KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Sean Payton’s Broncos teams have a bad habit of starting seasons slowly.
Week 1 against Kansas City wasn’t just slow.
It was flat.
And lackadaisical.
And sloppy.
And penalty-pocked.
And a mismatch in the trenches, where Denver has won so many games over Payton’s first three seasons.
The signs of a dud popped up early, but they snowballed on the Broncos over the course of a steaming-hot night at Arrowhead Stadium and a 31-10 demolition by the Chiefs.
Here are seven thoughts from the loss.
1. Davis Webb’s play-calling debut not only failed to soar, it really never even got off the ground
Davis Webb sat alone on the end of Denver’s bench between series in the second half Monday night.
The 31-year-old Broncos offensive coordinator looked down at his play-sheet — it is a fraction of the size of the board Sean Payton uses to house the same set of calls — and scribbled notes.
Down the bench, quarterback Bo Nix looked at pictures from another unsuccessful Denver drive with quarterbacks coach Logan Kilgore and fellow signal-callers Jarrett Stidham and Sam Ehlinger.
Further away, head coach Sean Payton had a lengthy, mostly one-way conversation with offensive line coach Zach Strief.
Webb spent most of the defensive possession there, looking for the key to unlock an offensive quandary that felt a little more handcuffed every time Nix and his guys trotted back onto the field.
It was far from an aggressive posture.
It was far from what Webb and the Broncos expected in his play-calling debut.
It was not all his fault, of course, but it will not go down as a storybook moment the way his mentor, Payton, still recalls shredding a Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick-coached New York Jets team in his first game calling plays back in 1998.
The headline numbers tell part of the story: 10 points, nine first downs, 2-of-12 on third down. A 55-yard touchdown drive in the first quarter, but from there, six punts, a fumble, a turnover on downs, and one measly field goal. Just 176 offensive yards overall and only 61 of them on the ground.
Dig in, though, and the outing only gets worse.
Six of Denver’s 11 full offensive drives ended without a first down. Four more generated one apiece.
Outside of one touchdown on their second drive of the night, the Broncos went three-and-out and punted three times (Drives 4, 5 and 10).
Each of the seven others featured a sack, a penalty, a turnover or some combination.
Drive 1: Sack, interception
Drive 3: Holding penalty
Drive 6: Sack
Drive 7: Delay of game
Drive 8: Holding penalty, sack from the red zone resulting in a field goal
Drive 9: Offensive pass interference, sack/fumble
Drive 11: Fumble
That mess led quarterback Bo Nix to put the blame for the performance on himself and his teammates rather than Webb.
“Nobody has good plays to call when you’re in second-and-long and third-and-long,” Nix said. “The play sheet is very small. We just didn’t put anybody in a good spot today, we really didn’t.”
Asked if he thought players let Webb down, Nix said, “Absolutely. Absolutely. The players did not make it easy on him today. Pretty pitiful, actually.”
Bo Nix on Davis Webb’s play calling debut: “The players did not make it easy on him today. Pretty pitiful, actually.”
— Parker Gabriel (@ParkerJGabriel)
Multiple players cited the inability to generate yards on first down, which is when the Broncos feel they can really get into their preferred tempo and get deeper into their play sheet.
Nix said Webb was his normal self on the headset, “a total pro,” and that he was imploring Nix and the offense to get to the next play when things didn’t go well.
“He shot it with conviction,” Nix said. “We called exactly what we prepared for and what we wanted to get to and we just didn’t execute. Then we were behind.”
Webb had some interesting concepts, particularly early in the game. He deployed Jaylen Waddle out of the backfield and used multiple variations of two-back and multi-tight end sets.
He aligned Waddle in the backfield on the Broncos’ opening drive, then returned to it on the touchdown drive and used Denver’s new top receiver as a decoy. Waddle flashed into the flat and drew the attention of three defenders, allowing Evan Engram to run a corner route behind him and come open for a 19-yard touchdown.
The ’ first TD of the year.
Look at the eyeballs Jaylen Waddle draws.
