The Broncos’ offseason was not yet 48 hours old when head coach Sean Payton made the first public mention of an item near the top of his offensive to-do list.
Well before the sting of Denver’s loss to New England in the AFC Championship Game wore off, before anybody headed out of town to decompress and before, even, players had fully cleared out of the locker room, Payton paid a visit to offensive line coach Zach Strief in his office.
The topic of conversation: The need to run the football better and more efficiently than the Broncos did in 2025, particularly after J.K. Dobbins was injured in Week 10.
“I feel like we’re far enough along with the RPOs and some of that, but when we want to run it under center and control a game, we’ve been able to do it a few times, but not as much as I’d like,” Payton said Jan. 27. “That’ll be an important study. And with urgency.”
Nearly five months later, Payton, in some way, shape or form, has mentioned run game consistency nearly every time he’s talked with reporters. The Broncos must find ways to run the ball efficiently when they want to this fall, but just as critically, they must be able to do it when they have to.
The extent to which the Broncos are able to improve or fail to, of course, will not be known for a couple more months, and the full answer won’t come until January. There are pieces to the puzzle that will be critical, like exactly how Payton and new offensive playcaller Davis Webb develop their mix in the run game, that are still to be determined.
With only training camp and the preseason left before the 2026 campaign begins, though, there are already months of moves and tweaks that show how Denver hopes the puzzle fits together more completely this fall.
The Broncos are likely to rely on the same offensive line that powered the attack last year. Beyond that, virtually everything else will be at least somewhat different.
Start with the backs themselves. The Broncos re-signed Dobbins and have RJ Harvey heading into Year 2, but they also drafted Jonah Coleman in the fourth round. If Coleman is the pass protector the Broncos believe he can be as a rookie, then Denver has a cleaner-fitting set of three backs than it did last year, with Dobbins as the lead man, Harvey as a No. 2 and terrific pass-catcher and Coleman as a third-down back. They are also better fortified should Dobbins (or somebody else) miss time due to injury.
“I think itap important to stack that position,” Payton said Tuesday. “We drafted to a strength again.”
The Broncos found themselves short at the position last year when Dobbins sustained a Lisfranc injury in Week 10. They went from averaging 4.8 yards per carry and 128.6 yards per game over the first 10 games to 3.9 yards per carry and 104.5 per game in the final seven. Denver averaged 3.2 yards per carry and totaled 149 rushing yards across two postseason games.
The Broncos, though, didn’t just struggle in the second half of the season. Over the course of the year, they also ran the ball better late in games once they had established some rhythm.
Harvey’s average was marginally better (3.9) in the second half compared to the first (3.5), while Dobbins’ was substantially better, jumping from 4.1 early to 5.6 late.
Some of those marks could be driven by game situations — a rugged Broncos offensive line leaning on opposing defenses or the comfort of playing with a lead — but another possible factor is Payton’s preference to throw a lot of different looks and calls early in a game and then tailor from there.
If the Broncos can identify things that they can truly hang their hat on, perhaps Webb will get to them earlier and hammer them harder out of the gate.
“Itap going to look a little different, obviously, there’s a different guy calling the plays,” right tackle Mike McGlinchey said Wednesday. “That’ll be a little different and I think that will be an advantage, especially early for us. We open up with a division opponent and they don’t have any tape on you, thatap always helpful.”
Once the element of surprise wears off, the key will be how Webb approaches calling the run game. He said earlier this month he expects Denver’s approach will change throughout the year and noted that the Los Angeles Rams didn’t commit to playing with three tight ends so frequently until six weeks into last year.
Still, what Webb sees as the Broncos’ bread-and-butter should be clear before that. Is it the smorgasbord approach Payton’s taken? Is it more reliance on the outside zone principles the Broncos talked up last summer and never really fully leaned into during the season? Something else?
McGlinchey sounded like a guy who’d played in an outside zone-based system for Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco the first five years of his career on Wednesday when outlining another key.
“I think having play(-action) pass work off of it will be a huge factor as well,” he said. “If you can make everything look similar, it makes it hard to diagnose whatap about to happen. We’ve been working on those things wholeheartedly.”
A lot has to go right in order to have a consistently productive run game. The Broncos could certainly use better blocking overall from their receivers and tight ends. They need a Year 2 jump from Harvey, and perhaps nothing would go further than Dobbins staying healthy and playing the first full season of his career.
Time will tell on all of that. In the meantime, though, Denver has pieced together several changes that amount to a fairly substantial revamp. The Broncos have retooled the running back room itself, changed the offensive playcaller and appear poised to take a somewhat different approach schematically.
All of that must come together around a front-line group that has established itself as one of the best in the business.
“At the end of the day itap an attitude and I think we have that attitude,” McGlinchey said.
