With Russell Wilson and Sean Payton, Broncos Country May Be In for a Wild Ride

On a 90-degree day in the middle of August, Russell Wilson tried his best to play things cool. It was a couple of weeks into the Denver Broncos’ training camp, and a local reporter was posing some benign questions to the 34-year-old quarterback during media availability: “Are you more confident now, this week, running the offense than you were?” he asked. “Can you feel your confiden—”

Wilson cut in to deliver an answer that somehow sounded both amiable and annoyed. “Yeah, I mean, I think every day you get more and more—” Wilson began, before cutting himself off, too. “To be honest with you, my confidence doesn’t waver much!” he continued, chuckling and talking faster and louder now, flashing a bright, strained grin. He repeated the words “every day” and “you learn a little bit more” another few times as he talked about the direction of the team. Finally, he concluded: “The picture is all coming together. It takes time to, you know, paint a beautiful picture sometimes.”

On paper, Wilson’s words fell somewhere between the artful and the unexceptional. His response was neither untrue nor unkind. So then why did it all sound just a little bit tense?

Probably because, for Wilson and the Broncos, just about everything feels that way at the moment. Tense is what happens, after all, when a team that hasn’t made the playoffs in seven seasons trades a big cache of players and draft picks for a star franchise quarterback in the back half of his career; pairs him with an … intriguing rookie head coach; garners and luxuriates in oodles of buzz; and then proceeds to go a sickening 5-12, all of which Denver did last season. Tense is when that quarterback signs a five-year, $245 million contract extension that won’t even begin until after this season … and then turns in career worsts in completion percentage, touchdowns, passer rating, sacks, and wins in his first year with the team. Tense is a decorated and self-assured head coach—the post-sabbatical Sean Payton, formerly of New Orleans—taking over in the offseason with the goal of righting the team, and promptly sitting down with USA Today to take a blowtorch to Broncos employees past and present, just to, you know, set a new tone.

And tense is when one wide receiver tears his Achilles and another pulls a hammy and the O-line might still be porous and it isn’t even Week 1 yet, and all anyone can do is just wait to see how the whole beautiful picture is coming along. Really, the only thing we do know about the work in progress is how it has largely been framed this offseason: Is Russ cooked? running along one edge, and Can Sean Payton fix him? on another.

A few feet away from where Wilson spoke at training camp, near the entrance to the practice field, a novelty street sign read “2023 Compete Street”—apparently a Payton staple from his days in New Orleans. Compete Street didn’t appear to intersect with anything else, though, which felt appropriate for a 2023 Broncos group that has an undefined path forward. This time last year, the Broncos thought they were about to go off; instead, they failed to switch anything on. Going into this season, the unstated goals are a little bit different: pipe down and keep up. The road ahead may well be a wild one, marked by new-coach U-turns and injury runoffs and quarterback controversy exit ramps. All the Broncos can do now is stick to rolling along, hoping they’ll spot the right turn.

It may well be true that Wilson’s confidence rarely wavers. This is a guy who, at barely 5-foot-11, has confounded NFL defenses for years; who very famously—like, too famously—courted and married Ciara; who in 2020 trademarked the phrase “Let Russ cook.” But it’s also true that, recently, everyone else’s collective confidence in Wilson has, shall we say, fluctuated a bit more. Which is why the Russ discourse currently resembles a Jackson Pollock painting: takes every which way, dripping all over the page.

There is the loyal praise from his teammates, all of it befitting a nine-time Pro Bowler who won a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks after the 2013 season, nearly won another the following year, and created a new mold for what a modern quarterback could be. “Russ is always the guy who keeps working hard, does all the right things, does all the little things that are gonna make sure he’s prepared and well for the game,” Broncos receiver Jerry Jeudy tells The Ringer following one mid-August practice. Greg Dulcich, a second-year tight end, says that when he joined the Broncos last season, he called his family and former teammates to gush about Wilson. “I was telling my dad,” Dulcich says, “I was like, man, he’s a real leader of men. A guy that you can really get behind, and a guy that motivates you and that you want to be great for.”

