Watch: BK breaks down the win on FOX31
Jaylen Waddle is the real deal. When the Broncos made the trade for the former No. 6 overall pick just before the draft, some pundits and fans alike, thought Denver was giving up a lot of draft capital (a 1st and a 3rd round pick) for a player, who had shown flashes of brilliance, but didn’t necessarily sustain that high level during his 5 seasons with the Dolphins. In the season opener in KC, the former Alabama star had just 1 catch for 2 yards. Things weren’t looking much brighter in the home opener against Jacksonville, as the Broncos offense only mustered 3 points in the 1st half. However, in the 2nd half, the script flipped, Waddle hauled in a 49-yard bomb from QB Bo Nix, that setup up the team’s 1st touchdown of the day, a 1-yard toss from Nix to tight end Nate Adkins.
On the day Waddle finished with 8 grabs for 138 yards.
From the moment Waddle arrived in Denver, he was the first thing anyone associated with the team would tell me, it wasn’t just his former Crimson Tide rooomate, Pat Surtain Jr., the team’s best player. To a person, regardless of side of the ball they worked on, or front office, Waddle impressed. His work ethic, his route running, and his demeanor, all had the entire organization buzzing. Head Coach Sean Payton, who doesn’t often crack a smile, lit up a bit when talking about Waddle following Sunday’s win, “He’s kind of infectious,” said. “You guys have covered him now. He doesn’t have bad days. He likes football. He’s a real good teammate. We needed it. It was good for our offense.”
Following suite, Nix, who started slow, but finished the day 22-31, 288 yards passing, 1 TD and 1 interception, echoed what his head coach said about Number 17. “Jaylen has a really positive outlook on football, he has a positive outlook on life,” Nix said, “He hasn’t necessarily had the success as of late that he wants in his career by wins and losses perspective but now he’s got a new opportunity and he’s making the most of it and he knows he’s around really good players and a really good team and I think he enjoys that and he kind of has a fresh wind about him. He’s had a great career and he’s had—from college to the pros—he’s been an elite receiver himself for a while. So it’s really good to have no only his play on the field but his leadership capabilities along with Courtland (Sutton) in that room.”
It’s clear Waddle unlocks things for the rest of the offense. He demands attention, which is a good thing for every skill player to find space to operate, or have their number called, with often times more than 1 defender covering, or at least keeping an eye on Waddle. His presence allowed Nix to spread the ball around, and connect with 8 other pass catchers, in the 20-13 win.
The Defense reminded everyone that they are one of the best units in football and that Monday night’s historically bad tackling performance in KC was a fluke. All week long, instead of talking about their vaunted pass rush, or PS2 being the best cornerback in football, all the heard was how bad that tackling was, and how concerned everyone was that the defense had fallen off. Payton said they restructured practice Thursday with a renewed emphasis on tackling. Defensive Coordinator Vance Joseph said “it made me sick to my stomach,” when he looked at the game film. Well, what a difference a week(6 days) makes. Denver completely shut down the Jaguars offense. QB Trevor Lawrence threw for 279 yards, 3 TDs and no picks in December in Denver. He threw 4 TDs and no picks against the Browns in Week 1. In fact, he had only given the ball away 1 time in his last regular season games. Sunday, the Broncos D had other ideas. They hit Lawrence early and often, including a strip sack in the 1st quarter courtesy of all-pro pass rusher Nik Bonitto that was negated by an illegal contact penalty whistled on cornerback Riley Moss. But, Moss got the last laugh, as he intercepted Lawrence in the 3rd quarter, and that completely shifted the Momentum for the Broncos, as it led to their 1st TD, and the Jaguars had no answers for the league’s top pass rush the rest of the game. Surtain owned his defense’s poor showing in the locker room in Kansas City saying maybe they needed some “humble pie,” which was a reference to everyone touting them returning 10 of 11 starters from a group that led the NFL in sacks for two straight seasons. “Holding them to three points(in the 2nd half) is always a big-time thing in the game, and it’s very evident if they don’t score, they don’t the majority of the time win,” Surtain said. “So I think that was very evident on what we did, and we made game-changing plays. Shoutout to Riley (Moss)for making that interception. We came through clutch on third down, and I think that is where it counts.”
