LAGGING BEHIND
Denver went all- in with Wilson to end K. C.' s dominance, but gap has widened
By the time the holiday season arrived in 2018, Patrick Mahomes had already taken the NFL by storm. In his first season as Kansas City’s starting quarterback, Mahomes burst out of the gates. When he and the Chiefs went to Seattle for a Week 16 matchup, Mahomes had thrown 45 touchdowns against 11 interceptions and was steamrolling toward an MVP award.
The young quarterback played splendidly in the Pacific Northwest, but he was bested in a 38- 31 loss by the Seahawks star who helped usher in this NFL era of free- wheeling, dual- threat quarterbacks: Russell Wilson. Seattle’s quarterback threw for 271 yards and three touchdowns and ran for 57 more yards to lift Seattle to victory in prime time.
Fast forward four years and the quarterbacks will meet for the first time since that game. Mahomes has engineered a dominant era in Kansas City, winning four division titles and a Super Bowl. In March the Broncos traded four premium draft picks, three players and gave Wilson a $ 245 million contract extension to try to put an end to that run in the
AFC West.
Wilson’s arrival signaled a challenge to Kansas City, which appeared positioned to come back to the pack after trading away top receiver Tyreek Hill and losing defensive standout Tyrann Mathieu in free agency.
But there has been no threat to the Chiefs’ reign from the Front Range. Just the opposite, in fact.
The quarterback Denver pushed its chips to the middle of the table for has been mediocre. Wilson, through 12 games, does not look like a match for Mahomes but rather an albatross around the Broncos’ future. Instead of competing for the division title, Denver is trying to figure out simple things like personnel groups and which undrafted wide
receivers it will be forced to rely on Sunday when it hosts the Chiefs.
This remains an impassioned rivalry despite Kansas City’s 13- game winning streak, but Wilson and first- year head coach Nathaniel Hackett are so preoccupied trying to figure out solutions to the offense’s problems that they hardly seemed to notice this past week.
“This game of football isn’t necessarily all about the past. It’s about the present,” Wilson said. “That’s the great thing about the game. What can we do to go against a really good football team and get a win at home in front of our fans and for our team?”
The problem with the Broncos’ present — and their immediate future, for that
matter — is there are no obvious answers on how Denver is going to dig out of the hole it dug for itself with the Wilson trade.
The end goal is easy to articulate: Wilson must play better and get more from those around him. The path to get there is far more difficult to chart as the distance between the Broncos and Kansas City continues to lengthen.
Mahomes enters Sunday’s game squarely in contention to add a second league MVP to his trophy case. Since throwing nine interceptions over the Chiefs’ 3- 4 start to the 2021 season, he’s played some of the best football of his career. In 22 regular season games since, he’s helped Kansas City to 18 wins with 49 touchdowns and just 12 interceptions. This year he’s doing it without Hill, who is proving to be one of the best receivers in the game with Miami.
“He’s playing at an unbelievably high level, whether he’s hitting things in rhythm or he’s breaking the pocket. It’s incredible the different plays that he makes,” Hackett said of Mahomes. “… He’s just playing out of his mind, whether it’s
the proper play or whether it’s in rhythm or he’s going to make plays with his feet.
“He looks to me to be an MVP.”
Denver didn’t need an MVP- level season from Wilson, but it did expect it was getting a franchise quarterback. That hasn’t materialized. The single biggest question for the Broncos, general manager Geoge Paton and their new ownership group going forward is how to get more out of their quarterback.
“We’re in it for the long haul with Russ,” Paton said in October after the team’s first seven games. “We believe in Russ and I believe in Russ. We just need to play better on offense.”
Wilson’s not going anywhere anytime soon. The five- year contract extension through 2028 that Wilson and the Broncos agreed to in September all but ensures it. Cutting Wilson after the 2023 season would result in either a one- time dead salary cap charge in 2024 of $ 85 million or a two- year spread of $ 35.4 million in 2024 and $ 49.6 million in 2025, according to Over The Cap data.
