SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Vance Joseph’s defense, bruised and battered, down two starting cornerbacks and three points, needed one more stop Sunday afternoon.
They had already kept the Broncos’ reeling offense in this latest fight for more than three quarters, waiting and waiting and waiting for quarterback Bo Nix and company to locate their late-game magic once again.
Instead of a stop, though, Denver got knocked out.
Instead of more late-game heroics, Denver got nothing but frustration.
Instead of a rousing win on the road in the face of another top-flight opponent and a raft of injuries to key players, the Broncos got thumped, 24-14.
They are 2-2 and, on paper, still in fine position given the daunting nature of their schedule.
Renck: No reason to panic, but Broncos’ Bo Nix is not good enough when run game remains bad
Under the hood, though, concerning signals are blinking that, if they aren't fixed soon, could crescendo into alarm bells.
This may not be the time for panic, but Sean Payton’s team is headed back to the Front Range anything but unscathed.
“The thing I felt coming away from the game was, man, our guys left it out there with the heat and everything,” Payton said. “And yet we’ve got to look closely at, alright, what are the things that we can do as teachers to help them?”
The final blow was a perfectly timed 56-yard screen pass from Brock Purdy to George Kittle for a touchdown with 2 minutes, 15 seconds remaining. The sequence that led to it was emblematic of a Broncos team that can play with anybody but has erased any margin for error in the first quarter of this season by making too many mistakes and generating too little offense.
After a first-half stalemate and three points aside in the opening 30 minutes, Joseph’s defense came out flying in the third quarter.
The group forced a three-and-out in 1:04 to open the second half. Nix and the offense went nowhere, but punter Jeremy Crawshaw pinned the Niners at their own 8-yard line.
When Denver’s defense forced another three-and-out, San Francisco’s vaunted offense had 4 total yards in the third quarter and had seen its seven drives on the afternoon end like this: Punt, turnover on downs, punt, field goal, blocked field goal, punt, punt. Purdy and company had been turned away in the red zone for only the second time in 11 tries this season. They’d found some success rushing, but only sustained one drive.
Joseph called San Francisco coach Kyle Shanahan the best halftime adjuster in football during the week of preparation, but Denver’s defensive coordinator had been his equal or better to that point.
Despite another week of next to nothing offensively early on, the Broncos dragged the Niners into a fistfight. They’d turned each possession into trench warfare and slow progress rather than a track meet.
Then Marvin Mims, Jr. was ruled to have fumbled a punt return, though, the field flipped by 60 yards in a flash and the game flipped with it.
Shanahan’s offense grinded out 28 yards for a touchdown after the fumble to take a 10-3 lead. They mounted a muscular nine-play, 74-yard touchdown drive the next time they got the ball to extend the advantage to 17-6. After Nix and company finally put the ball in the end zone and clawed to within 17-14, Joseph took a big swing to try to get the ball back, dialing up a first-down blitz from San Francisco’s 42-yard line.
But Shanahan finally had the perfect counter. A screen the other way to Kittle, who stepped through one tackle attempt and rumbled right through the Broncos’ heart for a putaway touchdown.
“You just want to stop them,” Alex Singleton said. … “You want to push them back. It was a great play-call.
After three points in seven possessions, San Francisco scored touchdowns on its final three.
In the process, they sent the Broncos home with a basket full of questions at the season's de facto quarter mark.
The Broncos have talked about the early-season race to improve, but has this offense?
The Broncos have talked about establishing the run, but they threw the ball 24 times in the first half while running it only nine times.
The Broncos have talked about making life easier for Nix, but through four games his efficiency metrics, his quarterback rating, his completion percentage and his scoring output are all substantially worse than either of his first two seasons.
The Broncos believe themselves to be a resilient bunch, but they are about to put that notion to the test in a major way if they are without All-Pro corner Pat Surtain II, his running mate Riley Moss and wide receiver Pat Bryant for any length of time. Denver has played without quality players, including Surtain and Moss, for stretches in the past, but it hasn't lost three key starters in a game since Payton’s been in Denver.
The season is no longer young.
The road has been predictably rugged.
This group has shown a penchant for the rebound and Payton has been brilliant in October as a head coach, but the coming weeks are not likely to provide much in the way of reprieve.
"I think the frustration is just within the losses," Nix said after completing 25 of 42 passes for 214 yards and a fourth-quarter touchdown to Jaylen Waddle. "We've played really good teams, had four really good challenges so far. We're sitting here at 2-2, so I definitely don't think we hit the panic button. At the same time, we just have to grind and find ways to get better."
If it feels like the Broncos have been here before, itap because the team has started 2-2 in each of its last three seasons.
By this time last year, though, Denver had already started what ultimately became an 11-game winning streak. In 2024, they won in Week 4 in the midst of a stretch in which they won five of six.
That kind of heater might be just around the corner for this group, too, but under the baking South Bay sun on Sunday afternoon, they looked more like a team searching for answers than finding solutions.