— Parker Gabriel (@ParkerJGabriel)
After that, though, the offense could never get itself unstuck.
Not only that, but the same hum the offense exhibited in the summer did not travel to Kansas City. The Broncos incurred a delay of game, nearly had another on a third-and-1 that went awry and burned a timeout in the second half with the play clock running low.
That area is supposed to see a marked improvement with Webb at the helm. It will need to get sorted out quickly.
2. Davis Webb’s response after a rough first outing will be fascinating
An entire lack of rhythm becomes a compounding problem for offenses.
If you can’t get anything out of your openers and your early down plays, then it becomes harder to build from them into other concepts, wrinkles or set-ups.
Right tackle Mike McGlinchey has spent his career playing for Kyle Shanahan and Sean Payton, two of the best play-callers in football.
When the guy with the sheet gets rolling, it feels unstoppable.
“If you understand why things are being built the way they’re being built,” McGlinchey told The Post during training camp. “‘Hey, we just hit them with this and there are four other plays in this package that, now, they’re going to be worried about the thing we just hit them with.’ Something’s successful, so we’re going back to it in a different way. Back to it in the same presentation, but hit them with something else while they’re thinking about this.
“Itap like building a story throughout the game. The best play-callers have that feel and they can see it as the week goes on. ‘This is why I’m calling this play.’ ‘This is why we’re building it this way.’ … Whatever the thing is. You’re on a five-play drive and you hit them with something you’ve been working on that you saw all week. Here comes the counterpunch from the same look. I love that.”
Every sport has its version. When a baseball player is seeing the ball well and his swing is grooved, hits come in bunches. When his timing is off, hitting gets hard in a hurry. Itap more tempting to guess. To chase a little. To overcompensate. Same with streaky shooting in basketball.
After a dominant dopamine hit of a preseason opener in Atlanta, Payton marveled at the smoothness with which Denver’s offense ran with Webb at the helm, but also went deep on what he sees as the toughest nut to crack in play-calling and the other side of the coin from the flow state McGlinchey described: Getting yourself out of a jam.
Payton couldn’t have known it at the time, but he foreshadowed Webb’s regular-season debut.
“You can have games where that call sheet looks magnificent,” Payton said then. “And then there’s been games where you can stare at 140 and hate all of them. … I think the biggest thing is, how do you reset if it’s not going? You have a set of openers and you go three-and-out. Then, how do you reset? …
“What can you get to based on what’s being stopped, and how do you adjust there? And that’s not just at halftime. The halftime is eight minutes. You’re in, you pee, you grab a banana, and you’re talking with your players. That’s going on throughout while the defense is on the field, those adjustments and discussions.”
Webb and the offense searched for answers Monday night, but his old defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo and the Chiefs stayed at least one step ahead.
Now the Broncos have a short week to identify what went wrong and quickly set about finding fixes. Nix said Webb and the offense called the stuff they wanted. So, was it a bad plan? Bad execution? Some of both?
“Yeah, I mean, look, sometimes you have your openers and sometimes they go well, and other times you have to regroup,” Payton said. “So, we’ll have a chance to evaluate all of that.”
Players said afterward they expected Webb to respond well to the adversity this week. Nix believes Webb will handle the coming days the same as if the Broncos had won.
Wide receiver Marvin Mims said that, in a way, he’s excited to see what the offensive coordinator has in store.
“I think he’s going to respond great,” Mims said. “Davis, I mean, we had days of camp where they were not-so-great days offensively and the ways he’s responded and the things he’s done have been great. So I’m excited going into this week, short week, we’ve got to get going and get ready for Jacksonville to come to town.”
Marvin Mims, Jr. was glad to get back into the game after what he indicated was a recurrence of an injury he dealt with earlier in camp when he pulled up running a route. called it a hip injury tonight.
Mims: "It was just some old stuff coming back up and trying to…
— Parker Gabriel (@ParkerJGabriel)
Payton said he’ll treat Webb in the coming days, “no different than a player. You must evaluate the first quarter of the game, the second — and then make the corrections and learn.”