Regardless, counting the days and dollars until Wilson can be jettisoned is no way to move forward, so the Broncos are tasked with trying to get more out of him.
As the season has trudged along and the Broncos have lost a cavalcade of playmakers to injury, their best bet at improving has been to put Wilson under center with multiple tight ends in the game. In two of the past three games, they’ve relied more on the run game and the play- action off of it and Wilson has put together his two best outings of the year by completion percentage.
“He’s get t ing more adapted to what he feels comfortable with and we’re putting that more in the plan and kind of dressing it up in different spots,” offensive coordinator Justin Outten said. “Getting him a clean read here and there, whether it’s down the field or ( intermediate) throws or just underneath. Just getting more comfortable with who’s out there and what he’s used to being around, I think we’ve done a better job as far as adapting to those things.
“And then getting the run game to match that as much as possible, you can start to see the success and him getting a little more comfortable with his choices.”
Center Graham Glasgow said the proliferation of teams that rely on threereceiver sets around the
league plays to Denver’s advantage when it goes heavier.
“I feel like you just get more vanilla looks ( against base defenses) and then you’re more multiple,” he said. “I feel like they have to somewhat declare where they’re going to be blitzing from or move a safety down, they can’t just interchange a safety with a nickel.”
That, in turn, makes life easier for the quarterback as he adjusts to ever- revolving personnel and defenses that don’t think the Broncos can beat them down the field.
This is only a patchwork solution, though, and while it’s resulted in slightly more efficient play from Wilson, it hasn’t turned into points or wins. The Broncos have scored two touchdowns in their past three games and only three over their current four- game skid.
Longer- term, NFL Network analyst Kurt Warner told The Post earlier this fall that Wilson has to decide who he’s going to be as a quarterback and posited that the Broncos should build their identity around that.
“I don’t look at what they’ve done offensively and say to myself, ‘ This is an earth- shattering change from Russell has done in the past,'” he said. “Somebody asked me, ‘ Do you believe in system quarterbacks?’ I believe every quarterback is a system quarterback. We have things that we do better than other things and we’re going to be at our best when we play at our best when we’re in a system that plays to what our strengths are and what we’re comfortable with.”
Wilson has expressed confidence in Hackett — “I believe in Coach Hackett and I think this team does, too. … We all love him.” — but this duo has not figured out a way to play to Wilson’s strengths or necessarily identified exactly what those are.
It took Warner a long time in Arizona to answer similar questions about himself when new head coach Ken Whisenhunt arrived in 2007 with a different offensive philosophy than he had thrived in previously.
“We were trying to be all of these things mixed together and we weren’t good at anything,” Warner said. “We were trying to have this kind of principle but it doesn’t tie into this. It was just like, ‘ oh my gosh, what are we doing?’ … I just remember, ‘ I don’t know what we are. We’re not good at anything. Too many cooks in the kitchen here.’ At some point you just have to say, forget it.
This is what we’re going to be. This is what we’re going to practice. This is what we’re comfortable with and we’re going to go with it.”
At this point, that’s an off- season question for Wilson to ponder.
In the meantime, Wilson didn’t want to get into what he’s working on in his own game when asked this past week, saying, “The biggest thing is we’re just trying to find more touchdowns. That’s my focus. It doesn’t matter how we get them. It doesn’t matter what we do or how we do it.”
Asked if he sees a reason to change his routine or his preparation, he flatly said no. “My routine that I’ve built over 11 years of my career in terms of just how you go about it every day and what time you get ( to the facility), I think that allows you to have confidence, play with confidence and still not lose it, even in the midst of ebbs and flows,” he said.
Even in the context of its sixth consecutive losing season and soon- tobeofficial seven- year playoff drought. Wilson maintains it’s “nothing we won’t overcome in the long run.”
The Chiefs, meanwhile, just keep on winning and widening the gap, and Broncos Country is left to wonder just how long the run will be.