But wanting and doing are two very separate things, as Broncos fans learned during the team’s weekly meltdowns last season. The team stumbled out of the starting gate and never regained its stride, and Wilson’s play was the worst of his career. Over his decade in Seattle, he had averaged more than 29 touchdown passes per season—he threw 40 in 2020!—but in Denver, he finished with 16. He was sacked 55 times for 368 yards, both numbers that were bad enough for an ignominious no. 1 NFL ranking. In Pro Football Focus’s quarterback ratings, Wilson was 29th out of 41 players at the position. (Before last season, his average ranking was ninth.) All of which helps explain why, on the heels of that 5-12 showing, the broader state of Russ commentary has tended to skew more skeptical.

“I would be shocked if Russell Wilson was the starter for 17 games this season,” opined former NFL executive Mike Tannenbaum in late August on ESPN’s Get Up, a take later echoed by league insider Mike Lombardi, who described Wilson as being “on a really short leash” on The Bill Simmons Podcast. (All of which tracks with what NBC’s Matthew Berry reported during the NFL combine in March.) On the Fox show SPEAK last Wednesday, retired NFL wide receiver James Jones said he had “zero, zero, zero confidence in Russell Wilson.” And on Undisputed, Wilson’s former teammate Richard Sherman pointed out that “this is [Wilson’s] legacy on the line, at this point.” (His co-panelist Keyshawn Johnson gave a prescription for how to fix Wilson’s performance: “Let him cook less.”)

Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes is the grab bag of strategic attention-deflecting stuff that Payton has been saying about Wilson since he signed on to coach the Broncos earlier this year.

Wilson and Payton have crossed paths before, both as NFC opponents and as a player and coach on the same Pro Bowl team. According to a February blow by blow in The Athletic about Wilson’s rough first season in Denver, Wilson once urged Seahawks ownership to let go of head coach Pete Carroll and GM John Schneider and to perhaps pursue hiring Payton. It was a request that led to Wilson being traded out of Seattle. But one year later, Wilson was back on the hunt.

As Payton likes to tell it, Wilson texted former Saints quarterback Drew Brees so frequently, in hopes of getting him to convince Payton to take a job with the Broncos, that Brees begged Payton to do it just to shut Wilson up.

The story, in other words, is a little bit of a neg, in much the same way that a lot of the things Payton says about Wilson kind of are. His praise is often so general as to feel suspicious. “He’s super competitive,” Payton told reporters about his quarterback at the NFL annual meetings in March. “He’s won at a high level. He’s someone that I think moves well. He’s someone that I think works extremely hard.” He told Peter King: “I’ve been pleasantly surprised—like, wow, the arm talent in the throws down the field.” In most interviews, he points out that Wilson has lost weight since last year—and that he needed to.

“I like to be sarcastic and make fun,” Payton told Kay Adams during training camp about his relationship with Wilson, “and so I think he’s figuring me out a little.” Adams nodded. “You’re like a pirate,” she responded, “and he’s like a Boy Scout.”

On the one hand, the Broncos preseason practices I attended at their complex in Dove Valley, Colorado, seemed rather ordinary. Players cycled through their walkthroughs and their stretches and their position-specific plays. The quarterbacks ducked in and out of a series of pylons as if they were participating in a slalom skiing competition. The linemen did some drills that involved a bunch of BRUTE brand trash cans. And Payton patrolled the operation wearing one of his many pairs of Jordans. I wasn’t the only media member in from out of town: Fox NFL Sunday host Curt Menefee showed up one day in a bucket hat (don’t tell Payton!) and a “LIFE IS GOOD” T-shirt.

In much of the Colorado sports world, life is good. The Avalanche lifted the Stanley Cup last summer. (Wilson attended one of the games.) The Nuggets won an NBA title this year. (Wilson and his family were there to see the win.) The University of Colorado football team under Deion Sanders will never be boring. (Wilson worked out with Buffaloes quarterback Shedeur Sanders, Deion’s son, this summer.) But things have been tougher with the Broncos, who have racked up the second-longest NFL playoff drought in the league, behind only the Jets.

At the Centura Health Training Center, Broncos fans huddled under a cool-mist pergola or baked in the high-altitude sun on a grassy hillside or lined up to pose for selfies with cheerleaders. Cash registers tallied up merch. In many ways, it all reminded me of a similar reporting trip I took during training camp last year, to visit the Miami Dolphins. Like the Broncos this year, the Dolphins were, at the time, preparing for a season with a new offensive-minded head coach in Mike McDaniel and an embattled quarterback trying to live up to his own hype in Tua Tagovailoa. But even if the broad strokes between the two scenes were the same, the big picture felt different.

