INDIANAPOLIS — So, Sean Payton isn’t COMPLETELY surrendering control of his offense. He made that clear to me Tuesday. As he has a way of doing, because if you make even the slightest misstep in citing a point that he makes, he’ll attack you like a badger and lacerate you with words. He’s as adept at that as he is at finding the hole in a lockdown Tampa Two in his seventh hour of film dissection.
But he will step back and let Davis Webb lead the way.
That’s Davis Webb, who, a mere 48 months ago, was in the throes of preparing for another season as an understudy quarterback, waiting for a turn that, if it came, was likely to arrive in some forgettable late-season game after all playoff hopes had been extinguished that was consequential only to the players on the field, their close friends and family and to degenerate gamblers.
Davis Webb, the 30-year-old son of a coach who has a “gift,” as Payton puts it. That “gift,” of course, is something that the public has seen manifested just once, in a single Broncos preseason game.
The Broncos won, and their offense dazzled in the first half that night, but it was what it was: preseason, two days after a joint practice in which both the Broncos and Arizona Cardinals fired all of their first-team arrows, leaving mostly understudies in their quivers.
So, we don’t know. You can have all the faith in the world, but you just DON’T KNOW.
And Webb will have no honeymoon, no grace period and no on-ramp. Results will be expected immediately.
Broncos Country will demand an upgrade from an offense that finished the 2025 season in the league’s top 10 in total offense. Hey, that’s no small task. But if Webb can pass the brutal Payton examination, he has a good chance of succeeding in 2026.
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