Denver won on Thursday night. Ryan Fitzpatrick spent the postgame show taking apart the quarterback who won it.
Fitzpatrick went after Bo Nix in a scathing on-air rant following the Broncos’ 17-14 overtime victory over Seattle, and the number that drove it is hard to argue with. Nix finished 17-of-27 for 107 yards with no touchdowns and no interceptions, the lowest passing yardage total of his season.
Winning while being the fourth-most important part of your own win
That is the uncomfortable truth about Denver’s night. The Broncos are 4-2. They beat a 3-3 Seattle team on the road in overtime. And they did it because Ja’Quan McMillian intercepted Sam Darnold at the Seattle 43 and Wil Lutz hit a 53-yard field goal.
Nix did not lose the game. He also did not do much to win it. One hundred seven passing yards in a game that went to overtime means roughly 75 minutes of football produced less passing offense than a decent single quarter.
Fitzpatrick’s point, stripped of the volume, was that a quarterback in his third season on a 4-2 team should not be producing that. That is a fair thing for an analyst to say, and it is the kind of thing analysts usually only say after losses.
The analyst-after-a-win genre
There is a convention in football television that you criticize a quarterback when his team loses and you let it go when they win. Fitzpatrick ignored it, which is why the segment traveled.
It is also the more honest approach. Denver’s record is going to keep the Broncos in the playoff conversation, and the national coverage will mostly treat 4-2 as evidence that things are working. Fitzpatrick looked at 107 yards and said the thing out loud.
He played 17 seasons for nine franchises and threw for more than 34,000 yards without ever being anybody’s long-term answer. If anyone has standing to assess a quarterback whose team wins in spite of him, it is probably the guy who spent two decades being that quarterback.
What Denver actually is
The Broncos have a top-tier defense that just forced two interceptions and held an opponent to 17 points over five quarters. They have a reliable kicker. They have a quarterback who is not turning the ball over and who is also not generating much.
That formula wins games in October. It has a known failure mode in January, which is that eventually you play a team whose defense is also good, the field position evens out, and somebody has to throw for more than 107 yards.
Denver also got news on Friday that helps the part of the team that is actually carrying it. Edge rusher Jonathon Cooper, who has 31.5 career sacks, was removed from the Commissioner Exempt List and is eligible to play in Week 7 against Arizona after missing the first six games.
So the Broncos are 4-2, their defense is about to add a 10-sack edge rusher, and the loudest story coming out of a win is a former quarterback explaining on television why the current one is a problem. Fitzpatrick was blunt. He was also looking at the box score.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.