It felt like the Broncos played a decent game... and that's the problem

 

Phillip Lindsay had 130 all-purpose yards and two touchdowns.

Courtland Sutton had five catches for 87 yards.

The Broncos defense only gave up one full-field touchdown drive, and it was on the first drive of the game.

Joe Flacco completed nearly 70 percent of his passes.

“I do see a lot of good out there,” said head coach Vic Fangio after the game.

And he’s not necessarily wrong. In a weird way, it felt like Denver played a pretty decent game in all phases. But that’s the problem.

This iteration of the Denver Broncos can play what feels like a solid game and only score 16 points while losing by double digits. What does that tell you? It tells you that they are a bad football team.

Their margin of error is non-existent. Denver’s three turnovers turned into 14 points, they lost by 11. A phantom holding call on Emmanuel Sanders cost the team four more points, effectively killing any momentum they had at the time.

Our expectations have fallen so far that the offense simply looking competent leaves us saying, “Not bad!”

And can you blame us? The Broncos have scored more than 24 points in just four of their last 40 games. They’ve now scored fewer than 20 points in seven straight.  They’re averaging 15.3 points per game through three contests this season.

Seeing them shoot themselves in the foot with turnovers is somehow better than seeing them not have a weapon at all.

The offense is so bad that even the defense blames their problems on the offense.

“We really haven’t had the lead or the long third downs to pin our ears back and get going,” defensive coordinator Ed Donatell said this week when asked why the team hasn’t had any sacks yet.

“Interceptions come in bunches, and we have been playing behind,” Chris Harris Jr. said on Sunday of why the team has yet to create a turnover. “Teams play smarter and take less risks when that happens.”

That’s been a constant narrative coming for the last couple years—the offense needs a lead to get the defense going. For a team that’s built upon the defense and asks the offense to simply not screw it up, needing the offense to serve as a spark plug for the defense seems like a problem.

What we have here is a flawed design. The Broncos are getting the opposite of complementary football. On Sunday, without their kickstart, the Denver defense let the Packers offense grab hold of the game, allowing their ‘D’ to tee off on Joe Flacco to the tune of six sacks.

So that’s what it looks like. Maybe all you need is an Aaron Rodgers to execute this plan.

The result of all this non-complementary football is zero wins, three highly frustrating losses and a tunnel as dark as ink.

Not only does this team need to rebuild, but they need to re-evaluate their formula, because it has become abundantly clear over the past three years that good defense and bad offense leads to a whole bunch of games where the Broncos are in the teens, and their opponents are in the twenties.

It was only six years ago that Peyton Manning and the boys were booed by the home crowd as they trotted into the halftime locker room having only scored 14 points against the Jaguars.

Score 14 points in the first half against the Jaguars next week, and they just may get a standing ovation.