The Broncos’ ascent to the NFL’s best record and the AFC’s No. 1 seed might feel meteoric.
But it really isn’t — at least not in this day and age, when one doesn’t have to look far to see worst-to-first turnarounds amid the NFL’s postseason party.
Two of last year’s eight last-place finishers in their respective divisions soared atop their quartets. One of them — New England — matched the Broncos in posting the league’s best record. Another, the Chicago Bears, won the rugged NFC North, the only division that saw all of its clubs finish above .500. And another worst-to-first team, San Francisco, came within one game of the NFC’s top seed.
While the 49ers aren’t exactly a turnaround story given their recent playoff seasons, the Patriots and Bears stand as examples of microwave turnarounds under head coaches who only arrived in the 2025 offseason.
By comparison, the Broncos’ path to a division title, a franchise-record-tying 14 regular-season wins and the No. 1 seed was laborious, deliberate and step-by-step, reminiscent of many notable rebuilds of decades past.
It had more in common with the sort of projects undertaken by Hall of Fame coaches such as Bill Parcells and Dick Vermeil.
Parcells went to New England in 1993, inheriting a dysfunctional franchise that had won just nine games in its previous three seasons and was facing a change in ownership. By Year Two, the Patriots were in the postseason; in Year Four, they were Super Bowl-bound.
Vermeil’s leaps forward always happened in Year Three. In Philadelphia in 1978, he guided the Eagles to their first winning season in a dozen years — and a wild-card spot to go with it. Twenty-one years later with the St. Louis Rams, the breakthrough went all the way to a world championship. Four years after that in Kansas City, the Chiefs stormed to a 13-3 record and the AFC West crown.
As a result, for those who’ve been around this sport for a while, there’s a familiarity to how the Broncos have reached this point.
This sort of methodical rebuild — specifically one that started from the inside out, beginning with the acquisitions of Mike McGlinchey, Ben Powers and Zach Allen — follows the time-tested principles.
Fortify the trenches. Improve special teams so you stop losing games at the margins. Use the first year to evaluate holdovers, because why engage in a clear-cut, total teardown when there is plenty of value to be extracted from what’s already on hand?
“It was all about getting the right people here, who was already here that you like, build them up,” tight end Adam Trautman said. “We paid a lot of in-house guys. We hit on a lot of free agents, and then we went out and did it again this year in free agency.
“Confidence comes from demonstrated ability,” Payton often says. Confidence grew beginning midway through the 2023 season, when the Broncos strung together five-consecutive wins — four of which came at the expense of playoff-bound teams. It didn’t translate to a winning season that year, but it helped the Broncos to a three-game improvement from their lost 5-12 campaign of 2022.
They were on their way.
And while Payton’s project in New Orleans in the 2000s didn’t follow the same timeline, the eventual success gave him credibility. The buy-in arrived.
BRONCOS WERE THINKING ABOUT THIS GOAL FROM THE MOMENT THEIR SEASON ENDED LAST YEAR
And perhaps that’s why Payton could so effectively call his shot to his Broncos players — both last January in the wake of the 31-7 wild-card defeat at Buffalo, and again last summer when he told them that they were capable of reaching Super Bowl heights.
“Yeah, I think he laid out a vision, and everything’s a building block to get to that vision,’” said Trautman, who was with Payton in New Orleans during the 2020 and 2021 seasons and rejoined him via a draft-day trade in 2023.
“So, it’s like, ‘Hey, we want to host a playoff game.’ All right. All offseason, you might be thinking about it, it’s kind of in the back of your mind, show up for OTAs, and obviously we had great participation at OTAs, I think it’s almost 100 percent the last couple of years, which is not very common at all.”
And with that sort of engagement and commitment, Payton had no hesitation about putting the largest goal possible in front of his Broncos from the moment it arrived for training camp — and then making it public.
It wasn’t a willy-nilly, off-the-cuff pronouncement. It had a firm foundation: three offseasons and two previous campaigns of progress along the way, steps and missteps alike serving as lessons that paid off in the form of a 13-1 run after a 1-2 start, a sprint that included a 10-0 mark in one-score games from October onward.
That didn’t happen overnight. It was all the work you didn’t see — including, as Trautman mentioned, the near-perfect offseason attendance.
“We’re around each other so much because of all the participation, you feel the energy, and you feel the want and the drive of everybody to want to obtain that,” he said.
“So, obviously, the program’s been built incredibly well from the ground up. And that’s why we’re in this position.”
