bills lighting up the scoreboard in the first half, Lock and company made it respectable with what have been three scoring drives, if Brandon McManus would have been on the field anyway.

The Broncos should have had 17 first-half points but emergency kicker Taylor Russolino missed a 54-yard field goal and an extra point. He would go on to miss another extra point in the second half.

Lock tried to hang in the face of overwhelming domination by the Bills offense but eventually the dam broke when he was strip-sacked in the third quarter, which was scooped up and promptly returned for a touchdown. The entire team, to somewhat echo Fangio, seemed to give up the ghost in that moment as the margin climbed to 35-13 five minutes into the third quarter.

Honestly, even though it wasn't great, Lock slapped together three touchdown drives in this game. The onus for this one, as much as Fangio wants to call it a "total team failure", falls on the defense. Blame the kicker, too, I guess, but Russolino had as much cause to be out there as Kendall Hinton did at quarterback in Week 12.

“It was definitely a bad day," Lock said post-game. "It was not a good day for us. I wouldn't say that any of us are feeling in a way that we're taking a step back, but that was not a good day for us, by any means and our job is to figure out why it wasn't, what we did wrong, what we could have done better and go from there.”

It's been that type of year for the Broncos.

Follow Chad on Twitter @ChadNJensen and @MileHighHuddle.