Melvin Gordon Dishes on Closed-Door Sit-Down with Broncos HC
By now, most Denver Broncos fans are aware that running back Melvin Gordon was benched in the team's 19-16 overtime loss to the Los Angeles Chargers on Monday night. Most fans probably know about Gordon's viral post-game comments, too, and his passive-aggressive social-media behavior, liking tweets that advocate for the Broncos to trade him.
Cut to Wednesday morning, and Broncos head coach Nathaniel Hackett surprised many fans and media by saying that he'd talked with Gordon, and that the veteran running back would get the start this coming week vs. the New York Jets.
Latavius Murray will surely garner plenty of touches, with a few from Mike Boone thrown in for good measure, but the Broncos are telegraphing a continued belief in Gordon. For his part, Gordon told 9NEWS' Mike Klis about the sit-down he had with Coach Hackett this week.
“I knew there was going to be a conversation," Gordon told Klis. "You never know till it happens but I knew there was going to be a conversation... We hashed some things out.”
It would have been interesting to have been a fly on the wall for that Gordon-Hackett conversation. At the end of the day, Gordon received just nine snaps (three carries for eight yards) vs. the Chargers, to Murray's 27 (15 for 66) because the Broncos were in a tight game.
Hackett can claim that it's just the way the cookie crumbled, and that Murray was doing so well that he couldn't take him off the field, but the truth is likely that the Broncos feared that Gordon would put the ball on the ground, and fumble the game away. That's what happened in the end, but it wasn't Gordon's doing.
Rookie Montrell Washington muffed a punt return, the Chargers fell on it, and a few plays later, a field goal ended the game with the Broncos going home at 2-4. The fact that the Gordon storyline persists in the face of the Broncos losing three in a row, and fielding the worst offense in the NFL, shows how this team has jumped the rails.
The Broncos are reeling and have already careened off a cliff. After all we've seen, barring an increasingly unlikely, miraculous turnaround from Russell Wilson, the Broncos are poised to make 2022 their sixth-straight losing season, the seventh consecutive year of missing the playoffs since hoisting the Lombardi Trophy in Super Bowl 50.
And everyone's worried about an almost 30-year-old running back who can't hold onto the ball (four fumbles in 2022 alone) with some hurt fee-fees. Indeed, the Broncos have found a way to continue inhabiting the 'World of Suck' Emmanual Sanders once lamented.
That was three-plus years ago.
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