The Denver Broncos rank fourth in fourth-quarter points per game through 10 weeks this season. However, Broncos head coach Sean Payton is concerned with how his team has performed during the other three frames in games, which rank no better than 15th (1Q).
The Broncos face their AFC West rivals, the Kansas City Chiefs, in Week 11, and Payton has already set the tone for how significant this matchup is.
They have much larger goals, though, and reaching them will require cleaning up their issues.
Payton was again presented with a question about the Chiefs, this time regarding the differences between this year’s team and those of seasons past. There was not much to critique.
That is particularly true with wide receiver Rashee Rice back from a six-game suspension.
“There’s a reason this team has won for a long period of time,” Payton told reporters on November 12. “It’s talent, it’s coaching, it’s a program, it’s a GM, it’s ownership, and that’s where we’re aspiring to go.”
The first thing Payton cited was the Chiefs’ “consistency” through the years. He also noted that they are playing good “complementary football.”
They have been frequent visitors to the red zone this season.
The Chiefs have the third-highest conversion rate on the fifth-most red zone trips, per Pro Football Reference. The Broncos have frequently been lauded for having many, if not all, of the components Payton mentioned for KC.
Putting it all together for a full 60 minutes is their next challenge. A win in Week 11 could vault Payton and the Broncos into another stratosphere mentally.
To get it, they must properly address the issues they have encountered early in games.
Payton and the Broncos are 8-2, atop the AFC West standings, and tied for the best record in the NFL heading into the Chiefs game. The head coach met with the media on Wednesday, and he spoke highly about the team’s ability to emerge victorious in tight contests.
The Broncos are 6-2 in one-score games this season, and their two losses came in Weeks 2 and 3, against the Indianapolis Colts and Los Angeles Chargers, respectively.
However, presented with a question regarding the Broncos’ slow starts, Payton was frank.
“It’s our jobs to, offensively, put ourselves in a position of starting faster. And when I discussed this after the game, there aren’t many times when a game’s over – when you win, even – where you’re fully satisfied. There’s something bugging you. There’s something. And certainly, getting that balance and the time of possession, also to help our defense. And so, I like that this year we’re doing better in these one-score games,” Payton said.
“I think you gained some confidence. And if you tried to pick when did that turn, you might look at Philly. But to go where we want to go, there has to be improvement. And certainly we understand that.”
The Broncos enter this game riding a seven-game win streak. The Chiefs lost in their last outing against the Buffalo Bills before their bye in Week 10.
For the Browns, it is a mostly hopeless situation at this point, no matter what decision the team makes next at quarterback. They want to keep Dillon Gabriel going as the starter, despite the fact that his struggles seem to be getting worse with each start, not better. He has completed only 58.6% of his passes and is averaging just 170.0 yards passing per game, for a rating of 80.4.
At Pro Football Focus, Gabriel has notched a grade of 49.9, which ranks 37th out of 37 graded quarterbacks this season.
The choice, then, is to stick with Gabriel and continue to watch his conservative yet inefficient style, or to pull the plug on him and essentially admit that the five games with him at the helm were a wasteful experiment. Making matters more untenable for the Browns is that QB2 Shedeur Sanders is in the background, and there has been a rising call for him to get a shot at the job.
That public pressure has been there for much of the season, but has gotten more intense and more widespread–you’d be hard-pressed to find a talking head on the national sports scene who has not taken a swipe at the Browns for their mismanagement of the quarterbacking situation and their unwarranted devotion to Gabriel.
Publicly, the Browns remain committed to starting Gabriel. Coach Kevin Stefanski was asked, as he always is, about the possibility of playing Sanders this week, and he demurred as he always does. He’s sticking with Gabriel.
If Browns fans are hoping that, behind the scenes, there is a shift going on that could result in Gabriel finally being benched and Sanders being elevated to starter, well they got some bad news from ESPN league insider Jeremy Fowler.
He wrote on Wednesday: “Coming out of the Week 9 bye, the Browns’ plan was to give Dillon Gabriel a fairly long runway of games to evaluate what they have in him. But as we see with young quarterbacks and teams in transition all the time, those plans can change.
“The public pressure in Cleveland is mounting. But I simply haven’t sensed that the Browns have been eager to turn to Shedeur Sanders.”
And so we can expect to see more Gabriel in the future. Certainly, he will be on the field in Week 11 against the Ravens, a team that has won three straight and is finally getting its defense together–Baltimore has held four straight foes below 20 points.
It will take a better overall effort offensively, not just from Gabriel, to hang with the Ravens, Stefanski said.
“It’s our job as coaches and certainly the players to go be productive on offense,” Stefanski said. “And it’s very, I understand that a lot of the focus goes to the quarterback position, but I look at it also globally and try to look at ways that we can improve across the board, whether it’s how we’re designing some of those plays, who were putting in those spots in some of those plays. I think that’s as big a part of it as well.”