Sean Payton talked big. No problem there. The National Football League is a place for the bold, both in terms of actions and words, and the incoming Denver Broncos head coach wasn’t shy about setting a verbal stake in the ground.
There’s only one caveat attached to the summer flex. You’d better be prepared to back it up, quickly. Otherwise … ouch.
Ouch is what happened to Payton and the Broncos on Sunday, because ouch is unavoidable when you get 70 — yes, 70 — points piled upon you, the kind of score line where the first response is to wonder whether you’re looking at a typo.
Denver found itself decimated by Tua Tagovailoa and the incredible Miami Dolphins running game, the eye-popping 70-20 beatdown giving Miami the highest points tally in an NFL game since 1966.
Flex no more. Those days of pouring scorn on predecessor Nathaniel Hackett, the apparent culprit of one of the “worst coaching jobs in NFL history” are gone. The assured promises that Payton would get Russell Wilson back to being an A-plus quarterback have lost all their resonance.
Now Payton, in the court of public opinion, is playing defense. If only his actual defense would do the same.
“Every once in a while, in this league, you get your butt whooped,” Payton said. “But this was more than that.”
Indeed. It was much more. It was an indicator that things aren’t just bad in Denver, they’re utterly dismal, and that whatever secret sauce Payton is sprinkling is not having any kind of positive effect.
When the only good news to be had is that the next opponent, the Chicago Bears, might be the only team playing just as poorly as you are? Yeah, there’s some straw-grasping going on.
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It has been an interesting and somewhat breathless start to the season across the league, but of all the didn’t-see-that-coming happenings, the Broncos’ 0-3 turmoil rates pretty highly on the list.
It was just generally assumed Denver would improve upon its 5-12 campaign, a sad journey that resembled an endless, aimless wobble through the final quarter of last year.
Regarding the expected improvements, no one knew how comprehensively or by how much. But a coaching upgrade to a talented roster and a QB who just needed pointing in the right direction? Potential in abundance, surely.
And, yes, Payton’s bluster and noise did play into it, for if the Super Bowl-winning coach was prepared to be this outspoken about things, surely that meant he felt confident good times lay ahead?
Hands up if you saw this coming. Didn’t think so.
As the week came to a close, the wider NFL fan base was falling over itself to pick at Payton and remind him of his off-season ramblings, with no shortage of glee attached. For a good little while Hackett’s name was trending on social media, and you don’t need to be told the reason why.
Peyton now has a demoralized locker room to contend with on top of everything else, like the poor play and Wilson’s ongoing issues, and the history that says teams that start 0-3 don’t usually get anywhere.
“S—,” offensive lineman Garett Bolles said when asked to describe his emotions. “S—. Tired of losing, man. Been here for seven years and all I’ve done is lost. And it’s frustrating.”
The Broncos are three games in, and something has to change. All the energy of Payton’s arrival has dissipated, exposed as something that was never real in the first place. The opening-game defeat to the Las Vegas Raiders was sloppy. The following week’s collapse against the Washington Commanders was painful. This 10-touchdown shellacking served to rubber-stamp the certainty that all that hope was false.
“0-3 doesn’t feel good,” Wilson said. “But the reality is we’ve got 14 games left, and you’ve got to put the blinders on.”
Keep telling yourself that, Russ.
What a weekend for football in Colorado. Deion Sanders’ Buffaloes got taken out at the knees by Oregon, then the pro franchise tapped out early in sunny Florida. Who knew?
The Payton blueprint was pretty clear from the outset. Energize the situation, project confidence, get the players believing, make a quick start and just keep rolling from there.
Except that before the end of September, the buzz now sounds like bunk, the confidence has turned to annoyance, the belief has washed away, victory feels like an alien concept and the only momentum is of the wrong kind.
For any coach, it hurts to be on the wrong end of a historic thrashing. It probably hurts a little more when it comes so soon after all that big talk.
And all that big energy.
And, most of all, all those big expectations, which are so far forgotten now it’s like they were never there to begin with.
