The Denver Broncos are 8-2 and in first place in the AFC. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t glaring issues that need to be addressed heading into the back half of their schedule, especially after they won in ugly fashion over the Las Vegas Raiders on Thursday night.
The offense is wildly inconsistent. The special teams unit continues to have issues. The defense has been phenomenal for this team, but how far can that unit carry the other two if they keep struggling at this level?
One thing that remains consistent on a weekly basis for this Broncos team is that they can’t stop committing penalties. The orange and blue have committed an average of 8.3 penalties per game, the third-worst mark in the NFL. When looking at total penalties, the Broncos’ 83 flags against are far and away the most in the league, but they’re the only team to have played 10 games.
Thursday’s game was just the second instance since 1950 in which both teams had more penalties against than first downs in a game. If that doesn’t set off some alarms at the Broncos’ facility, then what will?
“Everybody’s learning,” Broncos head coach Sean Payton said after Thursday’s game. “Rookies, veterans, mistakes happen in the game, but in order to be a good team, you have to play clean. I keep saying that every week, you have to play a clean game. You can’t have missed assignments, you can’t have penalties, you can’t have penalties negating big plays, can’t have turnovers. Those are the things that hurt teams.”
Thursday night was the fourth time in 10 games that Denver has committed double-digit penalties, with 11. In last week’s win over Houston, they committed just four, the only time that number has been under six this season.
Of the Broncos 83 total penalties, there have been 18 offensive holdings (6.56 above league average), 12 defensive pass interferences (7.28 above), 11 false starts (0.5 above) and eight defensive offsides (-5.56). All other fouls have occurred five or fewer times.
The bottom line? This team is undisciplined in all three phases of the game, and it’s costing them. This franchise brought in seasoned head coach like Sean Payton to limit the yellow handkerchiefs on the field after Nathaniel Hackett’s Broncos committed the third-most violations per game in the 2022 season (6.65). That was one of Hackett’s biggest knocks, his inability to get the team prepared an organized, and yet his numbers are alarmingly better than Payton’s.
The Broncos head coach and play caller was asked about how comfortable he is with the way his team’s games have unfolded en route to a league-best 8-2 start, and he brought up the penalties like he did on multiple occasions Thursday night.
“If my answer were to you, ‘I’m comfortable.’ That’d be silly. Right? So obviously, we got to clean up the penalties, we got to clean up some of the execution, and that is an ongoing thing that probably never ends. You search for that Shangri-La. Right now, we’re a team sitting at eight wins,” he said.
Broncos fans are sure hoping that the penalty problem is something that comes to an end before the postseason, because those fouls have an ability to flip a playoff game on its head, especially when there’s a large sum of them like the Broncos have had more often than not.