BALTIMORE — This too shall pass. Like a kidney stone.
“A lot of what-ifs in this game,” Broncos QB Bo Nix mused after Denver came out on the receiving end of a 41-10 flogging by the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday at M&T Bank Stadium. “But the fact of the matter is, we got our butts kicked.”
You say the Broncos are “one player away,” with the trade deadline looming on Tuesday? Only if that player was born on the planet Krypton and leaps tall buildings in a single bound. Sell, baby. Sell or stand pat.
At least Denver found a WR2. Unfortunately, he also happens to be their QB1.
“We’ve had tough losses,” Broncos coach Sean Payton said of the franchise’s worst margin of defeat since that infamous 70-20 shellacking at Miami in September 2023. “But it gets back to that grit, you know, and sometimes embracing the misery a little bit.
“And you just can’t (expletive) yourself, including the head coach — or any of us. We’ve got to be able to say, ‘Hey, you know, we get on that plane, we go back to work (Monday).’”
Pressed into a statement game, the Broncos fluffed their lines and showed their age. After nine weeks, the Broncos are 3-0 against the NFC South, the Mountain West of NFL divisions. They’re 2-4 against grown-ups.
Tampa Bay, New Orleans and Carolina woke up Sunday morning with a combined record of 7-17. The Ravens (6-3) woke up in a foul mood.
“As a young team, we’ve got to find ways to not let this happen again,” said Nix, who was merely fine — 223 passing yards and a leaping 2-yard touchdown grab off a “Philly Special” toss from Courtland Sutton — in a game that demanded he be special.
“So I think as an older team, guys that have been around a long time, they’re able to just flush it and move on to the next (game) and go play. But I think we’ve really got to look at this and see why it happened … try to fix our mistakes so that it doesn’t happen to us again or we’ll be right back in the same situation.”
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The Chiefs at Arrowhead are up next on the Farewell Yellow Brick Bo Tour, and like Kansas City, Baltimore’s got a gear the Broncos don’t. Scar tissue the Broncos don’t. Playmakers the Broncos don’t.
Which isn’t to say the stomping didn’t have silver linings. For one, it’s hard to imagine the Broncos defense playing any worse in K.C. than it did in the second and third quarters against the Ravens. For another, it adds more clarity to the murky question of “buy” or “sell” on Tuesday.
This is not a 5-4 team that’s the right dude away from 7-2. It’s a young, rebuilding team that’s outkicked its coverage by kicking the crud out of the dregs of the NFC.
And that’s OK. Payton and Nix might be doing more with less than any coach-QB combo in the NFL right now. Tip your caps. But the Broncos don’t have a full compliment of draft picks in every round again until 2027. You’d be loco to chase more for No. 10 now by shipping off what precious pick capital is left in the bank account. You either sell some surplus dudes or ride this out with what you’ve got.
The deadline won’t bring what the Ravens have that Payton doesn’t. The shopping list’s too long. An RB1. A wideout who takes some of the heat off Sutton. A TE1. A young LT1. Another safety, maybe.
Also, come back soon, P.J. Locke. With 16 seconds left in the first half and the Broncos holding on to shouting distance by a pinkie finger, Denver safety Devon Key turned the Broncos’ Hollywood script into a Three Stooges routine.
The defensive back took a bad angle while chasing down star Ravens wideout Zay Flowers, then took a worse one while trying to close, swiping at shoulder pads in the open field instead of wrapping up low. The Baltimore speedster whoop-whoop-whooped Key from there, stiff-arming him with his left hand, cutting hard to the right, and outrunning everybody to the end zone for a 23-10 lead pending the extra point. It was two sins on the same play, the sort of fundamental gaffe reminiscent of last fall’s 70-Burger in Miami.
“Like Coach (Payton) said, that’s something you can go two ways with,” linebacker Cody Barton told me after the game. “You can either be all negative and let it spiral and be, ‘Woe is me,’ or whatever you want to call it. Or be positive, have an open mind, and grow from it … we’re all on the same page. We all believe in each other. We all believe in this team.”
True, but Payton also came in believing he’d have to score 35-40 points just to make it interesting. Riverboat Sean went for it five times on fourth down. One turned into a TD on that “Philly Special” from Sutton to Nix. The Broncos turned it over the other four tries.
“I think there are some games where your palate has to change,” Payton said. “And certainly we felt this was one of those games.”
A playoff team ain’t rolling the dice like that. Even on the road.
At some point, Nix’s going to hit Franklin over the top from 30 yards out, the way they missed on fourth-and-4 at the Ravens 33 to start the second quarter. He’s not there yet. They’re not there yet.
The best thing to come out of Sunday was, in the same breath, the worst: A cold glass of water, straight to the kisser. A reminder that the Broncos are still in the early stages of a reconstruction job that usually takes a season if not longer, to really bear fruit. We want what we want now. We want to see the 2023 Texans. The truth might be closer to the 2020 Chargers, who turned to rookie Justin Herbert at QB1 and finished 7-9.
“I’m not saying sadly, but unfortunately, I would say that, yeah, you do need that learning curve,” Sutton reflected later. “You do need to have that, ‘The stove is hot, don’t touch it’ moment.’”
You either step up or get stepped on. In a statement game, the scoreboard said it all.
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