Check it in with our guy Ryan Michael at the Ryan Michael on Twitter? Ryan, how you doing this evening?
Doing well? Then? Nick? How are you guys doing pretty well? Guys? Bon Nicks has.
Done basically a complete one eighty from the first four weeks of the season what looked like a bust to some people after a couple of games to possible offensive Rookie of the Year candidate now through twelve games are Listen, are you ready to apologize with Sean Payton hate that's been sizzling out of your Twitter account?
Oh?
My goodness, listen. I am the biggest Sean Payton fan in the world and nothing would make me happier than to continue to see us winning football games, scoring points. And yeah, I try to be fair and everything that I do. So we're a team that's trending upwards. Certainly, seven and five is well above expectations. I think the overunder before the season started with five and a half. So doing well, super and is quickly developed into a
player showing signs of becoming a franchise quarterback. Even better, he was the guy who I had second on my draft board coming into the season. I think he's had one of the most impressive college football resumes of any
quarterback prospect we've seen over the last decade. So he's trending in the right direction, so much so that if we shrink the windows that since Week three, he took his per game average and put it over a seventeen game pace, you'd be looking at four thou ninety total yards, thirty four total touchdowns, only three picks, zero loss fumbles all season. So sure it was spectacular the offense, though,
Ben still ranks nineteenth in Portsberg game scored. And you want to guess where we ranked last year.
I know the answer to this would already, but I'll let you dazzle us.
In ranked nineteenth in points per game scored last year. So you know, if you look at what we're doing this year with flooring points in very different ways. Both accounted for twenty one of our twenty five offensive touchdowns and for the four supportive Russian touchdowns on the ground, one was one yard, another was five, another was eight. Three of those four were you know, close in the red area. So we're doing it a bit differently. And I was talking on Twitter earlier today a little bit
about this. Russell Wilson was very underappreciated for what he was able to accomplish our structure. Last year, he led the AFC touchdown pass percentage of five point eight. That's very high, and he produced just one fewer touchdown pass and one hundred and fifty fewer attempts than Patrick Mahomes to trade off as I feel like we talked about this third week, he finished twenty seventh in sack percentage, so Bow is the antithesis of that. He's seventh in
the league right now. He's technically third if you narrow down the quarterbacks who started ten or more games, but he's twenty first in the league in sack percentage. So bo style is death by a thousand paper cuts, right timing, rhythm efficiency, a Sean Payton offense, perhaps without the weapons that we saw in New Orleans, and b Nix isn't quite true abreziate. So he's showing great development. We're doing the best we can in salary cap held, but yet
was still nineteen from the league in scoring. Now.
Coaches like people are creatures of habit, and what I mean by that is when they live and die by their system and they have players or they look for players to kind of fit their previous system with their current system. Now when you look at Courtland Sutton and you look at Devon Belay, those two are now emerging, in my opinion, as wide receiver number one and why
receiver number two. Do you see how they're being deployed similar to maybe what Sean Payton has done in the past with other receivers.
Sure, I mean we're right now New Orleans Saints light and they mean that effextionllently. So you could say that Courtland Sutton is a poor man's Michael Thomas and Devon you know, the comparisons this week from Marcus Coulston, I
could see that. You know what, we could used Nick As, we could use Jimmy Graham, because right now, amongst the tight end position, Lucas called the team of ten receptions Troutman just one hundred and fifty eight yards Nate Adkins, who hadn't scored a touchdown even in college football and longer than I can remember most touchdowns by a tight end on Broncos this year with too So yeah, I mean, there's this similar deployment and they're cut of the same
mold of Sean Payton kind of eyes. We're certainly seeing a roster that built in his image this year. So I like what I'm saying so far, and I believe I said this last week. We have arguably, if not the best rooky quarterback in the NFL, arguably the best offensive line in the NFL, and arguably the best defense in the NFL. So in salary cap hell, we're not going to necessarily have assassins at the skill position. I like what I'm seeing with what.
We have with Ryan Michael at the Ryan Michael on Twitter. The offense has been steadily growing, but the defense has been consistently elite. How much credit do we give Sean Bayton for the fact that the defense is elite and carrying this team.