In Miami, things seemed anticipatory, pent up, even festive—like the crackling start of a night out in South Beach. (The way fans supported Tua every time he touched the ball had extreme “girl giving a relationship pep talk at a club bathroom sink” vibes.) In Denver, though, fans seemed to be doing a more cautious assessment, like putting one’s hand out into the air to see whether it’s raining.

The general admission seating at the practice facility still hummed with energy, but it was the energy of, like, a bunch of outdoor enthusiasts packing for a long hike up a Rocky Mountain peak—everyone knowing full well that a good view from the top would require a trudge first. Even the kiddos had the air of wary realists: When I chatted with a trio of 12-year-olds in Pit Viper sunglasses and Wilson jerseys about their outlook, one went out on a limb to say, “I feel like their record is going to be, like, OK this season.” Music was scarce. Attendance had been capped. Beat writers lamented the tightening of media access to players and coaches under Payton’s regime.

And all of this stood in marked contrast to last offseason in Denver, when the Broncos were considered to be a team that could make a splash with Wilson under center and newcomer Nathaniel Hackett as head coach. Wilson showed up to camp in the largest conveyance imaginable and sought to establish “Broncos country: Let’s ride!” as his own personal catchphrase. Hackett, meanwhile, got to advance his crank theory that starters oughtn’t play much, if at all, in preseason games. (He also advanced the word “tugalicious,” somehow.)

The powers that be within the Broncos organization—which had been sold in June 2022 for $4.65 billion to a consortium that includes Walmart scion Rob Walton, Condoleezza Rice, and Lewis Hamilton—said yes to just about anything Wilson asked, according to The Athletic. Could he have his own office, up on the same floor as all the team brass? Sure. Could he bring along his own side coach and other various trainers and consultants? OK! “It’s got to be a player-ran kind of team,” Wilson told King during training camp last season, positively radiating with confidence. “We’ve gotta run it ourselves. And Coach Hackett gives us the keys to do that.”

The way the Broncos played last season, it was like those keys snapped off in the lock and jammed the only door in the building. No NFL team averaged fewer points per game than the Broncos. In their season opener—against Wilson’s former team, the Seahawks—Denver’s game management was so awful that viewers of ESPN’s Manningcast got to watch in real time as Peyton Manning was slowly driven mad. It only got worse from there. On Christmas, the Broncos lost 51-14 to the Rams. Hackett was axed the next day.

Ever since Payton was hired in February, he has sought to make it clear that under him, things will be different. When he was asked, on his first day as a Bronco, about Wilson’s private performance advisers having had access to the team facilities, he said: “That’s foreign to me. That’s not going to take place here.” He expressed an aversion to “Gilligan hats” and sideline interviews. When he was asked at the NFL annual meeting in March about the Broncos’ play last season, he grimaced and said: “It’s hard film to watch” as if he were describing snuff footage. His remarks to USA Today in July that “everybody’s got a little stink on their hands; it’s not just Russell” made headlines (and ignited a small feud with the Jets), but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t said before. Back in April, he told reporters that when a team has a five-win season, “There’s probably a little bit of dirt on a lot of people’s hands.”

And so this is a season all about tidying up. During the Broncos’ first preseason game this summer, against the Arizona Cardinals, Wilson found Jeudy with a pass on third down—only for the wide receiver to drop the ball just outside the red zone. On fourth down, Payton again drew up a play to Jeudy, and this time it was a success: a 21-yard touchdown pass. “It’s about time,” says Jeudy a few days later when I bring up the play. “It’s about time to just—to get consistently involved, for real.” This summer, Payton told Jeudy that he would be watching him closely in order to get the most out of him, and the preseason play call felt like the best kind of challenge. “It felt like support,” Jeudy says. “They had that confidence in me to go to me back-to-back. And you know, I appreciate coaches like that.”

