Two of last year\u2019s eight last-place finishers in their respective divisions soared atop their quartets. One of them \u2014 New England \u2014 matched the Broncos in posting the league\u2019s 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\u2019s top seed.<\/p>\n
While the 49ers aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
By comparison, the Broncos\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
It had more in common with the sort of projects undertaken by Hall of Fame coaches such as Bill Parcells and Dick Vermeil.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Vermeil\u2019s leaps forward always happened in Year Three. In Philadelphia in 1978, he guided the Eagles to their first winning season in a dozen years \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
As a result, for those who\u2019ve been around this sport for a while, there\u2019s a familiarity to how the Broncos have reached this point.<\/p>\n
This sort of methodical rebuild \u2014 specifically one that started from the inside out, beginning with the acquisitions of Mike McGlinchey, Ben Powers and Zach Allen \u2014 follows the time-tested principles.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s already on hand?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was all about getting the right people here, who was already here that you like, build them up,\u201d tight end Adam Trautman said. \u201cWe 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cConfidence comes from demonstrated ability,\u201d Payton often says. Confidence grew beginning midway through the 2023 season, when the Broncos strung together five-consecutive wins \u2014 four of which came at the expense of playoff-bound teams. It didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
They were on their way.<\/p>\n
And while Payton\u2019s project in New Orleans in the 2000s didn\u2019t follow the same timeline, the eventual success gave him credibility. The buy-in arrived.<\/p>\n
BRONCOS WERE THINKING ABOUT THIS GOAL FROM THE MOMENT THEIR SEASON ENDED LAST YEAR<\/p>\n
And perhaps that\u2019s why Payton could so effectively call his shot to his Broncos players \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I think he laid out a vision, and everything\u2019s a building block to get to that vision,’\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, it\u2019s like, \u2018Hey, we want to host a playoff game.\u2019 All right. All offseason, you might be thinking about it, it\u2019s kind of in the back of your mind, show up for OTAs, and obviously we had great participation at OTAs, I think it\u2019s almost 100 percent the last couple of years, which is not very common at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
And with that sort of engagement and commitment, Payton had no hesitation about putting the largest goal possible in front of his Broncos<\/a>\u00a0from the moment it arrived for training camp \u2014 and then making it public.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n That didn\u2019t happen overnight. It was all the work you didn\u2019t see \u2014 including, as Trautman mentioned, the near-perfect offseason attendance.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, obviously, the program\u2019s been built incredibly well from the ground up. And that\u2019s why we\u2019re in this position.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"YouTube](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1767867442_976_hqdefault.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Subscribe-Banner.jpg\")
\t
![](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Subscribe-Banner_DS.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/DenverSportsEmail-300x250-1.jpg\")
\t
![](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/DenverSportsEmail-830x100-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n