3. Bo Nix’s turnover and sack woes look like an aberration, but they also need to be
The first play of the game served as a harbinger.
Nix, a quarterback who is rarely sacked, got dropped for a loss on Denver’s first snap of the season.
It didn’t get much better for the third-year quarterback in his 2026 debut.
In fact, Nix had an outlier of an outing in multiple ways.
The 2024 first-round pick was sacked four times total on the night. Itap tied for the most in a single game in his career and only the third time he’s been sacked that many times.
He also put the ball on the ground three times, the most of any game in his career.
In fact, over the course of Nix’s entire first season, he fumbled three times and lost none of them. Last year, he fumbled four times and lost two.
Essentially, Nix had a year’s worth of fumbles on Monday night. Over his first two seasons, he averaged one fumble per 318 snaps and one lost per 1,112 snaps.
In Week 1, he fumbled once per 16 snaps.
Nix has played enough football in the NFL to suggest that an outing like this one is an aberration.
All the same, the ability to avoid turning the football over and taking big negative plays has been one of the foremost drivers of Nix’s first two seasons. For Denver to get where it wants to go and for Nix to take another step forward in 2026, this outing has to be the exception.
4. The Broncos’ early running back rotation creates more questions than answers
Week 1 is ripe for overreacting, so there is time to see how Denver’s backfield looks over the first few weeks.
Still, there were some head-scratchers against the Chiefs.
First and most simply is the Broncos’ inability and unwillingness to run the football early in the game. Payton said afterward that some of Denver’s run calls turned to passes because they’re RPOs, but that doesn’t explain away 19 dropbacks and six runs in the opening 30 minutes.
Lead back J.K. Dobbins carried the ball twice in the first half and eight times for 36 yards overall.
When thatap your leading rusher, nobody is going to have a particularly big night. But it was a surprise to watch Dobbins and RJ Harvey split nearly all of the offensive work. Rookie Jonah Coleman didn’t touch the ball on offense and played only sparingly.
As had appeared to be the case throughout training camp, Harvey also got Denver’s initial reps as the third-down and two-minute back.
The Broncos want him to handle that work because he is so dynamic and explosive as a pass-catcher. Monday night, however, showed that he still has work to do as a pass protector.
He didn’t whiff badly on any assignments, but even when the second-year man was in the right position, he sometimes got overpowered. That included Alohi Gilman charging through him and pressuring Nix despite Harvey initially getting in position to square him up.
That kind of production in that role will not suffice. If Nix isn’t comfortable and trusting in a back that he is going to do his job in protection, difficult third-down passing situations become even more of a high-wire act.
There is plenty of wonder to go around offensively after Monday. Obviously, Jaylen Waddle is not going to catch one pass for 2 yards every week. Same for Courtland Sutton and his two catches for 11 yards. Denver will run the ball more than 15 times in most games going forward. So on and so forth.
Still, the Broncos will at some point have to weigh the third-down tradeoffs with Harvey and consider getting Coleman on the field more if he’s not able to pass protect more consistently.
5. The Broncos continue to work their salary cap picture as the season begins
The start of Denver’s season brought a series of procedural moves that have become — and will continue to be — the norm in how the club manages its salary cap picture.
The Broncos made a series of decisions on option bonuses in the contracts they have with star players, including CB Pat Surtain II, DT Zach Allen, WR Courtland Sutton, and LT Garett Bolles.
The option bonuses are structured in a way that they don’t impact how much money each of those players earns in 2026 — all four have substantial guarantees as part of extensions and, in Surtain’s case, adjustments agreed to over the past two years.
What the bonuses do, though, is allow the Broncos to decide whether to prorate the maximum amount of each player’s 2026 money out over future years as bonus (smaller cap hit now, bigger prorated charges in the future), count all of the players’ money as base salary now (bigger cap hit now, less prorated charge in the future) or split the difference somewhere in between.
According to multiple sources, Denver exercised its options with Surtain, partially exercised them with Allen and Bolles and rescinded its option bonuses with Sutton.