I think that, you know, we have to give him credit for the change of culture beyond that this is really vanced justice defense. And I think we have to be fair then, because Sean Payton was also the overlord of New Orleans Sames teams that produced defenses that finished thirty to thirty first and thirty second in points per game surrendered, And if you think back to that time, nobody was typically critical of him for those awful defensive finishes because on the offensive side of the ball, they
were top ten, often top five. So if we were going to be leaning on him when the defenses weren't bad under his botch, can we really give him more credit relative to the criticism that we gave him when they were bad in New Orleans? I don't think so. I think at the end of the day, we need to give a lot more credit to Vance Joseph. And what I'm seeing on that side of the ball is
an exotic aggressive defensive schemes were blitz heavy. I think around forty five percent of the staffs or blitzes, and our guys get to the quarterback even when we're not sending experments of the personnel. This year has been very strong, and the unique thing about the Broncos pass defense is they're winning in other ways, you know, compared to other defenses that have been good. Take the Texans, for example, they lead the league with seventy passes defended. We're down
to twentieth with only forty two. What we are are the NFL's leader in sacks. We have forty four. We're sacking the quarterback on nine point six percent of the play, so one out of every ten plays results in a sack. You know that we're doing well. We're second only to Baltimore and quarterback hits we already have ninety, so we're doing it in a very different way. We're second in the league in yards per attempt allowed on the positive end of it, so we're only allowing six point four
yards per attempt. Our dbs aren't swatting down a lot of houses. We're allowing completions. We're around league average. I think we allow roughly sixty five percent completion percentage. But they're tackling machines and they're not traveling very far distances. And at the end of the day, we can bend a little bit. We're not breaking. We're not giving up points short of the league points per game surrendered. I love what I'm seeing from the defense.
Well, you may love what you're seeing from the defense as much as I love what I'm seeing for the defense. But my counterpart, you know, Benjamin Albright, he has this thing for clock management, and we've spent you know, some time at nauseum talking about this, but I'll allow to get you your take on the situation. Is three minutes thirty eight seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, and the Broncos throw three passes. Do you feel the same way about clock management as one Benjamin Albright?
I do? And at this level, Nick, it really is a beautiful There are season Madden players better. So you have three minutes thirty eight seconds on the clock, you hear us three times in a row, so you shaved a few seconds. That got him down to three minutes twenty three seconds. So the fact that we won the game means that we're going to overlook that kind of clock management completely. But it's the kind of decision making and a competitive, somewhat competitive game, at least towards the end,
they shot that could cost you a football game. So just because we win doesn't mean that we should overlook bad clock management. It makes my head, well.
You know what, It's very interesting because not often do you come on and you agree with Ben on end. Because Ben was celebrating, he threw his hands up like he's on the steps of Philadelphia and he was Rocky Balboa. And then you mentioned, you know, Madden Football, all the things that Ben loves to play. And I told him immediately when he had his comments, he was reverting back to his Madden days where he just loves to run
the ball. But here's what I would say. I said this to Band, and you tell me what you think. Do you think that coach Payton did what he did knowing is though he has one of the top defensive units in the league, you can.
Take more chances when you have an elite defense on the other end of the football. But this kind of brings me back Nick to Ben's question a few minutes ago. How much credit do we give Sean Payton for the elite defensive performance if you are now taking irresponsible shots on offense, the kind of chances that could lead you to losing a football game that shouldn't have even been
as close as it was. And if your excuse for that is that vance Joseph from the defensive side of the ball has us lockdown, I still think that that's inexcusable. I understand the personnel that we have to work with in the ground game, it's not strong, but you've got to at least give it to a running back on one of those three plays.
Yeah, to me, And at the end of the day, it's not about gaining yardage or anything. You want to get a first down, but even three negative rushes would have been better than three incompletions. Agreed, at least you're taking time off the clock or taking time outs away from your opponent. I do want to give Sean Baks some credit, though we can't just sit here a bag
on that, especially after a win. We can all see the offense approving what specifically has impressed you about what Sean has done the let's sell the ball.