Since his hiring, Payton has signed several coaches he’d worked with and players he’d coached on the Saints, as if to help disseminate his teachings. (One of them, receiver Marquez Callaway, tells me with a laugh that his Broncos teammates ask him “all the time, all the time” if Payton is usually like this. “Is he always this mad?” Callaway says.) But Payton also signaled that he was not stuck in the past or sentimental, and that he didn’t need to have Saints to ascend, waiving several of them last week. (Callaway was among them; he wound up on the Raiders practice squad.)

At his introductory press conference this winter, Payton used a musical metaphor to describe his outlook on not only Wilson, but all of his players. “I don’t like singing, period,” he said, “but none of us want to be at a karaoke bar with a song we don’t know the words to. So how do we get them comfortable, and highlight their strengths?”

Highlighting Wilson’s strengths will involve the work of a lot of guys whose last names aren’t Wilson. A priority for Payton in the offseason was to shore up the offensive line; with that in mind, the Broncos signed Mike McGlinchey from San Francisco and also spent to get Ben Powers. “We could be real creative and we can make big plays, especially with the O-line we got,” says Dulcich, who is part of the tight end unit along with Adam Trautman and is the kind of player that Payton refers to as a “Joker” (complimentary) due to his versatility. “We’re going to move people, we’re going to protect,” Dulcich says.

The Broncos also plan to run this season. A strong reliance on the run game is a strategy that once helped both Wilson (in Seattle) and Payton (in New Orleans) thrive. Running back Samaje Perine left the Bengals to join what he feels will be a productive multi-back system with Javonte Williams, returning from injury, and undrafted rookie Jaleel McLaughlin, who impressed the Broncos during camp. Having them as options can free up Wilson to better consider his options—which won’t include Tim Patrick again this season, after the wideout tore his Achilles during camp. But Wilson will have guys like veteran receiver Courtland Sutton, and the promising rookie Marvin Mims Jr., and the tight ends.

He’ll also have Jeudy—at least once the receiver returns from a pulled hamstring he suffered a few weeks back. And Jeudy believes that Wilson will be able to handle the pressure and bounce back this season. “Russ has always been the same person,” Jeudy says. “I knew him from day one [in Denver]; ain’t nothing much changed.” He means this as a positive—but after last year’s season, a little change could do a lot of people some good.

Wilson is under contract with the Broncos through 2028, when he’ll turn 40. His quarterbacks coach, former journeyman backup Davis Webb, is 28 years old and could have stayed active in the league as a player for a while longer. But as NFL.com reported, Webb wrote in a message to Wilson that “I retired to come and hang out and coach you. Because I believe in you.”

It remains to be seen whether the Broncos head coach feels the same way. Payton’s allegiance isn’t to Wilson, exactly—it’s to winning. At the moment, though, those two things are closely aligned. Given the guarantees in Wilson’s contract, it would be incredibly expensive for the Broncos to move on from the maybe-fading star too soon, and to that extent, it behooves Payton to find ways to help Russ, yes, cook. But as time goes on, the amount of dead cap space that would result from parting ways with Wilson diminishes, and the calculus of the entire exercise shifts. From Payton’s point of view, Wilson is not just a guy who manages a play clock—he’s a guy whose own clock keeps ticking.

Last year, in an attempt to become more of a pocket passer, Wilson struggled under Hackett. (It didn’t help matters, as Payton pointed out in July, that the Broncos were one of the worst teams in the NFL when it came to pre-snap penalties.) This year, with a hopefully revamped line and a more reliable run game, Payton’s offensive system ought to rely more on play-action to help utilize Wilson’s strengths. Payton has praised Wilson’s “movement skills” as well as “his off-schedule plays,” and has sought to funnel the QB’s energy into more disciplined and choreographed progressions and tempos. Wilson, for his part, seems amenable to an offense that is less “player-ran” than last season.

“I think the best thing about Coach,” Wilson told Adams a few weeks back, “one, he knows what he wants. But two … he has a swagger, to me. He has a confidence. And I think the biggest thing is, he’s done it. You know, at the end of the day, when you step on that field in between those white lines, there’s only so many people that have done it, and won a Super Bowl and have done it at the highest level, and he’s one of those guys.”

Wilson and Payton are two of those guys, and they’re clearly both people with no shortage of confidence. The big question is more about whether they can achieve confluence—and whether the Broncos can at last find their flow.