The functional outcome of those results: Denver used proration most aggressively with Surtain, avoided it with Sutton and landed in the middle with Allen and Bolles.
The way the CBA accounts for option bonuses, the default assumption used is that they will be exercised and, thus, the bonus money is prorated for cap purposes. Thatap why teams like them. They get the benefit of proration, but they can put puzzle pieces together in any myriad combinations they want and decide as they go.
The Broncos’ decisions mean that Surtain’s cap number won’t change for this year, while the 2025 charges for Allen, Bolles and Sutton will all rise some this year, Sutton by the biggest margin. He had a $12 million option bonus , so his base salary should jump from $4.375 million to $16.375 million. His cap hit for this year will jump to $23.575 million. That is obviously a big difference this year, but it wipes out $9.6 million in prorated cap charges for Sutton in future years.
It would be easy to look at that decision and wonder if the Broncos parked more of the cap charge for Sutton this year in order to make him easier to move after the 2026 season, when he has no more guaranteed money in the four-year, $92 million extension he signed last summer. However, the Broncos generally are more conservative than some teams like Philadelphia when it comes to option bonuses and so rescinding them with Sutton is not necessarily a telltale. They partially rescinded some of Bolles’ option bonus last year and it clearly wasn’t an indication of a future move.
All told, the option bonus decisions are going to pull Denver’s available cap space from currently showing around $26 million per OvertheCap down to south of $10 million and perhaps near $5 million.
The Broncos, sources have said previously, tend to look at option bonuses in their internal models as if they are going to rescind them, so they have been operating in recent months as if they had modest cap space available rather than the big numbers that show up on sites like OTC and Spotrac.
Itap all fairly complex and the sets of decisions made can make it more difficult from the outside to get a clear idea of exactly how much space Denver considers itself to have at any given time, but the bottom line in all of this is that roster and cap management never stops. The Broncos have dived into this world and are now working the levers they have to maintain an aggressive-yet-healthy cap position going forward.
6. No Broncos contract extensions done before the regular season
On a related note, the Broncos kicking off Monday finalized what had been becoming increasingly clear: Nobody got a contract extension during training camp. In fact, outside of bumping Surtain’s pay on his current deal this year, no player under contract has received an extension since the trio of Malcolm Roach, Luke Wattenberg and Wil Lutz last year over the team’s bye week.
The Broncos, of course, went on a mega run of locking up their core. But there are also several key players who are now playing regular-season games in the final seasons of their current contracts.
The list includes LG Ben Powers, TE Evan Engram, S Brandon Jones, DL Eyioma Uwazurike and every remaining player of Denver’s 2023 draft class: WR Marvin Mims Jr., CB Riley Moss, S JL Skinner and OL Alex Forsyth.
That is a bigger group of starters and key players than Denver has had playing out contracts than in recent seasons.
Itap an indication of the Broncos’ roster depth, the reality that they can’t keep everybody and also the possibility that they’ll negotiate a contract extension with quarterback Bo Nix when he becomes eligible after the 2026 season.
At some point along the way, though, it will be interesting to see if Denver tries to get a couple of players on the above list to the table. They’ve typically done extension work around their bye week and have made retention runs ahead of free agency, too. Of that group, however, there are several players who already will command big dollars — Moss and McMillian among them — and others who can create even stronger markets for themselves this fall, like Mims and Uwazuruike.
7a. A few stats to wrap this thing up.
The tackling numbers from Monday night are absurd. According to NextGen Stats, the Broncos surrendered a whopping 247 yards after broken tackles. That is a whopping 63.2% of Kansas City’s total yardage on the night.
7b. The 21-point loss is the worst by margin in the regular season since a 41-10 shellacking by Baltimore in November 2024. The only other regular-season losses worse than this one in the Payton era are the infamous 70-20 blowout at Miami in September 2023 and a 42-17 loss at Detroit later that season.
7c. A silver lining, perhaps: The Broncos have not lost an opening-week game by multiple scores since getting blown out by Miami, 34-10, in 2005. That year, Denver finished the regular season 13-3 and went to the AFC title game. There’s a lot of season left.
