ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — Sean Payton didn’t just take his foot off the gas. He yanked the emergency brake, got out of the car, handed the keys to Josh Allen and crawled home on all fours.
“As a play-caller on offense and vice versa, you have to pay attention to what’s going on the other side of the ball,” the Broncos coach explained after a 31-7 clobbering Sunday at the hands of Allen and his Buffalo Bills in the AFC’s wild-card round.
“And so early in that game, you’re paying attention to it. It’s like, you want to be aggressive. But as that game unfolded in the second half … then it begins to impact how you can call (it).”
The Broncos threw it five times on first down in the first half for 42 yards, or eight per play. They threw it four times on second down in the first half for another 42, or nearly 11 yards per attempt.
First drive, third quarter?
Run, run, pass, punt.
Second drive, third quarter?
Run, run, pass, punt.
“When they possess the ball, we can’t,” Broncos tight end Adam Trautman told me after a fun season ended with a belly-flop into the Niagara River. “And then when we fall behind, we’ve got to get away from certain things that we’d like to maybe in the plan. I mean, that’s really one of the main reasons they beat us like they did, is because they just possessed the ball.”
The other reason is that the head coach let down quarterback Bo Nix, not vice versa.
Down 14 with 2:53 left in the third quarter, this was Payton’s play sequence:
First-and-10: 3-yard run.
Second-and-7: 1-yard run.
Third-and-6: False start.
Third-and-11: Incomplete.
Down 21 at the Bills’ 14 with 11:37 left, the Broncos faced a last-gasp fourth-and-2. They ran a play-action bootleg to the boundary, dumping it to tailback Jaleel McLaughlin. Instead of pushing for the end zone, McLaughlin got pushed out of bounds for no gain, and that was pretty much that.
“We definitely have to score more than seven points in these tough games,” said Nix, whose fine rookie season ended with a whimper — 13-of-23 passing for 144 yards, 43 of which came on a rainbow to Troy Franklin on Denver’s opening possession.
“We went to Baltimore and only scored 10. We scored seven here today. We’ve got to finish in Kansas City. So there’s certain things where it all comes down to execution and scoring more points. And our defense played well in all the games. We’ve just got to somehow find ways to score and keep momentum and keep it on our side.”
The Broncos grabbed that momentum with both hands over the first quarter-and-a-half, only for Sunshine Sean to suddenly lose his nerve.
When you’re a road ‘dog in the postseason, that’s the best time to cut loose, shed those inhibitions and let the chips fall where they may. Going deep to open the game was inspired. Payton stuck to his theme on a fourth-and-8 at the Broncos’ 43 about four minutes into the second stanza, catching the Bills napping on a nifty fake-punt pass from Riley Dixon to a wide-open Marvin Mims Jr. Down 10-7, Denver kept the ball, silenced a half-sober Highmark Stadium and knocked the favorites back on their heels.
Only instead of punching it, Payton shifted to “park.”
Instead of going for the throat at a time when the Bills’ offense was moving the rock at will, the Broncos ran it with Javonte Williams for 6, then dumped it to Mims for a 3-yard loss. On third-and-7, Nix could smell Von Miller’s chewing gum and had to get rid of it, setting up another fourth down, this time at the Bills’ 39.
Payton punted and pulled the brake.
“Yeah, the distance on the next sequence though, analytically, was not in favor of (going for it),” Payton explained when I asked about the possession.
“What that play did is basically put them on the half-yard line. And so there we go. And now we’ve got to be able to (stop them, as) it flips the field. But unfortunately, we couldn’t hold them down there.”
Which is why you went for it in the first place, but … ah, never mind.
Big picture? Sky ain’t falling. World’s still spinning. The Broncos have been playing with house money for months. The singular, most important question — the franchise’s eternal question since Peyton Manning retired — was answered, and probably definitively. It’s Bo’s team, now. Bo’s time. You can’t get an NFL train moving forward again without a solid QB-coach base first. That’s finally here, and hallelujah. Don’t let Buffalo dismiss that. Or discount it.
But for the new-look, new-era Broncos, Sunday was a status check — and the postseason mirror wasn’t kind.
NFL coaching staffs are paid to find open wounds. Playoff staffs poke their dirty fingers into them and wiggle those digits like there’s no tomorrow.
The Broncos’ underbelly was laid naked to the world: Running back. Tight end. Inside linebacker. Occasional arm-tackling. Denver led 7-3 at the end of the first quarter. It felt more like being down 10. After 15 minutes, the Bills had eight first downs to the Broncos’ two; 124 yards to the Broncos’ 75; and 79 rushing yards to the Broncos’ 11. At the line of scrimmage, Buffalo’s offensive line could do whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted to.
Payton’s first big response? Turtling. Actually, no. That was his second big response. The first might’ve been the decision to deactivate powerful rookie back Audric Estime, in cold weather, before the game in favor of 5-foot-8 Tyler Badie. Badie’s touches? Two. For 8 yards.
“Just running style,” Payton said of the decision. “What we thought we were going to do running-wise … we felt like for this game, that was something we wanted to do.”
Buffalo had, ya know, other ideas.
“Whenever you’re not in the game running plays, you can get out of a rhythm,” Nix reflected. “But that’s our job, to get back in there and have a few plays that get us back in rhythm. And we’ve got to do better for that next time.”
Payton has to be better. At least on this stage. If you’re going to go down, do it swinging.
“Yeah, big momentum swings, that’s what NFL’s all about, what the playoff’s all about,” Trautman said. “So it went one way in our favor. And then, really quickly, it went the other way.”
The Broncos aren’t that far away. But as the Bills reminded them, knuckles bloodied from jab after jab, it’s still too far to crawl.
Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.