When it comes to coaching decisions, Sean Payton’s are usually pretty easy to understand. The Denver Broncos head coach has a strong vision of what he wants, which is one of his strengths, and he usually knows exactly how to get it.
But the decisions Payton made yesterday to fire offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi along with cornerback coach Keary Colbert and cornerback s coach Addison Lynch don't track that way at all. The sequence of firings feels very reflexive, as if Payton got angry about Denver’s disappointing loss to the New England Patriots, 10-7, in the AFC Championship game and decided he needed to do something big about it.
That contest was a weather game that certainly didn’t reflect poor coaching at all. The Broncos overachieved by a lot this season, so why fire half the staff?
Payton’s statement after the firings definitely didn’t shed any light on the “why” question. Indeed, it was so generic, thanking the coaches for all their hard work, that it simply made the obvious questions more prominent.
Nick Kosmider and Dianna Russini of The Athletic tried to provide some information and illumination, but they didn’t have a lot of luck, either. The best they could do was to go with Payton’s comments about the running game yesterday, which expressed a form of frustration that was familiar to both the fan base and experts who have watched the team all season.
“I feel like we’re far enough along with the RPOs and some of that,” Payton said about the Broncos’ non-existent running game, “but when we want to run it under center and control a game, we’ve been able to do it a few times, but not as much as I’d like. That’ll be an important study and with urgency, and then also with the runners, who are we asking (to do what).”
Payton then went on in a rambling quote in which he cited the loss of J.K. Dobbins as pivotal, and he also expressed a desire to play with multiple-back sets and sets with multiple tight ends to have more offensive flexibility. Taken as a while, the quote was a bit of a word salad, and Payton also complained about drops by the receivers and in the loss to the Patriots.
None of it made a lot of sense, and it left Kosmider and Russini guessing as well. Kosmider in particular usually has a good idea of what Payton is up to when he makes a given move, but the best he could do was to speculate that these hires might be a way to clear the runway to hire passing game coordinator Davis Webb as his new OC.
Webb had his second interview with the Las Vegas Raiders on Monday for their head coaching job, but even the “preemptive strike” theory does doesn’t explain firing the cornerbacks coach. It could also be a way to create an opening for offensive line and running game coordinator Zach Strife to move up, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense, either, given the Broncos struggles on the ground.
The whole thing is a bit of a muddle, and there’s almost certainly a lot more to this story that will surface in the coming days and weeks. Right now, though, these moves feel like the byproduct of a coach who threw a tantrum and scapegoated several coaches who helped an overachieving team go far deeper in the postseason than it probably should have.