Sean Payton and the Denver Broncos, a Match Made in Delusional Heaven

Sean Payton, famed offensive football guru, won a Super Bowl over Peyton Manning fourteen years ago, and he has not made it back since. Granted, if the worst non-call in NFL history had not happened, Sean Payton in 2018 likely would have had the opportunity to join the large fraternity of coaches who have lost Super Bowls to Tom Brady. Despite his illustrious status as an NFL legend, he has won AP Coach of the Year just one time in his career, his first in New Orleans in 2006.

The point here is that most of Sean Payton’s success as a top tier NFL head coach came over a decade ago. I wrote in The Quarterbacks Are Bad! last week how that 2018 Monday Night Football game between the Chiefs and Rams with over 100 combined points was a watershed moment for the league, but not like we all thought at the time. Defenses learned how to take away big plays afterwards, and it seemingly broke half of the NFL’s offenses.

Payton still had good teams the following two years with a combined 25-7 record, but every year since 2018, Payton has won less games than he has the season before. After “retiring” from football in 2021, the Denver Broncos, a delusional loser franchise who perpetually thinks they are one year away from contending for a Super Bowl, traded a first-round pick for Payton in 2023.

Sean Payton’s Broncos tenure has been a disaster so far. His attempt to fix former all-pro quarterback Russell Wilson last year didn’t fare much better than Nathaniel Hackett’s historic Hindenburg-esque reign the previous year that Payton said “might have been one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the NFL.” So far this season in year 2 of Sean Payton, the Broncos offense is one of the worst I can remember watching in my 37 years as a Denver football fan, and it has made me pine for the competence of Nathaniel Hackett forgetting that the play clock exists.

Payton has bet the farm on two-yard pass enthusiast Bo Nix as his rookie quarterback to mold, and so far, that decision looks calamitous. Nix didn’t throw a ball that traveled in the air past the first-down marker until the third quarter yesterday.

But Nix was not the Broncos’ biggest problem against Pittsburgh on Sunday, which is really saying something. Sean Payton coached the worst second half of an NFL football game that I have seen in a long time, completely abandoning the run and leaving his drowning rookie quarterback alone to fend for himself while making game management decisions that any six-year-old with an Xbox knows are about as dumb as it gets.

With 12:38 left in the 4th quarter and trailing 13-0, Payton made the correct (and obvious) decision to go for it on 4th and 6 from Pittsburgh’s 42-yard line and got the first down. Faced with 4th and 6 again later in the drive, this time from Pittsburgh’s 16, Payton sent the field goal unit out to take a two possession game down to a…two possession game.

But luckily for Sean Payton, the Broncos defense bailed him out and forced a quick 3 and out, potentially stealing another possession for Denver. Payton’s incompetent offense gave it right back after a dropped pass and a holding penalty, and Pittsburgh punted it back again in what was a summary of that terrible football game that no one should have watched.

Payton burned his second timeout to save some clock with just under five minutes remaining down 13-3, seemingly confirming that he was committed to either trying to score quickly or ensuring that the game would come down to an onside kick.

Neither of those things happened.

As the Steelers sat back in a zone, inviting the Broncos to dink and dunk their way down the field and chew up as much clock as possible, Sean Payton decided that Pittsburgh’s preferred strategy was also his own, and per ESPN’s drive chart, his quarterback passed “short right” then scrambled for two yards, then threw a ball “short middle” then “short middle” then “short left” then scrambled for five yards, then “short right” and finally “short right,” resulting in the Broncos kicking a 29 yard field goal with 1:54 remaining.

Anyone who has ever watched a football game knows the deal in this situation. The play clock is 40 seconds long, and if you can only stop it once, that’s about 80 seconds of 116 remaining that the other team can waste (not including the time it takes to actually run plays). If you want to have any hope of scoring a touchdown, you need to try an onside kick because you won’t get the ball back with any real time left to do it.

But in a flabbergasting move that the CBS announcers could not even explain, Payton kicked it back to Pittsburgh, conceding any chance to win the game on anything but a total fluke. There is no excuse for this level of incompetence from someone as accomplished as Sean Payton. I never saw Nathaniel Hackett do anything as dumb as those last five minutes yesterday and that man is a pioneer in stupid football decisions.

Sean Payton was asked about the decision to kick it away after the game, and he said “We felt like our odds—the long run on third down prior to them punting took about six seconds, we were hopeful to have two or three plays before we went to the endzone—it was just…weighing the odds versus recovering an onside kick or you know, getting the ball back with twenty-six seconds, we chose to kick off.”

The Broncos got it back on their own 19-yard line with nine seconds left.

Even if you add the six seconds Payton made a semi-excuse about, his clock calculations were still off by almost double, and he thought that going 80 yards in 26 seconds with one of the NFL’s worst offenses was likelier than the five percent league-wide recovery rate on onside kicks. I would throw my own Xbox controller out the window if I made choices like that to cost me a game against a six-year-old gamer with better game management skills than Sean Payton.

Sean Payton is fighting for his reputation, trying to prove that he is more than just the bronze medal winner from the NFL’s Brady-Manning era, and as it currently stands, I don’t see much difference between him and Nathaniel Hackett. It’s agonizing for my football soul to watch, but deep down I know this delusional franchise and head coach deserve each other.