Why the Broncos are still stuck in a world of suck

DENVER — It was a lovely 11 days in Broncos Country.

The sun shone. It snowed. Then the sun returned and bathed Mile High in glorious warmth. The Broncos played two games in postcard-perfect conditions — one near Los Angeles, the other at home — and won both of them. The defense didn’t allow a touchdown. The offense did just enough, although it struggled to convert third downs. John Elway said that none of his players were on the trading block.

After those two wins, the Broncos prepared for a wounded Chiefs team that was without five starters, including its best interior pass rusher and the left side of their offensive line. Their players were confident. The chance to wiggle back into the AFC West race was there. A new world beckoned.

And then they returned to the world they thought they had escaped.

Through their own decisions, mistakes and shortcomings, they returned to the “world of suck” Thursday, suffering a 30-6 flogging that was not as close as the score indicated.

“That was a statement I regret making,” Broncos coach Vic Fangio said after the humiliation was complete.

And yet it remains accurate.

The Broncos’ furlough from NFL purgatory ended on a night when everything was in place for them to take a step back into relevance.

The home crowd throbbed with energy in the game’s opening moments. Kansas City seemed poised to hand the game to the Broncos, bailing them out on their first possession with two drive-resuscitating third-down penalties.

Then the Broncos started to hand the game back. An ill-fated two-point-conversion attempt after a Chiefs penalty kept the Broncos’ lead at 6-0 after their first-possession touchdown. Even Fangio wasn’t sold on the notion of the gambit.

“I’m not sure if I’ll do it the next time because I believe the two-point play needs to be basically ignored until fourth quarter or late in the third,” he said. “But for one yard to get an extra point I thought it was worth the gamble.”

Another gamble — a fake punt to start the second quarter — ended in spectacular failure, as Colby Wadman rolled left, looked ahead and saw four Chiefs, with intended receiver Devontae Booker bracketed by two of them. Wadman had to eat the football.

“I saw Booker; he was down there. It looked like I had a chance to dump it up over the top, because there was a defender kind of there in front of him, but then I kind of looked up again and it looked like he was running with him,” Wadman said.

“The fake punt was botched,” Fangio said. “We had a receiver that was trying to get out of the flat. He didn’t get out and kind of left our punter in a bind there.”

Moments later, the Chiefs were in a bind when Patrick Mahomes suffered a knee injury on a quarterback sneak. Their offense, poised to score from first-and-goal at the Denver 3-yard line, stalled and settled for a Harrison Butker field goal.

It all collapsed from there. Two snaps later, Anthony Hitchens drilled Joe Flacco, jarring the football loose. Reggie Ragland recovered for the touchdown, and the Broncos were back in the world they thought they’d escaped.

This “world of suck” featured every color on the Broncos’ rainbow of offensive misery.

To wit:

• The Broncos averaged 3.11 yards per pass play, their lowest single-game figure since the Nov. 15, 2015 loss to the Chiefs that started the current eight-game losing streak in the series.
• Joe Flacco was sacked eight times, the most in his career.
• With the failed fake punt counting as a sack, the Broncos surrendered nine sacks in total, matching an Oct. 2, 1983 game at Chicago for the most the team has ever allowed since sacks became an official statistic in 1982. (The nine sacks allowed remains the most for any game in Broncos history since a 10-sack day posted by the Raiders on Oct. 31, 1976.)
• Left tackle Garett Bolles was flagged three times for holding. One penalty was declined because the hold didn’t prevent a sack, anyway. He now has as many holding penalties (nine) in seven games this season as he did for the entire 2018 season.
• Finally, the Broncos’ per-game average dropped to 16 points this season. Their scoring average ranks 29th, 6.3 points below the league average. Their offensive-touchdowns-per-game average of 1.57 is also 29th, 0.83 touchdowns per game below average.

All that came against a struggling defense that came into Thursday allowing 406.2 yards per game and 24.0 points per game. Denver mustered 205 yards and just 6 points.

By the fourth quarter, only Broncos fans seemed in a hurry. Most of the 74,121 in attendance darted for the exits as though free iPads were being given away to the first 10,000 people to reach the gates.

Meanwhile, Denver offense, with their hopes of remaining in the AFC West down to the faint chance of a frantic fourth-quarter comeback, moved at a serene pace, as if on a stroll through the Botanic Gardens. On their first two possessions of the fourth quarter, they ran seven plays with the clock ticking prior to the snap. They huddled before some, and not before others, but they nevertheless used an average of 26.7 seconds of the 40-second play clock before snapping the football.

Remember when Elway talked about wanting a team that went down “kicking and screaming”? Never had that notion seemed so far away.

Instead, Denver’s offense looked like it was searching for the exit. No Broncos fans could be blamed for walking out early, especially since those that left missed the sight and sound of Chiefs fans doing the “Tomahawk Chop” in the Broncos’ home.

That, too, is part of the “world of suck.”

This world also means that the Broncos could succeed in what appears to be a daunting four-game stretch of the season and still be deep underwater by the time they emerge.

Three of the Broncos’ next four games are against teams with winning records — Indianapolis, Minnesota and Buffalo — with a Week 9 home game against the lagging Browns shoved in there.

Players reiterated that there was a lot of season remaining. And to go .500 against that slate would represent progress. It would include at least one road upset.

And yet being .500 in that quartet of contests means sitting at 4-7 when December begins. The last time the Broncos got to seven losses before the final quarter of the season — when they were 3-7 in 2017 — they shoved Paxton Lynch into the starting lineup to find out what he possessed.

The uncomfortable truths that arose during the Broncos’ 0-4 start were silenced for 11 days.

Thursday, they returned louder than ever.

The Chiefs were slumping, hurting and in the throes of their first real funk in years. For two-thirds of the game, they used a quarterback who hadn’t thrown a regular-season pass in 689 days — and who hadn’t thrown a practice pass to some of the players he targeted in the game.

And yet Kansas City came within two first-possession penalties of dealing the Broncos their first home shutout in their 60-season history.

Considering that the Broncos’ two wins came against the decimated Chargers and the offensively-challenged Titans, it served as a reminder that this Broncos team isn’t close to reaching the new world.

It remains mired in the “world of suck.”