You know what I'm seeing with bone Nicks is we're continuing to tailor the offense to his strength, so that would be quick, complete, structured yards after the catch. And as he's becoming more comfortable, he's opening up the playbooks. He's been able to more efficiently attack the middle of the field. These are the kind of things that we saw at Oregon, and we knew that we weren't going
to see instant success. I believe I said before the season even started, the twenty twenty four should be about getting bone Nicks acclimated to the system. So here we are two thirds through the season and he's already playing the position at an elite level, hitting some highs. We put up one hundred and forty five passer riding the week before last second highest in the history of the franchise higher than John Elway ever hit, although we've got to adjust for eras, so take it with a grand salt.
I love what I'm seeing and as bone, it's a quarterback driven offense, and I don't say that to take any credit away from what Sean Payton is doing. We understand that he doesn't have Campa Bay twenty twenty roster, he doesn't have the two thousand and seven Patriots, so none of us should have or have expectations for the offense to be a top three, top five offense. We still want to produce more points, and slowly but surely
we're doing that. We have to be patient. We're rooting for him every week again and not trying to sell short the progress that he's made with bo Nicks. But at the same time, guys, when you see these issues with clock management and you see the lack of points produced over the grand sample size of here we are at seven and five, twelve games in, there's still plenty of room for improvement.
When you look at the Broncos run game, and we haven't really talked about it in great detail because it hasn't really been that explosive. Now we're moving into the back half of the season, colder months. What can we anticipate from the Broncos offense from a run game standpoint, You think.
Channing out so far through twelve games, like Toronte Williams, who is at one hundred and twenty carries only averaging three point seven yards per rush, that's not great success percentage, which is an efficiency metric for Pro Football Reference, very
six point seven percent not tremendous. I do like what I'm seeing out of all your estimains, averaging four point seven yards per carry equal to that of Bonix, and I believe I said this a few weeks ago when we were trying to predict what the second half of the season would look like for Bonnicks, I had a feeling they would take him out of harms when we wouldn't see as much of the quarterback design runs as we saw in the first half of the season. I
think that's smart. We need to keep Bonius healthy. But you know, the more that we can rotate these running backs in and generate momentum, I feel frustrated saying the same thing week after week after we because we don't have Derrick Henry in the backfield. We don't have shake on bar play in the backfield. If we did with the offensive line that we have, you'd be saying much better games. So I don't think the objective should be for us to become a run first team or to
have any crazy sort of expectations. We just want to get better, and slowly, but surely we're getting inner. Tyler R.
Michael at the Ryan Michael on Twitter, Ryan, Pat Mahomes didn't look like a scrub versus Carolina. Are you ready to eat some crow on your Mahomes criticism from a couple of weeks back.
I mean he played Carolina, the second to loss in the league. They give up one hundred and five point six passer rating nearly seventy percent completion percentage, their second to last in the league and SAT League fifteen sixteen seventeen something like that, and their last in the NFC in terms of touchdown passes surrendered was twenty one. So Pat Mahomes is trending upward as bo Nicks has been. But at the end of the day here he is.
Eleven games in his season, he ranked twenty first in the league in the just Vate yards per tenth after last year he was fifteen in the league, so right around league average, from the moment he started his first game against less than twenty seventeen. All the way through the end of twenty twenty two Hiss MVP campaign, he
ranked number one in the NFL. So when you look at one of the best overall efficiency metrics to go from it half decade running number one in the league, dropping down the fifteenth last year, and he's twenty first this year despite playing really well against Carolina. Well, I love Pat mahons, he's the future first ballot Hall of Famber.
But if we're pretending that the totality of his value of work our last two season is gonna comparable to just do the best runs we've seen in the history of the position from twenty eighteen twenty twenty two, I think what we're doing is we're unintentionally selling short how great he was for that first half decade. Don't do that.
Yeah, right, we don't want Understell. We've got Cleveland Browns coming up on Monday night.
What do you think?
What's your prediction?
Real quick? Twenty eight to seventeen Denver.
Oh wow, Okay, I'm a little concerned about this one. He's he's confident though he comes out to twenty eight to seventeen. Well, we'll certainly I'll hold you to that, and if it doesn't happen, we'll weill mercilessly roast you for twenty minutes next week immediately following the game. For those are the rules, so I don't make that much as follow I'm here for brother. Take care, Ryan Michael let the Ryan Michael on