The Denver Broncos got two crucial two-pointers against LA, and this isn't Payton's usual approach.
The Denver Broncos made at least a half-dozen huge plays to get their 30-26 win over the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday night, but there are two that have been mostly overlooked.
The Broncos picked up a pair of two-point conversions as they rallied from a 16-0 deficit in the third quarter, and there’s an argument to be made that if they don’t make those plays, they don’t get the win.
These plays are also a departure for coach Sean Payton, who discussed the two-pointers after the game as part of his media availability, with Parker Gabriel of the Denver Post providing an update on the results.
Payton likens two-pointers to Christmas presents, in the sense that sometimes you think you’ve got a good one and you can’t wait to unwrap it. But two-point conversions can unravel during the unwrapping, and one of Payton’s comments revealed that the Broncos staff had multiple good strategies they wanted to use.
But Payton has a fairly specific strategy with these conversions that’s “conservative,” to use his word. He usually doesn’t do two-pointers in the third quarter, even with the Broncos trailing by 16 the way they were against the Rams.
The coach recognized a major trend in the flow of the game, though, which is that the Rams defense had slowed down the Broncos’ brief offensive surge. He said he typically doesn’t even look at the chart dictating these kinds of decisions until the fourth quarter, but Payton recognized that his team was in a low-scoring game at the time and he needed to be aggressive.
One of the plays was fairly close to being miraculous. The pass from quarterback Bo Nix to Jaylen Waddle in the corner of the end zone in the first two-pointer was one that to be watched several times to verify that the ball somehow made it over the head of defender Josh Wallace’s helmet and into Waddle’s arms.
The second one was more of an okey-doke play that didn’t work, until it did. The Broncos lined up multiple receivers on the right side, then put one of them, Courtland Sutton, in motion to make it look like Nix was going to throw a receiver screen.
Not so much, as it turned out, but nobody on defense bit on the fake, either. That left Nix to throw a high pass to Pat Bryant, who was able to box out his defender to make the catch, which Bryant said afterward was exactly the way the play worked out in practice.
