Six days before the Denver Broncos were scheduled to face the New England Patriots in the AFC championship game, head coach Sean Payton arrived late to a 9 a.m. staff meeting and was in an unusually bad mood, according to senior writer Seth Wickersham. Payton was still stewing over his team’s overtime win against the Buffalo Bills, where he saw failures in both the run game and run defense.
What particularly set him off was the fact that practice-squad lineman Jordan Jackson, whom defensive coaches had pushed to activate because of his run-stopping ability, did not play a single snap. Payton grew furious that Jackson, who had been dressed at the expense of another player under the NFL’s 48-player active roster rule, remained on the sideline rather than contributing on defense.
Earlier, veteran assistant Joe Vitt had stopped by Payton’s office to express gratitude for being in the playoffs. That exchange did not go smoothly; Payton reacted angrily and Vitt departed, according to Wickersham. The confrontation prefaced a meeting in a windowless coaches’ room where Payton presided at the head of a long table lined with tape screens, a whiteboard and portraits of John Elway, Terrell Davis and Shannon Sharpe from a Super Bowl win.
Payton set the room temperature to 68 degrees, which he said keeps people alert, and assembled coordinators, position coaches and general manager George Paton at the table while scouts and support staff filled folding chairs. He criticized the staff’s communication, faulted the defense for allowing the run despite forcing five turnovers against Buffalo, and called attention to procedural errors — including having too many players on the field that once forced a timeout.
During the meeting Payton moved to a wall-length depth chart covered in magnets and picked up the QB magnet labeled “NIX,” referring to second-year starter Bo Nix, according to Wickersham. He described the session as part of a message to a staff he believes must correct lapses quickly with a championship at stake.
