Payton’s Body Language Isn’t Always About Broncos Issues

Watching the expressions and body language of Sean Payton is a game-within-a-game for Denver Broncos fans, and the head coach is always entertaining in this regard. Last week against the Kansas City Chiefs Payton looked more than a little lost without his play sheet to comfort and help him when things weren’t going well, but this week offered a slight improvement. 

Payton spends a lot of his time bent over in a crouch, but that’s not about the Broncos being good, bad or in a particuarly intense situation. According to Nick Kosmider of The Athletic, Payton has an L4/L5 disc issue in his back that often necessitates this posture, and it occasionally it causes pain that radiates down his thigh and into his foot.

The coach sustained the injury back in 2013 when he said he was doing a lot of CrossFit training, which is definitely not an easy image to conjure up. Payton emphasized that he won’t need surgery to get it fixed, but it does help explain a few things. 

One thing Payton definitely loved was the crowd reaction, which was noteworthy once the Broncos actually started to show up. The coach saw several alignment issues with the Jacksonville Jaguars that he thought were related to crowd noise, along with some communication issues. 

This sort of thing is often bigger than you’d think. When players line up wrong, the play clock becomes an issue, and trying to fix the problem can cause subsequent physical errors. 

That happened a third of the way through the fourth quarter with the game tied at 13-13 and the Jaguars facing a third-and-8 at the Denver 36-yard line, and quarterback Trevor Lawrence had to call a timeout to deal with the crowd noise. Lawrence appeared visibly frustrated, and the result was a missed 54-yard field goal by Cam Little that helped put the Broncos in position to win the game. 

There’s also plenty to fix going forward, however. The second quarter offense was a very different animal from what the Broncos showed late in the game, and one of the worst horror shows was a first-and-goal from the Jaguars one-yard line that turned into three stuffed runs by running back J.K. Dobbins and a 20-yard field goal from Wil Lutz. Nix got tripped by one of his offensive linemen on third down, so look for the Broncos to be doing plenty of red zone work this week as they try to make their coach's situation a little less painful.