In little flashes this fall, Denver fans have glimpsed the Russell Wilson Magic Show.
The chest-pass flip to Melvin Gordon while getting taken down against San Francisco.
The wheelin’-and-dealin’, rush-avoidin’, third-down improvin’ 80-yard touchdown drive against the 49ers to take the lead for good in the fourth quarter.
The 11-of-12 start against the Raiders, good for 149 yards, a pair of touchdowns and what felt like a signal that, hey, this thing is about to thunder downhill.
Except it didn’t.
Las Vegas put the clamps on Denver in the second half and rolled to a two-score victory, then Wilson and the Broncos’ offense turned in by far their worst performance of the season in an overtime loss to Indianapolis.
The preponderance of evidence through five games of the Wilson era in Denver is problematic rather than promising.
Broncos fans, talking heads and anybody who tuned in to Amazon Prime to watch the disaster against the Colts find themselves wondering not whether this team will compete for home playoff games but rather, what the heck is wrong with the offense? Is it Wilson? Is it his shoulder injury? Is age starting to show through after a decade in the league? Does Wilson have the talent around him he thought he did when he arrived in Denver? Is it as simple as an offense working its way through the tough part of a steep learning curve?
The consensus: A little bit of a lot of issues are dragging down the Broncos. Denver is 31st in scoring offense at 15 points per game. Wilson played the first four games to a solid but not elite quarterback rating of 91.1 but is down to a career-low 82.8 after a pair of fourth-quarter interceptions opened the Empower Field escape hatch for the Colts.
Pro Football Reference data suggests that Wilson’s accuracy is on par with his career numbers and that drops — a 9.2% rate, nearly double any of his final four seasons in Seattle — are playing a part in the lack of production, along with penalties and a lack of a consistent running game.
The question at hand, then, is whether that weight can be cut free or is the whole ship headed for the bottom of the lake. What factors can be corrected or improved upon and which ones are the Broncos stuck with? An issue-by-issue look can help chart Denver’s potential courses, but the current status is clear.
“We obviously thought it was going to be further along than it is right now, but itap not,” Denver head coach Nathaniel Hackett told The Denver Post this past week. “We have to be able to look at everything, learn from it, correct it and make sure we’re getting everybody on the same page to be successful.”
The Injury
Wilson didn’t use his right lat muscle injury as an excuse for his poor performance against Indy, though Timothy Gibson, an orthopedic surgeon at MemorialCare Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, Calif., said the relatively uncommon injury for quarterbacks could have an impact because it’s “a powerful rotator of the shoulder.”
Wilson threw all week in practice and said the shoulder is getting “better every day.” His velocity did not look noticeably diminished against either Las Vegas or Indianapolis, suggesting the question is more about pain tolerance than anything else going forward.
“You can’t really measure it. You can MRI it, you can image it, you can ultrasound it, but you’re not likely to see much image-wise,” Gibson said. “Itap really his feeling of how he’s doing.”
The Surrounding Talent
Wilson spoke highly of Denver’s skill talent from the day he was traded here in March. The Broncos have since taken some hits on the injury front — wide receiver Tim Patrick was lost for the season during training camp and running back Javonte Williams for the year against the Raiders — but at times it is still easy to wonder who besides wide receiver Courtland Sutton can be counted on to make a big play.
“Everybody talked about the talent there when Russell got there and I just remember thinking to myself, ‘I don’t really know what they have,’” NFL Network analyst and Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner told The Denver Post this past week. “I know they’re touted as good, young, talented players, but what does that mean? I haven’t seen that come to fruition at the NFL level where I’m really sure that these guys are great.”
The Broncos rank near the top of the league in explosive plays, but against Indianapolis Wilson went 2-of-15 on throws of 10-plus air yards, according to the league’s Next Gen Stats. Certainly Wilson deserves some of the blame for a poor outing and he missed some open targets, but at other times a receiver or a tight end had a chance at a play and didn’t make it.
Warner identified a third-down, red zone seam ball to Jerry Jeudy, in particular, as interesting because Wilson could have gone over the middle to tight end Eric Saubert but instead pressed the ball up the field to Jeudy, who was trailed by a linebacker. He had a specific Buffalo Bills play in mind when he saw it.
“You’ll see (Bills quarterback) Josh Allen do the exact same thing. Exact same coverage, exact same look,” Warner said. “He should have thrown it underneath and he throws it to the guy down the seam and the guy down the seam catches it in between three defenders and they get 25 yards on the play. … When you’re comfortable with guys, those things lead to big plays.
