Editor's note: Rookie running back Montee Ball, who kept a training camp journal on DenverBroncos.com, will continue his blog entries thoughout the 2013 season. See below for his first entry about his preseason, the Broncos' running back rotation and two particular Broncos fans he's excited to have in the crowd Thursday.
Montee here.
I haven't caught up with you all since training camp, so I want to catch you up to speed.
Speaking about training camp and preseason, it all went well, actually, for my first time around the ropes. It was good. I made some improvements that I needed to have made to stay here, to make the 53, so I'm happy about that. I'm blessed. Now that the preseason's over, I'm happy to get to the regular season.
As everyone knows, we've got the Ravens tomorrow. They're the defending champs for a reason, so they all have high motors, they all play with heart. They have a great coach over there and a lot of great players. So for us, we're most definitely going to use the energy at our home field. The crowd is most definitely going to play a huge factor in this one.
The crowd, they're very important just because they give extra motivation to us. Crowd noise is huge for us whenever Baltimore is on offense. Everything -- keeping us fired up. They play a huge factor in our success.
In the running backs room, we all know how important pass blocking is to our role. And it doesn't take much more to really instill that this week than knowing guys like Terrell Suggs and Elvis Dumervil are coming. It's no secret that they're great players. Dumervil did some great things here for the Broncos. We wish him the best -- other than this game. But they do a great job. They have high motors and we're most definitely going to match it and most definitely try to go over top of it.
Mainly we're just going to do what we've been doing this week in practice in preparing for it and make sure we come out with the win.
As far as that preparation, it's actually kind of weird, to be honest, because I'm used to college when you wear pads 24/7, all day. Then here, you wear pads a day and then -- it's more mental, I'll say that. It's more mental than physical because they want everybody to be fresh. Coach Fox has been doing a great job with his schemes and his patterns of how we practice and when to take us off our legs and stuff like that to keep us fresh for the game. So that's been good.
For right now, the coaches made a great decision by letting us backs go out there, 1A, 1B, 1C, however you want to put it, and whoever is the hot hand, whoever is playing the best is going to take the position. The reason why I think that's a great decision is because of all the talent we have in that room, and just because we've all had our hurdles we've had to jump over this preseason, struggling in certain situations. But we've most definitely been attacking them and working on them in our running back room.
The relationship between all of us is really good, and I'm not just saying that. It's really good. There's no bad blood between any of us. I always say we're all grown men. You can't get mad at somebody because they're doing better than you. We all want to be the starter. So when someone gets it, we're not going to be mad at the other person or anything like that, because we're all here to be that starter that the Broncos need.
I'm just ready to do whatever I can to help the team win, starting tomorrow. And my parents will be there to see it. This will be their first NFL game here in Denver. They came to a couple preseason games, but this is their actual first NFL game. It's a different environment. Different speed of the game. So it's going to be good. I'm glad that they're coming.
See you tomorrow night. We'll be ready.
