Denver Broncos get a fair ranking in Peter King's offseason power rankings

Anyone who says it hasn't been a good offseason for the Denver Broncos is lying through their teeth. The Broncos got one of the best head coaches to ever do it in Sean Payton, they improved the roster through free agency (more than most), and it's reasonable to expect things to go "up" after hitting rock bottom in 2022.

The upgrades the Denver Broncos have made certainly have drawn attention in the NFL world, and although offseason power rankings are meaningless, arbitrary, and completely subjective, it's interesting when someone like Peter King puts out league-wide offseason power rankings. Peter King has been around the NFL for a really long time, to say the least. He knows the league well, he's well-connected, and he has really good insights about teams, players, coaches, and executives.

He posted his list of offseason NFL power rankings and gave the Denver Broncos a pretty fair spot on the list.

"23. Denver. Broncos will be a playoff contender if Sean Payton unlocks Russell Wilson. It is entirely possible Payton will."

- Peter King

If you called Peter King's offseason power rankings a "2.0" version of the final results of last season, putting the Denver Broncos at no. 23 would actually be an improvement of five spots considering they finished with the 5th-worst record in the league last year. I don't mind King taking a rather conservative approach to where he placed the Broncos here because, what reason -- other than moves made on paper -- does he really have to put them much higher?

The Broncos were not just flat-out bad last year, they were underachievers. I think that's an important distinction to be made. They had one of the league's top defenses for the majority of the season and they lost a handful of one-score games that could have gone either way. As a matter of fact, 10 of the team's 12 losses last season were of the one-score variety. For a quick comparison, the Minnesota Vikings were 11-0 last year in one-score games during the regular season.

Imagine if the Broncos could have "simply" won even half of those 10 one-score games, they would have finished the year 10-7, despite their offensive struggles. It's the eternal optimist in me, but I just don't think the Broncos are as far away as their 5-12 record would indicate. Some of those one-score losses were just plain bad luck in certain circumstances. Imagine if the 2015 team had as much bad luck as the 2022 squad...

Of course, there are no moral victories in the NFL and the Broncos don't get to say they were a 10-7 team last year just because the ball could have bounced differently in some one-score games. With that being said, to circle this all back around, I simply don't think it's unreasonable to expect the Broncos to be a "playoff contender" as King puts it given the fact that -- just like it did for the Vikings -- the ball can truly bounce any way when you get those close games.