There is a palpable irony that accompanies Broncos head coach Sean Payton’s relationship with the onside kick.
After all, the Sean Payton Era in Denver began with a surprise (very surprising, actually) onside kick. At the time, Payton’s maiden maneuver in Denver was met with a reaction that ranged from a chuckle to a shoulder shrug; it was fun but perhaps desperate. However, when an onside kick was practically required – just as it appeared to be last Sunday against the Steelers – Payton surprisingly opted for a Will Lutz kickoff that resulted in a touchback; it didn’t require a degree in mathematics to see that the seconds remaining, paired with the Broncos lack of timeouts, wouldn’t make an equation that could yield a win.
Why anyone is talking about Payton’s preference for kickoffs is surprising in and of itself. Afterall, Payton is widely considered an offensive guru, yet his offense hasn’t produced much of late. To be fair, the coach isn’t exactly fielding a roster filled with Pro Bowlers. But neither play calling nor playmakers have much to do with Payton’s game management – or lack thereof lately.
Payton, who has a Super Bowl win on his resumé, arrived in Denver highly respected. Since then, he’s often – sometimes subtly, sometimes not so much – reminded those questioning him that he’s a man who deserves the benefit of the doubt. But after moving on from Russell Wilson, Payton is suddenly 1-3 with plenty of head scratching decisions along the way.
With that as a backdrop, we’d like to call a timeout in our ongoing evaluation of Nix and turn our attention to assessing the man responsible for drafting and coaching him.
Cody Roark
I think what we’ve seen so far through the first two weeks is a combination of both Payton’s problems and Nix’s newness. Bo Nix hasn’t gotten off the start he or anybody has hoped for, but he also has the third most passing attempts in the league through two weeks. The lack of run game is a major negative to Denver’s offense, which, by the way, hasn’t looked any different than it did last year. I was not a fan of the decision to go for it on 4th down last week – that killed an opportunity to get at least three points –and the decision to not go for the onside kick late. A lot of last week felt like waving the white flag. There are many unclean hands in the operation.
Dan Mohrmann
I don’t know if the in-game decisions lost the game for the Broncos, but they definitely removed winning from the realm of possibility. Anyone who has played three games of Madden in one sitting knows that making a 13-point game a 10-point game with 10 minutes left does you no good and your chances of going the length of the field with 8 seconds left are much worse than recovering an onside kick. We always hear football savvy analysts tell us that it’s really a simple game and Payton has overcomplicated things two weeks in. There’s time to recover, but if we keep banging our head against the wall out of insanity, we’re just getting back to the Nathaniel Hackett nonsense from two years ago.
Shawn Drotar
In the four games that quarterback pariah Russell Wilson hasn’t started, Sean Payton’s Broncos offense has been far less effective; scoring only 14 points per game (under Wilson, Denver averaged 22). Some of that is due to rookie Bo Nix – and journeyman backup Jarrett Stidham before him – but it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore the common denominator: Payton. The longtime head coach’s play calls are chock-full of verbiage that even he hasn’t seemed to be able to pare down and expecting a rookie quarterback to receive the play in his headset, relay it in the huddle and get to line of scrimmage with enough time to read the defense is probably too much to ask. The result has been a disastrous pair of games with rushed snaps, procedural penalties, and (according to Pro Football Focus, at least) the NFL’s worst offense. Ask yourself which is more likely: That every single player on the Broncos’ offense is simultaneously underachieving, or that the person calling the offense is?