Sean Payton started his postgame press conference with a simple summary of the Denver Broncos’ 28-24 win over the Kansas City Chiefs. “Obviously, a big win,” he said. “I’m proud of just the grit, hang in there. You’re playing a good team.” Then he told the story of the number he wrote on the locker-room board before the game.
Denver rallied from 24-13 down in the third quarter, stopped Kansas City on the final snap and moved to 6-2, a half-game ahead of the 5-2 Chiefs in the AFC West. It was also Payton’s 200th career win as a head coach, counting the playoffs, in his 300th regular-season game, and he said he did get a game ball.
“It was 48 days since we played that Monday night game”
Asked about the emotions of the day, Payton said he had put a number on the grease board in the pregame locker room. “You guys will appreciate this. 48. It was 48 days since we played that Monday night game and we were awful,” he said. The Broncos lost 31-10 at Kansas City in the season opener on September 14.
He had a plan to go with it. “I put one of those fold-up chairs, not like this, but the pads in them. And my plan was at some point during the pregame talk to pick that chair up and kind of Bob Knight it into the…” he said, before the problem set in. “These fold-up chairs are much heavier. And so I did a test run and I kind of lift, and I’m like, well, the only thing I could throw then would be the hand sanitizer stand. I wasn’t gonna do that.”
He came back to it later. “I just got angry and shouted without the chair going,” he said. “No one knew what the chair was for. As soon as I tried to lift it earlier, I thought, well, we’re not doing the chair.” He said the point was about his own team. “It had nothing to do with the Chiefs. It had everything to do about us,” he said. “When you have a game like that, you’re embarrassed. It feels rotten. And so you had to wait 48 days.” Asked whether the hand sanitizer stand would have been the easier option, he said: “The hand sanitizer was gonna be easy. I just don’t know if that was gonna be effective.”
Payton said he told his players before the game about the time he spent away from the sideline in 2012 and again in 2022. “Every one of us at some point has to get off this thing, but you don’t want to,” he said. “And we’re all better having been on it than never at all.” He called the day “emotional,” described screaming at defensive coordinator Vance Joseph one second and hugging him the next, and shaking hands with Chiefs coach Andy Reid. “There’s nothing like it,” he said. He added that a bit of the curse of coaching is that he hates losing probably more than he likes winning.
The goal-line stand and the false start
Kansas City reached the Denver 1-yard line on its last drive. Mahomes thought he had a winning touchdown pass to Rashee Rice on fourth-and-goal, but right tackle Jaylon Moore was called for a false start. From the 6, Malcolm Roach and Nik Bonitto got to Mahomes, and Roach sacked him as time ran out.
Payton said the Broncos were never in a true goal-line defense, but that Chiefs running back Kenneth Walker III’s run to the 1 impressed him. “When he came down at the one, you know, holy cow, you got a good runner,” he said. “Our guys just hung in there. They fought.” On the false start, he said: “If you could tangibly point to a crowd win,” and from his side as a play caller, going from the 1 to the 6 is “like you’re in another zip code.”
The boos and “a special place”
A reporter noted that the same crowd that helped on the final sequence had been booing in the third quarter, when Denver went three-and-out on all three of its drives. Payton said he heard it differently. “There’s that noise after a failed third down, but we’re still with you,” he said. He remembered walking down the bench during the stretch. “I remember doing a trip down the bench and looking up and saying, man, we’re right there. We’re right there,” he said.
He said he felt the crowd was behind the team the whole time. “I think this is a wonderful home crowd. I just know there are other cities where that adversity would be greater and longer, and this is anything but that,” he said. “You feel their disappointment with that reaction as much as anything else. And it’s sports, but man, it’s a special place. It’s something else. They won us the game tonight.”
Asked about the team’s 15 straight one-score wins, Payton said it comes from having done it before. “There’s a belief that can get stronger, and then there’s experience, and then you’re seasoned a little,” he said. “But we still have a lot of things to fix.” The Broncos have gone 10 for 48 on third down during their four-game winning streak, and they were 2 for 11 against Kansas City.
Jonah Coleman’s 51-yard catch and the red-zone calls
The play that put Denver ahead came two plays after Alex Singleton sacked Mahomes on third down. Bo Nix threw a short pass to rookie running back Jonah Coleman, who ran 51 yards, and Coleman scored from the 5 on the next snap for a 28-24 lead with 1:56 left. Payton said Kansas City blitzed, Nix recognized it right away, and, as on last week’s Bo Nix scramble, everyone in coverage was covering someone else. “No one had Jonah,” he said. “And there’s nothing like a one-play, two-minute drive that takes you to the two.” He joked about the rain. “My frickin’ call sheet’s getting soggy. I didn’t laminate it,” he said. “Paul told me it wasn’t going to rain until the end of the game. I’m yelling at him. Just lessons learned, but a huge play.”
Denver was 3 for 3 in the red zone and 2 for 2 on fourth down, and both of those fourth-down conversions were touchdown passes. Asked about going for it on fourth-and-goal, Payton said three of the plays he called had been in the plan for the last three or four weeks. “You’ll go six weeks and not even be in that zone,” he said. “So sometimes those plays are good next week or the next week. This is one of those weeks where we kind of emptied the bucket of plays.”
He was also asked how Denver went from three empty third-quarter drives to 15 points in the fourth. “We hit a few runs in the fourth,” he said. “I made a few better calls in the fourth than I did the third.” He said there is a “cat and mouse” element against Kansas City’s pressure, and that there were a couple of plays he was “punching myself” over. “Fortunately, we had enough in the fourth,” he said.
Two running backs on day three
Payton was also reminded that he had liked two running backs on day three of the draft, Chiefs rookie Emmett Johnson and Coleman, and both had big games. Johnson caught five passes for 128 yards and a touchdown, including a 73-yard score, and returned a kickoff 44 yards. “Emmett was one,” Payton said. “We loved Emmett.” He said the staff felt it was a good running back draft, with “different type runners.” “Exciting backs that are gonna play a long time in this league,” he said.
Denver visits the Carolina Panthers next Sunday, November 8, at 1 p.m. ET, which is 8:00 p.m. in Cairo. Kansas City hosts the New York Jets in the same window.
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