Shane Ray tweaks diet, workouts with expectation of more playing time

4:29 PM ET

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Experience can be a difficult, sometimes cranky, teacher. Shane Ray knows because he found his rookie season with the Denver Broncos to be more of a struggle than expected.

Ray had been a unanimous selection as the SEC’s Defensive Player of the Year in his final season at Missouri. That kind of accolade in arguably the nation’s best college football conference can breed plenty of confidence.

And that confidence may have been further enhanced when Denver traded up in the first round in 2015 to draft Ray 23rd overall. The Broncos had him as the No. 10 player on their board. But when the games came, Ray found the learning curve was a little higher than expected.

“Just … realizing what I did in college was not going to transfer to the league as easy as I thought it would,” Ray said. “At this level, you’ve got guys that are very smart in everything they do as far as technique. Your athletic ability can only take you so far. That was a big thing for me … I had to find another piece, another key. That was just part of the intellectual part of understanding film study, what guys are going to do, what guys are going to try and give me, and formations. Also, just my technique and my footwork and how much more crisp it needed to be.”

There was that and more. Ray had arrived on a team with a defense ready to flex its collective muscle, with two Pro Bowl edge rushers in Von Miller and DeMarcus Ware. Ray quickly went …

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