Two days of hindsight and film review later, Broncos coach Sean Payton on Monday acknowledged he’s revisited his own critical decision at the end of regulation in Saturday’s overtime loss to Cincinnati.
He did not say, though, that he’d have gone for two and the win rather than kicking an extra point to force overtime after Denver scored to get within 24-23 of the Bengals with eight seconds left in regulation.
“Oh certainly,” Payton said when asked if he’d reconsidered since the game ended in a 30-24 Bengals victory. “You go through it all the time relative to what the call would have been. Based on the outcome, you always second-guess and you always do that as a head coach.
“I know I trusted my gut in the moment, but I think it’s normal to (second-guess).”
Another element of the overtime decision: The Broncos and Cincinnati had very different stakes in the game. Denver could have clinched a playoff spot with a win or a tie, while the Bengals had to win to keep their postseason hopes alive.
Payton mentioned the possibility of a tie in his decision-making process after the game Saturday night.
A pair of overtime timeouts he called, though, ended up elongating overtime rather than shortening it toward a potential tie.
After the Bengals punted to begin the extra session, it switched to sudden death. Any score ends the game.
In Cincinnati’s second possession, they moved to the edge of scoring range at Denver’s 36-yard line with a 14-yard completion to tight end Mike Gesicki. Payton took a timeout with 4:15 left.
Bengals receiver Tee Higgins false started on the next snap but then caught a 19-yard slant followed by an 8-yard Khalil Herbert run down to the Broncos’ 14. Payton took another timeout with 3:32 to go.
“Listen, you have them. Part of it is just calming things down,” he said Monday. “Once you’re in that part of the game you know it’s sudden death. So partly just to give our guys a break.”
Cincinnati lost a yard on one more snap and then sent Cade York on for a 33-yard field goal attempt. He, of course, doinked it off the left upright, giving the Broncos the ball back with 2:43 to go.
Perhaps that sequence unfolds differently without the timeouts and the Bengals score a touchdown or York makes the field goal. Maybe the extra 30 seconds on the timeouts helped the Denver defense rally.
What’s also true, though, is once they had the ball back it would have been better to have less time on the clock rather than more because if the Broncos could have bled the clock out, they’d have clinched a postseason spot.
Instead, the offense went three-and-out and punted the ball back just 14 seconds of game time later after the Bengals used both timeouts and Bo Nix fired a third-down incompletion.
“It was really hard for me to process because people were asking me that question — what Denver needed to do — and we’re just trying to win the game,” Bengals coach Zac Taylor said afterward. “They ran it a couple of times there and they threw it on third down and saved us. Not that the time was going to be critical — I thought we were going to have plenty of time to go and do what we needed to do.”
Indeed, it didn’t take long. Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow engineered a five-play, 63-yard drive that took just 1:13 and finished with a walk-off touchdown pass to Higgins.
Of course, the game might not have even made it to overtime had Bengals running back Chase Brown not hurt himself trying to get down intentionally at the Denver 1-yard line late in regulation to run the clock. Or if the Bengals had tried to milk more time off even after that sequence rather than Burrow scoring on the next snap.
“It’s an interesting situation,” Taylor said of the end of regulation and overtime. “There’s a lot going through your mind. You’re having to process it and make quick decisions. It was a tough game. There’s a lot we’re going to review over the next several years from this game, I’m sure, that will teach us a lot about how to handle some of these situations.”
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