Whatever you do, do NOT tell Sean Payton ‘just to run it back.’
Whatever success a team has had in the past is mostly irrelevant in his mind to the coming season.
“It’s not, ‘Let’s run it back.’ I hate that term. It’s not, ‘Let’s run it back.’ Let’s understand one thing — it is anything but that,” the head coach scolded in his annual meeting presser, hinting at the difficulty the Chiefs had this season repeating their luck at winning one-score games. “When you win 11 of 13 one-score games, like you saw
the flip in just one season with Kansas City, it’s how do you improve your team? The better you get, the harder it is to improve your team.”
Payton is more aware than anyone how fortunate many of the Broncos’ wins were last season.
But that doesn’t mean he’s not building on it either. He believes the byproduct of winning those kinds of games is building confidence within your players. And that definitely is a way to improve your team.
“It was great to see us, compared to the year before, play very well in those one-score games. That’s a by-product of a little confidence, and it started, I think, in Philadelphia. If you pin-pointed a couple of key games, every one of you guys would say, ‘Yes, that was an important moment.’ Not just for Bo, but for a lot of people.”
And then when Bo Nix and the Broncos were in that situation again — the Giants, the Texans, the Chiefs, the Commanders — the mountain to climb back into the game was less surmountable.
“You feel like you can do it,” Payton added.
But Payton is an analytics guy, and nothing in the stats says winning 11 of 13 one year means you’ll keep that same ratio of wins the next just because of experience and confidence.
In fact, Payton mostly fears the opposite.
“That is why I said to you that I never feel good. You are always understanding the next challenge,” Payton noted. “We have a tough schedule. We don’t know when we are playing these teams, but we are playing a real good schedule of teams that have been in the postseason. I do think that patience is important.”
And that is why Payton is also the long-game guy. He has — and has had ever since he came to Denver — a long-term plan for getting this team into contention. Year two may have been a little more successful than many thought (maybe even the head coach despite his Super Bowl comment in training camp), but the goal is always the next hurdle, not the last race.
Asked whether Bo Nix and Caleb Williams — both about to be third-year QBs who won a lot of one-score games and had many fourth-quarter comebacks in 2025 — were likely to do that again, Payton reiterated his point like he was teaching a freshman philosophy class.
“So I would ask everyone here, if I said to you, ‘Caleb and Bo, are they more confident this year?’ Absolutely,” he said. “Now there’s nothing that says that’s promised the next year, and [Bears Head Coach] Ben [Johnson] knows this. You turn the board upside down. You place it and you collect your pieces, whatever the game is. You have to start back at zero. But when you start back there, you have a little bit of a bank vault that is filed with these positive experiences.”
If you believe it can happen once, then you are a different player at the start of the next season.
“It provides you with [knowing], ‘This is more the norm.’ We might be down six, up six, up three, tied at half. You get used to living in that world,” Payton added. “I think that’s a big thing, especially for the quarterback.”
