Call me crazy, but hear me out for a second. The Denver Broncos can indeed make the Super Bowl in the 2023 NFL season, and we'll break down how this is possible. Crazy things have happened all the time in the NFL. We saw two quarterbacks win a Super Bowl in the first year with their new teams back in 2020 and 2021.
Tom Brady did it with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Matthew Stafford did it with the Detroit Lions. It's not out of the question for the Denver Broncos to make and win the SB this year. I mean, both their head coach and starting QB have done it, which is something that only a couple of other HC/QB tandems in the NFL can say.
Even still, there is so much that has to go right in 2023 for the Denver Broncos to win the Super Bowl. This is especially true with them being in the AFC, which is a loaded conference. The Broncos have the necessary pieces in place to at least make the postseason and win a game or two. Sean Payton even said himself that he would be angry if this was not a playoff team.
Let's take it a step further and dive into how the Denver Broncos can make and potentially win the Super Bowl this year.
The Denver Broncos can make the Super Bowl this year, and this is how
1. Field a top 7 scoring offense
Every Super Bowl winner from the 2016 NFL season fielded at least a top-seven scoring offense. That is a pretty solid trend to follow and certainly not a coincidence. Yes, the old saying of "defense wins championships" still applies and will always apply, but fielding a top offense is simply required to win a championship in the NFL.
Luckily, the Denver Broncos have a head coach who happens to be an elite offensive mind, so I do not think they will have trouble putting points on the board at all. In a whopping nine of his seasons as head coach of the New Orleans Saints, Sean Payton's offense ranked at least fifth in the NFL. He also had three other seasons where his offenses ranked in the top 10.
It is an objective fact that Sean Payton is an elite offensive mind. He's won a Super Bowl and has been a part of some of the best offenses of this generation. Fortunately, Denver having this coach in their organization gives them a great chance to have a good enough offense to win the big game.
The Denver Broncos can make the Super Bowl this year, and this is how
2. Field a top 8 scoring defense
Going back to the 2013 NFL season when the Seattle Seahawks won, defeating the Denver Broncos, there were only two other instances of teams who had a worse than an eighth-ranked scoring defense. That came during the last two years, when the Los Angeles Rams and Kansas City Chiefs had the 15th and 16th-ranked defenses, respectively.
So, in 80% of the last 10 Super Bowls, the winning team fielded a top-eight scoring defense or better. Those are pretty reliable numbers for what the Denver Broncos will need to do on the defensive side of the ball in 2023. The team ranked 14th in points allowed on defense last year, but they were one of the best scoring defenses in the NFL to begin the year before the massive losing streak.
The wheels seemed to fall off and as naive as it might sound, I bet the defense just was simply tired of always needing to play at their very best. Denver had a very good defense last year, certainly one of the seven best in the NFL. Now, with Ejiro Evero departing for the Carolina Panthers, they turned back to an old friend in Vance Joseph to run the defense.
He was most recently with the Arizona Cardinals from 2019-2022 after two failed seasons as the Denver Broncos head coach. Joseph is certainly not the best DC out there, but his work as a HC and DC since 2017 gives him more experience than a lot of defensive coordinators.
Denver also features one of the NFL's best secondaries, a very good ILB core, and what we hope is a competent defensive line. The defense does feature enough playmakers to field a top-eight unit. And honestly, with how good Denver's defenses have been this decade, fielding a top-eight unit is nothing that should come as any sort of challenge for them.
What we can gather with these first two points, going back to my first slide, is that at the very least, Denver will need to have both a top-10 offense and defense to win the Super Bowl, unless one of their units is truly elite. I don't think it's all that realistic to suggest that Denver can rank number one on either side of the ball, but their being within the top 10 does feel attainable to me.
The Denver Broncos can make the Super Bowl this year, and this is how
3. Russell Wilson having a QB rating of at least 97.4
This one probably seems silly at first, but let me elaborate. In each Super Bowl since 2013, besides 2015, the starting QB for the Super Bowl winner had a passer rating of at least 97.4 in the regular season, and there were seven instances of the QB having a passer rating above 100 in the regular season.
The NFL is a quarterback-driven league, so this should come as no surprise. Russell Wilson will need to have a passer rating in the upper 90s if the Denver Broncos want to have a chance at winning the Super Bowl in 2023. Fortunately, both Russell Wilson and Sean Payton have a string of success that fits this criteria.
In Wilson's seven of 11 seasons in the NFL, he's had a passer rating of at least 100. He's one of the most efficient quarterbacks in NFL history even though his 2022 season was so brutal. I mean, the proof is right there. Let's take away the recency bias for a second and look objectively.
Sean Payton also has similar success with Drew Brees. With the two together in New Orleans, they had nine instances where Brees had a passer rating of at least 100. They played together from 2006-2020, so that's nine of 15 seasons. If we put it all together, Russell Wilson and Sean Payton have met this criterion in 16 of 26 combined seasons, which comes out to a 61.5% chance that the two will conjure up an offense with a high enough passer rating to meet this third criterion.
Well, there are certainly more trends that I am sure we can dig up that are present in the recent Super Bowl champions, but I think Denver can appear in the big game in 2023 if they satisfy these three.