Broncos season preview: Can Sean Payton finally turn things around in Denver?

The Denver Broncos are a new football team in 2024, but will they end up looking like the same old Denver Broncos over the past eight seasons? Let’s preview.

With Week 1 ready to roll on Thursday, I figured it would be a good time to do a quick season preview now that the active roster is set and game prep has begun. The 2024 Denver Broncos are going to be a much different team than a year ago. Since taking the reins last season, Head Coach Sean Payton has been aggressively rebuilding the roster. The team has gotten much younger and much faster, but are they any closer to contention than they were last year? Let’s find out.

2023 results

Record: 8-9 (third in AFC West)

Offensive rankings: 19th in points per game, 26th in total yards, 18th in rushing yards, 24th in passing yards, 17th in turnovers, and 27th in sacks allowed.

Defensive rankings: 27th in points per game, 29th in total yards, 30th in rushing cards, 24th in passing yards, 14th in turnovers, and 21st in sacks.

If we’re being honest, the Broncos were really a four to five win team last year that won eight games due to a very fluky seven game stretch where they won six of the seven games they played on the backs of a massive turnover margin. The turnovers were dropping right into their laps game after game and they were winning… but just barely at times. To hammer this point home, Denver had seven of their 11 total interceptions during that streak and out of their 15 fumble recoveries on the season they nabbed 11 of them in that span.

Talk about unsustainable. In fact, once those breaks stopped going Denver’s way, they closed out the season losing three of four and missing the playoffs. Russell Wilson was benched for the final two games and the rest was history.

2024 changes

Subtractions: Russell Wilson, Justin Simmons, Josey Jewell, Jerry Jeudy, Chris Manhertz, K’Wuan Williams, Cameron Fleming, Lloyd Cushenberry, Fabian Moreau, Dwayne Washington, Caden Sterns, Jonathan Harris, Mike Purcel, and Ben Neimann.

Key Additions: Bo Nix, Jonah Elliss, Troy Franklin, Kris Abrams-Draine, Audric Estimé, Devaughn Vele, Blake Watson, John Franklin-Myers, Zach Wilson, Levi Wallace, Cody Barton, Brandon Jones, Matt Peart, and Malcolm Roach.

While many in the major media look at Denver’s roster and think they have done little to improve in 2024, reality is a little more complicated. Last season, they entered Week 1 with the 8th oldest roster in the NFL, but this year they enter the season with the 10th youngest roster. As noted earlier, Payton is remaking this roster and they are getting younger and faster at every position. It could either result in a quick turnaround or more growing pains, but more on that later.

The biggest change happened at the quarterback position. Despite handing Russell Wilson a quarter of a billion dollar contract, they decided to move on from him after just two below-average seasons. They also took the biggest hit they could up front, so they could move on more easily in 2025 from a salary cap perspective. It was quite the surprising move and one that could fool people into thinking this team is in salary cap “hell”, which somehow they are not.

Reasons for pessimism

While I may be a Bronco fan, I am not blind to the realities that Payton and company face in turning around a franchise that has grown used to losing. As mentioned earlier, the biggest issue could be the lack of experience on the roster and the growing pains that could bring this season.

The defense has also looked good all through training camp, but outside of that five game win streak last year it was a pretty rough season for Vance Joseph. Can he turn things around in 2024? That is the big question mark for me and most Broncos fans as well. Giving up 10 touchdowns in a single game is not something one forgets easily. And it could have been more:

The youth on defense is looking a lot faster this season and that should help, but the inexperience of that youth is likely also going to bring some pain against elite quarterbacks like Patrick Mahomes. In short, Denver can’t rely on defense to win games anymore. It’s time for Payton’s offense to show us all what it can do or this is likely another sub-.500 football team in 2024.

Reasons for optimism

This is a brand new roster with a ton of optimism. The hype around Bo Nix is both real and promising. We’ve been through enough quarterbacks here in Denver over the last 10 years that this one feels real where most past hype around a quarterback was hype over potential without any real consistency in the day to day. Nix has been legit every single day so far and the maturity for a rookie is off the charts. I could see this young team rallying around him as a leader from Week 1.

People are starting to catch on to Bo Nix in Payton’s system too. Before their second preseason game against the Green Bay Packers both Chase Daniel and Dianna Russini had high praise for Nix.

“Everyone wants to say ‘Oh, he’s checking the ball down, he’s doing this’…,” Chase Daniel said in the video above. “These check downs are getting 10 plus yards!”

These are the kinds of things us Broncos fans are seeing from Nix every day that has us pretty optimistic for this season even though he is just a rookie.

It’s going to be tough road in the AFC West, though. The Kansas City Chiefs are always going to be a problem as long as they have Mahomes and who knows, maybe the Los Angeles Chargers will finally live up to expectations there. I’m not too worried about the Las Vegas Raiders in terms of AFC West playoff spots and haven’t been since the early 2000s. However, it is hard to talk trash about the Raiders when Denver has lost nine straight to them…

Ideally, we’ll see Denver rise and fight for that second spot in the division and shock everyone. However, even if 2024 ends up another .500-ish type season, we could come out of it feeling much more optimistic than we did last year. It will come down to how well Bo Nix and how that offense gels this year.

We’re ready to start Bo-lieving in this football team again in Denver.