Payton: ‘It doesn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing to be effective’

The Denver Broncos are now 11-2 in one-score games in 2025. They just keep finding ways to win those close games and often do it in ugly ways against the bad football teams. And yes, the 2025 Kansas City Chiefs are a bad football team. So are the Las Vegas Raiders and New York Jets, both teams Denver beat this season by a combined 5 points in two of the games.

I was looking back at my childhood Broncos and came across a season that came directly after their 55-10 butt-whooping in the Super Bowl to the San Francisco 49ers. They went 5-11 a year after being AFC champions. How might you ask? They did what the 2025 Chiefs did: lose close games. That 1990 team went 2-7 in close games.

The NFL is a knife’s edge sometimes between a losing record and a winning record. And Head Coach Sean Payton summed it up quite succinctly after the game tonight, “It doesn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing to be effective. I’ve said that before.”

It’s not always pretty, but when the 2025 Broncos need to make a play they find a play to make. In this game, it was Bo Nix converting 11/18 on third downs and 1/1 on fourth downs. The biggest play of the game ended up being the final touchdown throw where Nix redirected RJ Harvey on his route to get him open enough to fire in the touchdown pass.

After that pass, Albert Breer posted on X noticed the same thing about Bo Nix. He does what needs to be done.

The Broncos ended up possessing the ball for nearly 40 minutes and outgained the Chiefs by a 2-to-1 margin. Nix led the Broncos on four drives of 14-plays or more. That’s not something you see a lot of in a game, maybe one drive is that long. This is the second time this season where the Broncos have had 3+ drives that took 14 or more plays to complete.

So the national media can say what they want, but Nix grinds through adversity and keeps competing. That’s all you could hope for from a franchise quarterback.

One more game. They just need one more win to lock up the top seed and earn themselves a much-needed bye week to get healthy. The Los Angeles Chargers are a tough one to figure out. Bo Nix is 0-3 against the Chargers. He’ll need to make that 1-3 now. I Bolieve!

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