Broncos Insider Predicts a Playoff Return For First Time Since 2015

Denver Broncos fans are excited about the 2023 season. Although traumatized by the high hopes of recent offseasons turning to ashes in their mouths come the fall, most of Broncos Country is in a dare-to-hope posture thanks to the arrival of head coach Sean Payton.

As a 15-year head coach of the New Orleans Saints, Payton boasts a 152–89 (.631) regular-season record, with nine playoff victories and a Super Bowl championship (2009) under his belt. It's an impressive resume — so much so that the Broncos' new ownership moved mountains to get Payton to the Mile High City.

Woody Paige — a Broncos insider embedded in the market for many decades — seems to be more than encouraged by Payton's arrival. In a recent column in The Denver Gazette, Paige sagely predicted a playoff berth for Payton's Broncos, with a unique holiday forecast.

T’will be the night before Christmas and the eve of the new year when the Broncos are back in a holidaze. ‘Tis the season.

For only the fifth time in franchise history the Broncos will play on December 24th and 31st.

For only the third time they will win both on Christmas Eve and New Years’ Eve.

And for the first time since 2015 the Broncos are back to business in the playoffs.

Eleven is heaven.

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Paige is leaning into the Payton hype train, and as one of the longest-embedded and most-venerated insiders in Broncos history, he's no stranger to the offseason promise of yore resulting in naught but a lump of coal come Christmas. It's just another prediction, I suppose, but because of Paige's prescient record for forecasting the future, I take it with a little bit more than a grain of salt.

At the end of the day, what the future holds for the Broncos will come down to the quarterback position and whether Payton is truly able to coax a vintage version of Russell Wilson onto the gridiron. For the entirety of the Broncos' post-Super Bowl 50 era, the team brass tried getting fans to buy into the notion that Denver was just one middle-of-the-road quarterback away from winning it all again.

A boneyard littered with the corpses of quarterbacks like Trevor Siemian, Paxton Lynch, Case Keenum, Joe Flacco, Drew Lock, and Teddy Bridgewater lies in testament to the folly of that misguided belief. The NFL is a quarterback-driven league, after all, and the previous seven years proved that all the Von Millers, Aqib Talibs, Derek Wolfes, Bradley Chubbs, Patrick Surtains, and Justin Simmonses in the world aren't enough to overcome a dearth at quarterback.

Former GM John Elway became sold on the notion, surely, due to the Broncos' wild 2015 season that saw a banged-up, injured, and greatly diminished Peyton Manning quarterback an anemic offense that was complemented by one of the greatest defenses in NFL history. However, even though Manning was a shell of his former self, he was still Peyton F-ing Manning, and the Broncos don't get past the Pittsburgh Steelers, and New England Patriots in the playoffs, let alone the Carolina Panthers in the Super Bowl, without him.

It's true that Wilson presided over a five-win team in Year 1 with the Broncos, but he was (mis)managed by one of the most incompetent head coaches in NFL history. Lest you think I'm being hyperbolic, remember, Nathaniel Hackett is one of two head coaches in the Super Bowl era to be fired before his first season had even concluded.

Since Payton's arrival, we've learned that he's already taken measures to painstakingly clean up Hackett's messes, but the hope is that the residual effects of that mismanagement will not be lasting. Payton's resume as a winner is impressive enough, but throw in his history as a QB whisperer who not only helped resuscitate Drew Brees' career and put him on a Hall-of-Fame path, but also extracted heretofore unseen excellence from a litany of JAG signal callers like the aforementioned Bridgewater and Jameis Winston.

So, if you like Payton's odds of duplicating these feats with a quarterback who has himself won a Super Bowl and earned nine Pro Bowl nods in 11 years, it's not that much of a stretch to buy into Paige's playoff prediction.

The past is the best predictor of the future, and that applies to Payton's new mission in Denver. Sign me up.

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