The worst part about the Broncos’ performance is also one of the most encouraging

KANSAS CITY — The Kansas City Chiefs are an excellent football team, there’s no doubt about it.

But the Denver Broncos had a tougher opponent than the now 7-1 Chiefs on a balmy Sunday afternoon in the heart of barbecue country.

Themselves.

“So many penalties. Penalties all over the place. You can’t beat a good football team like that with those type of penalties,” a bewildered Von Miller said following the Broncos’ 30-23 loss on Sunday. “Unfortunate situation. Extremely tough loss.”

Derek Wolfe uttered nearly the exact same sentiment after the game.

Case Keenum chimed in, too.

“There were a lot of times where we had some good momentum, good starts to drives and [then] self-inflicted wounds. That’s near impossible to beat a team like the Chiefs when you’re hurting yourself like that,” the veteran quarterback said. “We’ll watch it and learn from it. It’s not an excuse, it’s a chance to get better.”

Vance Joseph preached a familiar message as well.

“When you’re playing a good football team it’s tough to beat them without having those penalties. With these penalties, it’s almost impossible,” the head coach said.

The talk after the game wasn’t about how Patrick Mahomes went off and was unstoppable — although that was certainly the case as he put up 303 passing yards, four touchdowns and a 125 passer rating — or how Sammy Watkins looked like Antonio Brown — hauling in eight passes for 107 yards and two touchdowns.

No. It was about how the Denver Broncos beat the Denver Broncos.

On the day, the Broncos racked up 10 penalties for a whopping 83 yards. That’s more yards than any receiver on the Broncos had.

“It killed us,” Joseph said with a pained and sickened look on his face. “We had three penalties that took away 20-plus yard plays, offensively. When you’re playing a good football team like this that can score points in bunches and you can’t have at least a chance to match the points because of penalties, it’s almost impossible to beat this team.”

To make things worse, it wasn’t just that the football field looked like a teenagers room with yellow laundry spewed all over it all game long, it was how and when the penalties happened.

In the first quarter, however, the Broncos managed the effects of their penalties well.

During Denver’s second defensive possession, Bradley Chubb jumped offsides and Bradley Roby committed a 17-yard pass interference penalty. But despite those penalties, the defense held the Chiefs to a field goal.

But during the next series, not only did the penalties begin to spiral out of control, they derailed the game.

On the first play of the second quarter, Emmanuel Sanders negated his own 22-yard catch with an offensive pass interference penalty.

Two plays later, a Connor McGovern holding penalty crossed off a 21-yard Phillip Lindsay run.

Without the penalties, both plays would have resulted in Denver deep in Kansas City territory at their 23-yard line.

Instead, Denver ended up close to the 50-yard line and was forced to try a 55-yard field goal, in which Brandon McManus hooked to the right — his first miss on the season.

This carried over into the second half, too.

In the third quarter, Shaq Barrett drew a roughing the passer penalty for hitting Mahomes in the face just after he threw the ball. Not only was it 15 additional yards for the Chiefs, but Kansas City turned right around and punched it into the end zone the very next play.

But that wasn’t it.

Later in the second half, Max Garcia joined the action negating a 23-yard Lindsay run with a hold of his own.

Lindsay had 74 offensive yards called back due to penalties by his teammates.

There are good penalties and there are bad penalties. On Sunday, the Broncos displayed much more of the latter.

“In my opinion, we controlled the game outside of the penalties,” Joseph said. “Once the penalties occurred, we got pushed out of scoring range, we got into third-and-long and they made their plays. Without those penalties, without being pushed back, we never get in those third-and-longs and we control the game. They never stopped us until we got the penalties.”

The first offensive play after Justin Simmons’ interception, Garett Bolles drew a false start penalty quickly slashing the Broncos momentum they had built up from the turnover.

“I was hoping for a lot more [from the offense] in the second half especially, but the penalties kept pushing us back,” a disappointed Joseph reiterated once again. “It’s unfortunate.”

This isn’t the first time, either as Denver had a mind-numbing 13 penalties for 120 yards against the Baltimore Ravens in Week 3.

“Are we playing smart football to beat the best teams? We’re not,” Joseph stated. “We played the Chiefs twice and it’s been good games. We’ve played the [Los Angeles] Rams and we’ve battled, but we have to play cleaner football to beat the best teams.”

Despite all of this — including their head coach admitting this is more than just a one-game issue — the Broncos don’t believe this is the type of football team they truly are.

“I think we’re beating ourselves a lot of times with penalties,” Wolfe said, stating the known. “We’re not an undisciplined football team, so that’s crazy to me.”

But it wasn’t just Wolfe that believed Denver isn’t an undisciplined football team.

“We’re getting so many penalties like we’re an undisciplined football team and we’re not,” Miller said, joining Wolfe in that belief. “It’s just extremely frustrating. It’s just frustrating.”

There was another notion that floated around Denver’s locker room following the game surrounding the penalties.

“It’s just bad calls at the end of the day,” Wolfe said, furious over the officials not calling illegal lineman downfield on many of Kansas City’s read-pass option plays.

“At the end of the day, we got to play better football. We can’t worry about the refs, regardless of how shitty of a job they do. They don’t get held accountable. Whatever. Me? I get fired if I play bad, but they don’t get fired if they make bad calls. You know what I mean?”

Joseph didn’t necessarily give the officials his stamp of approval either, calling into question whether calls were good or bad on many occasions.

“I’m not sure if it was good calls or bad calls, I’ll watch it and see. I told our guys “Whether they are good or bad, we can’t do it,” Joseph said. “We’ll go back and see the penalties and see how it shakes and move on from it. It’s over. We can’t fix it now.”

The encouraging part to all of this?

If — which is a big if at this point — Denver hadn’t “killed” themselves with penalties, in the words of Joseph, they would’ve given themselves a fighting chance at pulling a massive upset against the best team in the entire AFC in one of the toughest places to play on the road.

As Wolfe made crystal clear after the game there are no moral victories, but as the team is currently on pace for a 6-10 season, a potential bright spot is the team isn’t lacking in overall talent as it’s hung close against some of the NFL’s best.

Sitting at 3-5, the Broncos have had a tough schedule through the first half of the season, but many weeks they don’t need to look outside their own locker room to find their toughest opponent.

That was once again the case on Sunday in Kansas City.