The Broncos defense in 2024 didn’t just rack up a league-best 265 pressures and set a franchise record with 63 sacks.
They also put forth a top-shelf run defense. Vance Joseph’s group finished second in yards per rush allowed at 3.9 and third in estimated points added per rush at -0.15, and they allowed just three players to top 100 yards in a game.
And yet, one of the more notable blemishes on that record came right out of the gate.
In Week 1, Seattle rushed for 81 yards on 10 carries in the third quarter alone as the Seahawks stampeded to a 26-20 victory — a game chiefly remembered as Bo Nix’s NFL debut.
One week later, Pittsburgh followed Seattle’s 149 rushing yards with 146 of its own in a 13-6 win against the Broncos at Empower Field. Those two games constituted two of the three highest team rushing totals in the regular season against the Broncos.
Denver, of course, bounced back from the 0-2 hole with three straight wins, then a four-game winning streak later in the year helped propel Sean Payton’s team to 9-5 and ultimately a playoff berth.
Still, one of Payton’s clear messages from the time this team convened for offseason workouts in April is that it cannot repeat such a sluggish start to September.
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that veteran nose tackle D.J. Jones had a simple answer for how his team can avoid that outcome beginning Sunday against Tennessee and quarterback Cam Ward, the No. 1 overall draft pick back in April.
“The defensive line dominates their offensive line,” Jones said Monday. “Simple.”
That simple? It’s on the defensive line?
“1,000 percent,” said Jones, who has seen Denver lose the season-opener each of his three years with the franchise.
Of course, there are more factors than just those guys that will determine whether the Broncos can get off to a better start. They’re the widest favorite in the NFL in Week 1, opening as an 8-point betting line favorite against the Titans. Then they head to Indianapolis in Week 2 before a brutal stretch from Weeks 3-5 ahead of the club’s trip to London that goes at the Los Angeles Chargers, home on Monday Night football against Cincinnati, and at Philadelphia.
“We need to start fast,” Payton said last week. “What does that mean? We have a home opener. We go on the road, but are focused on this game. We haven’t done that the past two years. It’s hard to be one of those upper-echelon teams if you play yo-yo football. You lose a couple, you win three.
“At some point, any one of these teams that win 10 or more games, there’s that (stretch of) three wins in a row or four wins in a row.”
Payton knows those stretches well. Denver may have made the postseason in 2023 were it not for a 1-5 start that included a nightmare 70-20 beatdown in Miami that dropped the club to 0-3. That team climbed back into contention with a five-game winning streak.
Over his time in New Orleans, plenty of Payton’s Saints teams went on long heaters. But they also started slowly more often than the veteran coach would prefer.
His first Saints team in 2006 took the NFL by storm, started 5-1 and ended up in an NFC Championship game. But then the ‘07 team started 0-4.
The Super Bowl champion 2009 team had no such problems, starting 13-0. But over a trio of 7-9 campaigns from 2014-16, his teams went 1-9 in September.
Overall, Payton’s got a glistening 170-105 mark in the regular season but is just 29-28 in September. That includes 2-5 in Denver.
Payton often refers to the race to improve over the first quarter of the season, and his teams have excelled in that department. Despite the pedestrian September numbers, Payton-coached teams have never had a losing record in October, and he’s 50-17 in that month. New Orleans mounted a 14-0 run over four straight Octobers from 2017-20 and went 17-1 total in Payton’s final five years there.
That success has largely continued in Denver, where the Broncos are 6-3 in the second month of the season.
This year, though, the Broncos across the board recognize that digging out of an early hole spells trouble, even if they’ve shown they can do it in the past.
“It’s the schedule. It’s the sense of urgency,” Payton said Monday. “Ultimately, it’s the preparation, the details in this game plan and the team we’re playing. Everything from hydration to recovery during the week so that they’re at their best peak performance on Sunday, sleep included, all of that.
“That really isn’t even discussing the football scheme.”
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