Will the Denver Broncos finally have a winning season in 2023?
That is the question.
This is the debate.
The Situation
The oddsmakers appear to be a fan of the Broncos’ offseason. After finishing 5-12 last year, DraftKings Sportsbook has set the Broncos’ initial win total for the 2023 season at 8.5.
Not only did the Broncos hire Sean Payton to lead their team, they also spent the most money of any team in free agency… and it wasn’t even close.
Will the significant resources dumped into the team over the past few months lead to four additional wins for the Broncos in 2023? Will Denver have more than 8.5 wins this year or less?
The Cases
The Broncos WILL have nine or more wins this year — Zac
First off, a three- or four-game improvement from last year—which the oddsmakers are indicating will be the case by setting the line at 8.5 wins—would be a significant improvement in just one year. So if the Broncos get close to this number, then they are trending in the right direction and all of Broncos Country should feel great.
But if they hit the over, it will be a massive success.
This all comes down to if Sean Payton can “fix” Russell Wilson. And if anyone in the NFL can, Payton has the best chance of doing so.
In 12 of Payton’s 15 seasons with the Saints, New Orleans had a top 10 scoring offense. The Broncos, on the other hand, haven’t had a top 10 scoring offense since Peyton Manning’s second-to-last season with the team in 2014. It’s been nearly a decade since Denver’s offense has been a juggernaut.
Although on the surface it would appear Payton might need a few years to get Denver’s offense turned around, he has proved in the past that he can do it in one offseason.
When Payton joined the Saints, he inherited the second-worst scoring offense in the NFL. His first year there, New Orleans was instantly a top five scoring offense. This time around, Payton is taking over the worst scoring offense in the NFL. If he can have them sniffing the top 10—even less of an ask of what he did in New Orleans—the Broncos will be a double-digit win team, let alone get nine wins.
The key to all of it will be Wilson’s play. At the end of the season, when Justin Outten called games to Wilson’s strengths, No. 3 had arguably the best two-game stretch of his season, racking up six total touchdowns to only two interceptions along with a 96.5 passer rating and 275 total yards a game. There’s no reason to believe Payton won’t be able to get as much out of Wilson as Outten was able to, if not significantly more.
It’s not out of the question to imagine Payton turning Wilson into an elite quarterback again. But if Denver’s head coach is able to simply make Wilson slightly above average this year, the Broncos will absolutely be at least a nine-win team.
History points that Payton will be up to the task.
The Broncos will NOT have nine or more wins this year — Henry
Don’t let months of trying to forget the 2022 Broncos season allow you to believe they’ll be just fine in 2023.
Only a handful of seasons have been worse than the Broncos produced in 2022. In 2010, Josh McDaniels bottomed out with four wins. In 1982, Steve DeBerg quarterbacked the Broncos to two wins in the season between Craig Morton and John Elway in a nine-game season. In 1971, Lou Saban stepped down as head coach after a 2-6-1 start and the Broncos went on to win two of their final five games.
Those are the three most recent seasons in which the Broncos didn’t match the five wins they produced in 2022.
The Broncos were so bad that they fired Nathaniel Hackett before the end of his first season in charge, a remarkably rare move. Only three other NFL coaches have been fired before the end of their first season; Urban Meyer in 2021, Pete McCulley in 1978 and John Whelchel in 1949.
Getting rid of their historcially bad head coach will help the Broncos out, but as new head coach Sean Payton said last week, “there’s a lot of people with dirt on their hands.”
It’s easy to see why the Broncos could improve in 2023—they upgraded their head coach, they spent big money in free agency, they could dodge the injuries that cost them at least three wins last year—but the question marks haven’t left the organization.
Russell Wilson returning to Pro Bowl form is a 50-50 proposition at best. The high-end talents on the roster are few and far between. The injury luck could improve, but the Broncos have finished the season among the top six in cap space on injured reserve in each of the last five years, and bucking that trend might not be easy. Plus, Javonte Williams is dealing with a complicated knee injury that starts them off on the wrong track.
Could the Broncos find a way past .500? Absolutely.
After six straight seasons of seven or fewer wins, I’m skeptical that this team is the one that will finally post a winning record. Call me crazy.
