Here's what made the Broncos' first 2020 game with fans painfully familiar

DENVER — Sometimes, you have a game that many will claim they witnessed in person — a number far greater than the actual attendance.

For example, the last time the Broncos defeated Tom Brady, 77,067 were on hand. Ten times as many will say they were there when Bradley Roby’s two-point conversion interception sealed the 20-18 win that sent the Broncos to Super Bowl 50.

Then you have Sunday.

After playing Week 1 in front of friends and family, he Broncos welcomed back fans for what is likely to be their last game against a Brady-led team. Officially, 5,226 spectators socially-distanced themselves around the lower two bowls of Empower Field at Mile High.

Maybe 52 of them will admit they were there for the 28-10 Broncos defeat. Most of them will likely be among the few handfuls of Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans who reveled in every short cross and every dime into tight coverage dropped by Brady.

He looked like himself. More importantly, looked like his old self, not the quarterback whose efficiency numbers over the last 12 months put him among the lower middle tier of starting quarterbacks.

Meanwhile, the Broncos looked like the team that has the NFL’s fifth-worst record since the start of the 2017 season: out-matched, out-fought and out-thought. They had little margin for error, and frittered that away in the first five minutes when Patrick O’Connor blasted past long snapper Jacob Bobenmoyer to block Sam Martin’s punt, leading to the first of Brady’s three touchdown passes three snaps later.

By the second quarter, the Bucs had all the points they would need. By the second half, they were on cruise control as the Broncos’ second-half possessions ended thusly: safety, punt, interception, punt, interception.

Sure, they didn’t have Drew Lock, Courtland Sutton, Phillip Lindsay and Ja’Wuan James. But that’s not an excuse for dropped passes and a failure to adjust protection to account for pre-snap positioning, particularly the Bucs’ movement of cornerback Antoine Winfield Jr. in position to blitz, from which he wreaked havoc.

“I know that we have a young group, and not even just on the offensive line, but on the offense as a whole. I think that we are not where we can be,” right guard Graham Glasgow said.

“Frankly that is a case for optimism, but at the same time the reality of the situation is that we are underperforming and we’re underachieving and that’s something that we need to work through as a group and as an offense.”

Underperforming.

Underachieving.

Not where we can be.

Everything Glasgow said is accurate. This isn’t the team the Broncos expected to field, but the same group pushed undefeated Pittsburgh to the brink of defeat seven days earlier.

Perhaps that is what was most disheartening. The same team that bubbled over with fight and fortitude last week showed neither of those qualities for long stretches after falling behind early against Tampa Bay.

As the clock mercifully wound into the fourth quarter, Fangio had seen enough of understudy-turned-starting-quarterback Jeff Driskel. As Brett Rypien drove the Broncos downfield in a vain attempt to make the final score respectable, a forlorn Driskel stood on the sideline, his helmet still on, hands on hips, the white No. 9 on his flame-orange jersey turned green by the repeated poundings into the mile-high grass.

“It is tough,” Driskel said when asked about being replaced by Rypien.

It was tough for Broncos fans to watch the entire game, too. After a summer in which training camp and the preseason was wiped out and the first game was played in a closed stadium, the anticipation of those few fans who got to attend was as as thick as the clouds that blanketed Denver for much of Sunday afternoon.

Early in Sunday’s game, enough of those fans stomped their feet on the steel risers beneath them to shake the press box just a little bit. It wasn’t like a playoff game, but for a moment, you could feel a taste of Rocky Mountain Thunder.

By the time the Bucs led 10-0 before the end of the first quarter, the storm had passed for good. The emptiness of the stands seemed to shroud the fans. By the second half, when Shelby Harris tried to rouse the spectators after one of his two sacks, there was little response.

In a year that has been unforgettable for all of the wrong reasons, those 5,000-plus in orange and blue absorbed one more football to the groin: a game for which they’d waited months without knowing it would ever happen becoming an afternoon they’d rather forget.

It’s not unlike the last three-plus seasons of Broncos football. The world and the roster changed. Sunday, the result remained the same.