Call it the Jarrett Stidham Revenge Game, if anything.
The Broncos will host the New England Patriots in Sunday’s AFC Championship in a battle of the conference’s No. 1 and No. 2 seeds. The game will be played at 1 p.m. Mountain Time on CBS.
The Patriots’ dream run under first-year head coach Mike Vrabel continued on Sunday, with a 28-16 win over the Houston Texans to advance to the AFC’s title game. New England’s swarming defense has held opponents under 20 points for four straight weeks — including a 16-3 domination of Justin Herbert and the Los Angeles Chargers in the wild-card round — and picked off Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud four times in the first half alone Sunday.
Under normal circumstances, this would’ve been a marquee matchup between two second-year franchise quarterbacks and 2024 first-round picks in New England’s Drake Maye and Denver’s Bo Nix. The Broncos quarterback, however, suffered a season-ending ankle fracture in Saturday’s 33-30 overtime win over the Buffalo Bills, forcing Broncos head coach Sean Payton to turn to backup Stidham.
There’s still plenty of history with Stidham, though, heading into Sunday’s matchup. The 29-year-old Broncos backup was drafted by the Patriots in the fourth round in 2019, and spent his rookie year developing behind Hall of Famer Tom Brady. After Brady left for Tampa Bay in 2020, Stidham was viewed as a possible successor, but the Patriots instead signed former league MVP Cam Newton, and Stidham spent two more years in New England largely as a backup before being traded to Las Vegas in 2022.
The Patriots and Broncos finished with the same record (14-3) in the regular season, but Denver earned a tiebreaker for the No. 1 seed when it came to common opponents. The Broncos beat the Raiders twice during the regular season, while New England lost to Las Vegas, 20-13, in Week 1.
