There’s a burden that comes with being a contender in the NFL. For years, organizations claw and grind to climb into relevance. They scrape for wins, sneak up on better teams and build slowly toward the kind of standing the rest of the league has to take seriously. And then, once they arrive, they discover that the view from the top comes with a different kind of pressure entirely.
The Denver Broncos are about to learn that lesson firsthand.
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On a Wednesday edition of “Stokley and Evans, with Mark Schlereth” on 104.3 The Fan, Schlereth, who has been on both sides of this divide in his playing career, laid out the mental shift that the Broncos are walking into as the 2026 season approaches.
“I think there’s a heightened level of importance and the fact that you ain’t sneaking up on anybody,” he said.
For the past several years, the Broncos have been one of those teams that opponents prepared for with one eye on the bigger games down the road. That period is over. After a 14-3 season and a run to the AFC Championship Game, Denver is now circled on every opponent’s calendar, the kind of team that other locker rooms point to in August as a measuring-stick matchup.
Schlereth imagined himself in Sean Payton’s shoes, framing the message the head coach has to be delivering to his roster.
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“You’re having this conversation if you’re Sean Payton, ‘We ain’t sneaking up on anybody. We were 14-3 last year. We brought back the same team. We are gonna be the hunted. We’re no longer hunting,'” he said.
That message is the one that defines successful follow-up seasons. The teams that handle expectations well are the ones that internalize the shift before it surprises them in Week 4. The teams that don’t tend to find themselves in mid-season nosedives, wondering how the magic from the previous year suddenly stopped working.
Schlereth then spoke from a place few in the conversation can match, direct experience with both sides of the equation.
“I will tell you from experience, because I’ve been in both situations. It is so much easier to hunt, than it is to be hunted,” he said.
That’s the line that every Broncos player should have written down somewhere. Hunting is fueled by hunger and the freedom that comes with low expectations. Being hunted is a grind, a season-long defense of a status that everyone else is actively trying to take from you. The energy is different. The pressure is different. The margin for a flat performance disappears almost entirely.
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The Broncos earned this position with last year’s success. Now they have to prove they can carry the weight that comes with it. Schlereth has been there. And he’s telling Denver, in the clearest possible terms, that the hardest part is just beginning.