The Denver Broncos offense has something to prove against the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night.
On Sunday night, the Kansas City Chiefs host the Denver Broncos in an AFC West matchup with a recent history of being completely lopsided in K.C.’s direction. There’s no reason to believe the advantages won’t favor the Chiefs once again in Week 13.
The Broncos are already on the outside of the playoff picture looking in on a year that has featured numerous injuries and tough losses in Vic Fangio’s second season. In their first matchup of the year, the Chiefs won by 27 points and now shift to their own home environment in hopes of replicating those results.
We recently sat down with Sayre Bedinger of Predominantly Orange to tell us about the Broncos’ motivation at this point in the season and how to make sense of the team’s future.
With this season as an officially lost cause, what are the primary things the Broncos are playing for now?
The Broncos are definitely in an evaluation mode right now, which is part of what made this past weekend against the Saints so frustrating. It was truly a throw-away game for the entire offense, which is what everyone wants to see weekly progress from right now.
The Broncos need to see improvement from Drew Lock and the rest of that unit, so that is the primary purpose in the rest of the season. Last December, the Broncos got some strong play from Lock and it raised all of the rest of the boats on the team, and they won four out of five games to boot. The Denver defense is good enough to get some more wins if the offense can show steady improvement and stop turning the ball over 2-3 times a game.
What do you expect to see offensively after last week’s insane situation?
I expect a lot of what we saw from the Broncos against the Dolphins. Drew Lock is going to have to take what the Kansas City defense gives him, unlike his last time out against them. He was pushing the ball downfield far too often, and Steve Spagnuolo was sending the exact kind of blitzes at Lock that he needed to to really rattle the young quarterback.
The Broncos’ offense is, collectively, very hungry to prove itself to the organization.
What’s the read on Vic Fangio at this stage?
The read on Vic Fangio at this particular stage is that he’s gotten a raw deal in 2020. His team has been fighting hard, even in rough circumstances. You can look all the way back to Jeff Driskel nearly leading the Broncos on an unlikely comeback trail in Pittsburgh against the Steelers to see how hard this team fights. They came off of a terrible loss to the Raiders to beat another playoff team — the Miami Dolphins — the following week.
Fangio’s got this team in a much better place than Vance Joseph would have. Injuries and youth on offense have really crushed the Broncos’ overall record this season, in my opinion, as well as the hilariously bad situation they were put in last week against the Saints.
Is there a feeling that the Broncos were good if not for injuries or has this season told a different story about the roster as constructed?
The Broncos, in my opinion, have one of their most talented rosters in the John Elway-era. Of course, the 2012-2015 teams were absolutely loaded, but this group is extremely talented on both sides of the ball. If the Broncos were able to trot out a fully healthy squad, it is painful to think of how good they could possibly be.
Even just having Courtland Sutton and Von Miller back with this team’s current state would be amazing, but it wasn’t to be. The Broncos can’t catch a break between injuries and COVID protocols, and I would argue that even if you just consider the injury and COVID issue with Drew Lock, the Broncos have probably dropped two games they would have otherwise won, no question.
Hopefully, they will take another stab at it in 2021 with the majority of this group returning, see if they can stay healthy, and hope that their player development can be more successful than it has been in the past.