With the third youngest roster in the NFL this season, the Denver Broncos are a team that has leaned heavily on a handful of younger players, and it’s helped get them into the NFL Playoffs for the first time in a long time. Young and Hungry summarizes the 2024 Broncos.
Denver Broncos ‘Young and Hungry’ approach could help in the NFL Playoffs
Going back to training camp, Broncos head coach Sean Payton made mention of how he viewed his team based on what he had seen so far. He described them as young and hungry, and that mantra has stuck throughout the entire season.
After starting off 0-2, it would have been easy for a young team to hang their heads and pack it in, a position the Broncos have been in before during their playoff drought, but their fight after their negative start turned on a light inside of the minds of every player — and that light was belief.
“I think, it wasn’t just from the draft or just from free agency, but young and hungry can sometimes be pretty dangerous and I think that, you know, most NFL seasons are filled with highs and lows,” Payton said. “Do you have the grit and the fortitude to weather the lows? [Our record was] 0-2 and going on the road, we got to get a win in Tampa. That was a that was an important stretch, that East Coast swing. When you can have some success, then you can have some confidence. Then it becomes something that can repeat itself. It’s hard to have confidence if you haven’t really demonstrated it yet, and so we began to see young players thrive in certain positions, some veterans, some key veterans, come in and fill in roles for us. So it was a number of different transactions that worked out. I’m proud of them.”
Credit to Payton and his staff, this team has kept their heads down all season long and haven’t really concerned themselves with the outside noise, but they kept receipts and were not only focused on improving and growing together, but also proving a lot of doubters wrong.
“Obviously a lot of people were doubting us, but we knew what we had the minute we came here for OTAs,” Broncos defensive end Zach Allen said. “That first OTA practice, you could tell that we are a special group. We got a really mature group and guys that—we just don’t let anything on the outside come in. There were definitely points in the season, first Kansas City, last week, Chargers, it really could have ended a team’s season or cut the locker room. It made us closer and stronger. The fact that we’re in this position says a lot, and we’re excited about it.”
Riley Moss highlighted the grit factor this team has. “It’s just grit,” Moss said postgame. “We have a bunch of guys that are competitors and don’t like to lose, and that’s what’s been driving us the entire season from the jump. It’s going to be a good test next week, and we’ll be ready for it.”
From the veterans to the younger players, buy-in wasn’t hard, and the leadership demonstrated by Payton and the staff down to Bo Nix as a rookie QB — that belief happened early on, and it’s a big reason why the team is in the position of going to the playoffs.
“We have a really good team,” Nix said. “We have a lot of guys that are all competitive, all work hard, they’re close knit. We’ve got a lot of good relationships on this team that you can really feel and watch the love for one another that we’ve got. We go out there and play for each other, the guy next to us. There’s not a lot of prima donnas on the team. [There are] not a lot of issue makers. We all have one goal, and that’s to go out there and win for our team. It’s funny; we kind of doubled what a lot of people thought we were going to win. [That] goes to show that [there was] a lot of talk preseason, but you don’t have to be what people say you’re going to be.”
The line was 5.5, and Denver finished with 10. Nix is absolutely right — the 2024 Denver Broncos were not anything close to what people said they’d be and it’s a good thing they didn’t listen.