“(Denver is) a little disconnected, they’re unsure — maybe everybody, but it looks like Russell is unsure of what guys are going to do and itap leading to him looking really, really bad because he’s trying to put himself in the mind of guys and they’re not doing what he expects him to do.”
The Age
Wilson, 33, has used his legs more in Denver’s past three games. He’s got 14 carries for 68 yards and a touchdown in that span after just three carries for two yards in the first two weeks. The Broncos were clearly hoping that wouldn’t be required, but he’s been mostly effective outside the pocket and has generated a couple of key first downs late in games with his legs.
Chargers head coach Brandon Staley, preparing for Wilson and the Broncos this week, said he doesn’t see a physically diminished player at all.
“He’s the same quarterback. That player is still there,” Staley said. “That competitor is still there. … He’s just new to the team. This isn’t uncommon to the quarterback position.”
The Transition
Time, though, does tick for all players, and one of the questions facing the Broncos at this juncture is what type of player they want Wilson to be over the course of his seven years under contract compared to the player that he is right now.
“I went back and watched Russell this offseason because there’s a little bit of a narrative out there that he’s a great playmaker, not necessarily a great quarterback,” Warner said. “I don’t know still to this day if he’s a great pocket passer, but when I went back and watched, I was more impressed just with the throws that he made and the decisions he made.
“He’s a really good quarterback.”
The route to the kind of longevity Wilson hopes to achieve in the NFL — he’s talked about playing another decade — is playing increasingly from the pocket, delivering the ball quickly, and avoiding the kind of hits that have piled up over his first 10-plus seasons.
“Knowing Russell, Russell would be the first guy to say, yeah I want to evolve, yeah I want to get better, yeah I want to become a great pocket-passer so I don’t have to rely on anything else, so ask me to do those things,” Warner said. “But, as I continue to learn those things and get comfortable with those things, there’s going to be a learning curve.
“There’s an aspect to it that some guys can and some guys can’t think that fast. Some guys can process information, some guys can see pressures and get the ball out and some guys just can’t. Itap just not their thing.”
The balance for Denver at this point is, at 2-3, itap going to take a lot of discipline to stick to the plan and trust that the offense is going to find its gear quickly rather than set out in search of short-term patches.
The System
From the start, Hackett has said he and Wilson would build the offense together. They’ve done that, which should help smooth the learning curve for the head coach and quarterback, but it still means nearly all new material for everybody else.
“We have to realize this is a guy coming into a new place. We built the system around him,” Hackett said. “There are people running the plays that haven’t run the plays with him (in a game). … Itap a learning process for all of us.”
The head coach said he expected bumps in the road early, but that other issues — ones that should be more controllable — have compounded his team’s offensive struggles.
“You always have growing pains, there are always things, it never looks great in the beginning,” Hackett said, “But I think the reason why it looks bad is because of those backward plays, whether itap false starts, penalties, whether itap a sack or lost yardage. Itap not one guy, itap a lot of guys.”
Then there’s getting on the same page with teammates.
“Itap just new parts. Itap newness. Itap figuring out all the pieces to the puzzle,” Wilson said. “You’re trying to make a map. You’re a puzzle maker. You’re trying to put all the pieces together. Sometimes you have to find and search that one puzzle piece to finish out what you want it to be and where we’re going as a team.”
Warner has been in that situation before, playing for three teams over the course of his career.
“When you’re playing quarterback and you’re thinking instead of reacting, itap just a little bit different,” he said. “Even though the plays might be very similar to things you did in the other place, you’re just going up to the line thinking about different things because you don’t visualize exactly what the formation is, you don’t visualize exactly how they’re going to run it or how guys run it here is a little different than how they ran it in the last place.
“You’re trying to get on the same page, so you can’t just relax and just rip it.”
The path forward
Through five games, that more than anything looks like the path forward for the Broncos’ offense. As the timing and execution get better and Denver’s offense finds a rhythm, wins should follow.
The question, then, is whether the other factors — the supporting cast, any lingering impact of Wilson’s shoulder injury, the ways in which he’s trying to adapt his game, the attempted coalescing of multiple offensive identities into one — become benefits or hindrances, And, if a young offensive coaching staff can make the requisite adjustments on the fly.
Hackett said the team spent part of its mini-bye week “focusing” on the playbook and the offensive plan toward what the staff and Wilson think they can do well.
“At some point you just have to say, forget it. This is what we’re going to be. This is what we’re going to practice. This is what we’re comfortable with and we’re going to go with it,” Warner said.
Five games do not a season make. And five games does not tell the story of what the Wilson era in Denver will bring.
This is just the beginning, though it is an inauspicious start.