On the day, Lawrence was held under 200 yards passing, 198, to be exact. And the Jags run game was shut down as well, mustering just 95 yards on the ground.
“We knew we would be able to do that,” linebacker Alex Singleton said in the locker room postgame, “and it was just good to see everybody come together on defense. It starts with ‘VJ’ (Vance Joseph), then the other coaches down to us. It’s just everyone believing in what we’re running. We made some adjustments early in that second quarter, and we’re able to pretty much shut them out (in the second half).”
I didn’t go 17-for-17, but following nearly every game last year, I would ask Nix about the defense, especially because they kept his team in so many games, and set the table for him to orchestrate so many late comebacks. Understandably, I did not ask the signal caller about his defense following the Chiefs game, but I was more than ready to ask him what he thought of his counterparts following Sunday’s win. “They played outstanding; they played great,” Nix said. “When everybody wanted to throw them to the wolves this week, they just responded against the team that sort of showed us our weaknesses last year and we responded really well against a really good offense. They have explosive play makers, they have a great system, they have a great quarterback and our defense played lights out and they gave up a little bit, but against a good team you’re going to, but they just kept on battling. They’re at the end of the game when it’s important and you’ve got to get a stop, they just kept getting stops. So our defense is just fine.”
Davis Webb is, understandably, a work in progress. This entire offensive play-calling situation is not common. In fact, one of the few examples of a Hall of Fame Head Coach/Play-caller handing the reigns over to a 1st time play-caller, was when Gary Kubiak took over those responsibilities for Mike Shanahan. The parallels are similar in that you are in the same city, and had a Super Bowl caliber team, and both play callers were career backups, that both head coaches felt strongly would become head coaches.
But the timing can certainly leave some observers scratching their head, because you have a team that was likely a QB’s broken ankle away from a trip to the Super Bowl last year. And unlinke in the late 90s, the aforementioned quarterback, is going into year 3. Whereas, John Elway was already being fitted for a gold jacket even before they won 2 Super Bowls.
Nonetheless, there were likely growing pains that are common in any new role. And if we go back and look at Sean Payton’s first two games as a play-caller with the Giants, he certainly wasn’t fully formed.
The thing with Webb is, and he will tell you this, as he’s told me, he’s “different.”
He’s likely the first player to ever go from starting the final game of regular season for an NFL team, as he did for the Giants in 2022, to becoming and NFL team’s quarterbacks coach, as he was named in 2023.
After his first season as an NFL coach, he went out of his way at the combine to meet any defensive coaches he thought might have a future as a head coach, so that he was in position to potentially call players for side coach, if they ever got a head gig. After interviewing for the head coaching job himself in Buffalo in Las Vegas this past off-season there were a number of new head coaches very interested in hiring Webb to call place including Super Bowl Champion John Harbaugh, who was taking over in New York.
As Payton has said repeatedly making this change wasn’t something he was going to do no matter what, and in a world where Webb gets a head coaching job perhaps as early as next season, don’t be surprised if Payton takes the play-calling responsibilities back.
The nature of fanship is often accompanied with impatience, but those and Broncos country need to probably exhibit a little more patience, and know that Sean Payton believes in Davis Webb, just as early in his career, Hall of Fame Coach Bill Parcells believed in Payton.
It’s clear that that Broncos Head Coach was happy with what he saw from his rookie play-caller following his 2nd game. “For every one of us—I mean this…Sometimes a coach will say, ‘We all,’ but there were a lot of things we all didn’t do well last week, starting with me, defensively, all of that,” Payton said, “So it’s tough to go back to work, tough for Davis. He responded the right way, the meetings, how he handled the schedule, and then the first half and all of that. You keep grinding at it. Things really picked up in the second half, and that was important. There was a certain way we wanted to play this game. I’m pleased that we were able to play that game, especially in the second half. We played it that way defensively in the first half. We had opportunities, and we came away with just one field goal. The second half was much better.”
