Sean Payton is selling optimism ahead of his first training camp as head coach of the Denver Broncos, and he isn’t holding punches in the process.
He’s already made headlines for ripping the NFL’s gambling policy and taking a jab at the New York Jets in an interview with USA TODAY Sports’ Jarrett Bell, but it’s what he said about his own team that should be catching the attention of bettors.
Or rather, what he said about the Broncos of last season.
“It might have been one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the NFL. That’s how bad it was,” Payton said.
That much was obvious to anyone who forced themselves to sit through a game to watch the 5-12 Broncos last year, and former head coach Nathaniel Hackett paid the price when he was dismissed after just 15 games. But Russell Wilson also shared in some of the blame, and the doubt around how much he has left in the tank is following him into this season.
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Payton, however, believes Wilson has plenty left. He pointed to collective dysfunction as the biggest culprit for Denver’s struggles.
“There’s so much dirt around that,” Payton said. “There’s 20 dirty hands, for what was allowed, tolerated in the fricking training rooms, the meeting rooms. The offense. I don’t know Hackett. A lot of people had dirt on their hands. It wasn’t just Russell. He didn’t just flip. He still has it. This B.S. that he hit a wall? Shoot, they couldn’t get a play in. They were 29th in the league in pre-snap penalties on both sides of the ball.”
And that leads me back to last summer, when all the hype existed around how good the Broncos could be. Payton is a Super Bowl-winning coach who presumably has a enough job security to ride out a few bad seasons. He doesn’t need to sell unwarranted hype. He’s saying this stuff because he believes it. So, maybe we weren’t all crazy for thinking the Broncos could be good.
This year, they have +198 odds to make the playoffs at FanDuel, which is better than just nine teams. But while they aren’t likely to get in via winning the AFC West over the Kansas City Chiefs, Payton fully expects this team to get in.
“I’m going to be pissed off if this is not a playoff team,” Payton said.
It’s easy to understand why. Even with the offense’s struggles, the team only lost three games by more than one score, and the defense finished with a top-10 defensive DVOA rating. They upgraded the offensive line this offseason, so everything will presumably sit on Wilson’s shoulders once again. If Payton is right about his quarterback, the Broncos could find themselves back in the postseason for the first time since 2015.
