On the bright side, 67,221 isn’t a half-bad attendance number for a sideshow.
That’s what Denver’s 16-9 home win over the Los Angeles Chargers on the final afternoon of 2023 became by the time everybody left Empower Field and headed to their New Year’s Eve parties.
When the Broncos do their retrospective on how this year finished with such a thud, they’ll find they have nobody to blame but themselves.
Oh, this isn’t just because of the Russell Wilson drama, either. Though that did become a big, ugly, public part of the equation this week. Denver spent several days dominating the NFL news cycle not because of a chance to end an eight-year playoff absence, but because coach Sean Payton benched Wilson and in the process effectively began divorce proceedings from the club’s $245 million quarterback.
That was enough to push Jarrett Stidham (first NFL win), Jaleel McLaughlin (11 touches, 62 yards), Lil’Jordan Humphrey (54-yard TD catch-and-run) and all the rest to the backseat, but only because Denver had already blown one too many chances over the past 17 weeks at actual January relevance.
Fittingly, the Broncos were officially eliminated from the postseason within moments of pulling back to 8-8 with a grind-it-out division victory that most weeks feels darn good.
“It just sucks, honestly,” outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper said. “It doesn’t take away from the win, we did our job today, but it definitely is a bittersweet feeling.”
Indeed, Denver set itself up for this air-leaking-out-of-the-balloon letdown long before Kansas City stamped its eighth straight division title.
“It is what it is. I mean, look, we kind of had that opportunity a week ago and then ‘ugh’,” Payton said.
So Sunday instead ended up an exercise in scoreboard watching and Wilson watching.
Wilson went out to midfield with Denver’s game day captains before he put on a big overcoat for the rest of the afternoon. The CBS camera panned to him on the sideline again and again, a backup quarterback for maybe the first time since high school. Maybe for the first time. Payton and players afterward raved about how he handled the demotion to No. 2 behind Stidham.
Turns out, this has been coming for weeks and months. The Broncos first approached Wilson and his camp about potentially adjusting his contract all the way back in the summer, then pushed the issue on the team’s bye week after Denver took its biggest step in trying to dig out of a 1-5 hole by beating Kansas City.
Simultaneously, then, the Broncos told teams they weren’t interested in selling off key players at the NFL’s trade deadline for anything other than premium prices and told their quarterback they’d have to consider benching him for up to nine games if he wasn’t willing to move a $37 million guarantee date in his contract back from March 2024.
They traded nobody. They got no concessions from the quarterback. They got hot for a while before running out of steam.
Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that they couldn’t thread the needle to the postseason despite the rest of the AFC trying its darndest to facilitate.
Even Sunday, after losing three of its past four, Denver had slim hopes largely because the Chiefs had loitered within striking distance.
Beat the Texans on the road or the Patriots at home – to say nothing of the three early season home losses – and Sunday afternoon feels like a playoff game regardless of who’s playing quarterback.
Instead, Las Vegas’ Jimmy Garroppolo, Washington’s Sam Howell, the Jets’ Zach Wilson and New England’s Bailey Zappe all led second-half comebacks on the pristine Empower Field turf against the Broncos and left the club’s playoff fate in everyone’s hands but their own.
So when the Chiefs defense stormed to one more defensive stop against Cincinnati as Stidham dropped to a knee in victory formation, Denver’s postseason drought ran to eight seasons.
“If we finish at 9-8, winning two in a row and going 4-2 in the division, most years that probably gets you into the playoffs,” defensive lineman Zach Allen told The Denver Post. “This is just one of those wonky years and we just kind of pissed a few away. It’s a shame, but I think we can use it as a stepping stone.”
That’s the best the Broncos can hope for at this point. Maybe it will matter a year from now and Denver will be making a run like Payton’s preferred example, the 2022 Detroit Lions, who missed the playoffs last year and stormed to a division title this year.
In order for that to be the case, though, the Broncos are going to have to figure out their path at quarterback. Navigate around the salary cap crunch that comes with likely cutting Wilson in the spring. Either stay as healthy as they did this year or somehow add quality depth to a roster without the benefit of many draft picks or the salary cap room to go on another free agency bonanza.
That all looked a long way off Sunday as a franchise in quarterback limbo played a game that goes as a footnote in a year that might be a building block or might just be a big, ol’ wasted opportunity all around.
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