Mile High Sports
There it was in black and white. Two words that said it all.
RUN IT!!!
Amazon Prime, December’s hardest working company, appeared to have delivered Christmas early in Broncos Country. Back in Denver, where fans of the orange and blue were nestled into their couches, watching the Broncos beat down the Chargers, the Amazon camera zoomed in on Broncos head coach Sean Payton. The shot captured the words that have been atop Christmas lists in Denver for most of the season.
RUN IT!!!
It was as if the coach himself wanted the world to know he’d been listening – that he’d not only heard the advice of crazed fans, opinionated talk show hosts and football savants, but that he’d taken their advice to heart. Right there on his very own play sheet in his very own handwriting, he’d written the only thing he and his team had to do on Thursday Night Football.
RUN IT!!!
And the best part was that it was working. In the first half, the Broncos bevy of backs rushed for 89 yards on 13 attempts. The team that had seemingly refused to run the football for the better part of Bo Nix’s rookie campaign suddenly looked like the 1997-98 Broncos – slashing and dashing, pounding the rock as if they were Terrell Davis and Howard Griffith behind the likes of Tom Nalen, Mark Schlereth, Dan Neil, Gary Zimmerman and Tony Jones. When the cameras caught Payton’s play sheet, it all made sense. Payton had finally committed to the running game and it was paying off in spades.
Down 21-10 with 50 seconds remaining on the first-half clock, the Chargers looked to be moving the ball. But the defense, as it has all season long, stepped up big, picking off a Justin Herbert pass and giving Denver the ball back on its own 18-yard line with just 41 seconds remaining.
And that’s when the coach stopped following his own advice.
Run it? Nah, let’s pass it.
Not so coincidentally, that’s when the wheels began to fall off for Denver.
On 1st and 10, Nix completed a pass that resulted in a 3-yard loss. On 2nd down, his pass was incomplete, stopping the clock and making things more interesting than they needed to be. On third, Payton finally dialed up a run, but predictable play-call allowed the Chargers to call a timeout in order to get the ball back.
As if Karma was watching, what happened next should have taught Payton a lesson about sticking to his own gameplan. A fair-catch penalty resulted in a successful, rare (as in, hasn’t happened since 1976 kind of rare) “fair-catch-kick” from 57 yards out, putting three more points on the board for L.A. Heading into half with a 21-13 lead, the play should have been merely an oddity, an answer to some trivia question someday. But instead, it ultimately signaled the beginning of the end for Denver.
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