Brandon Marshall publicly took offense to comments from John Elway when he suggested players had gotten "a little bit soft" since their bye in Week 5.

Marshall said he believes he can "respectfully disagree" with Elway.

"I wasn't taking shots at him," Marshall said. "I think everybody was saying 'He's taking shots at the GM' and that is kind of ridiculous. I'm a competitive guy, I've got skin in the game, I'm out here running around busting my tail. ... I see nothing wrong with being a grown man disagreeing."

Elway's comments were made last Friday.

"I think at this point we're still trying to figure out how we can get through it," Elway said. "So, there's no question at the end of the year we'll evaluate it and we'll look back and see what happened. But I will tell you I think we got a little bit soft. To be dead honest with you, we got a little bit soft. We went 4-0 in the preseason, we started out 3-1, then we get a bye week and if you exhale in this league, you're in trouble. To be dead honest with you I think we exhaled and it's hard to recover from that. So, it's a lesson that hopefully we all learned and prevent it from happening again."