The 2024 Denver Broncos are young, but they’re resilient and that’s something head coach Sean Payton made clear after the team’s heartbreaking loss on Sunday to the Kansas City Chiefs.
Denver Broncos young team ‘resilient’ according to Sean Payton
This year’s Denver Broncos team had a lot of questions surrounding it during the offseason after the team made big changes, including moving on from Russell Wilson and veteran fan-favorite Justin Simmons. A lot of those questions had to do with leadership and who would step up from there.
Rookie quarterback Bo Nix has taken on a great deal of the leadership on offense alongside Courtland Sutton, Mike McGlinchey, and Quinn Meinerz. Defensively, new voices have emerged, like Patrick Surtain II, Nik Bonitto, Jonathon Cooper, and P.J. Locke, from a leadership standpoint.
Sunday’s loss was a gut punch; it was devastating, brutal, heartbreaking, you name it. Broncos head coach Sean Payton firmly believes that this team will respond to it as the season progresses.
“The sky is not falling,” Payton said. “There’s a lot ahead obviously. We have [seven] games left. I think this team has been resilient. The sky isn’t falling relative to our season and the schedule. We’re sitting here at 5-5. Obviously we’d have loved to have been 6-4 with a win yesterday, but the focus [is] just quickly to the next game. I like the leadership on this team—someone asked about that yesterday. It’s an entirely different team than a year ago. It’s tough—it’s tough mentally and physically. We have to have a good week of practice here coming up for Atlanta. Overcoming a tough loss…listen, when you talk to the players about that, you tell them, ‘Hey, that’s going to happen periodically in your career.’ You hope that you have a few of those games that maybe you thought that you didn’t deserve to win that you did win. You have to bounce back either way.”
And that’s something he believes the team will do. Certainly, we saw them answer the call on Sunday, nearly knocking off the defending champs, who haven’t lost a game since Christmas of last year after Denver took a thumping in Baltimore just last weekend.
6-4 certainly would feel better right now than 5-5, but the AFC Playoff picture still has the Broncos in a good position, especially with losses on Sunday by the New York Jets, Indianapolis Colts, and the Cincinnati Bengals on Thursday Night. It gives Denver some more breathing room, but they’ll need to take care of business these next three weeks before their bye week, where they’ll take on the Atlanta Falcons at home, travel to Vegas to take on the Raiders and come back home on Monday Night Football against the Cleveland Browns.
This young team has already exceeded many expectations and is still in a position to exceed them even more, and their resiliency factor will be what we watch for.
