With the Denver Broncos entering Sunday’s game against the Seattle Seahawks as 5.5-point road underdogs, Head Coach Sean Payton was asked a question I’d normal ignore as its kind of a ‘who cares’ type of question. However, his answer was so complete and true that I just had to cover it for this morning’s Horse Tracks.
“I’ve done it long enough to where I can recall, in 2013, I don’t know that we were either an underdog or a favorite, but we ended up having a pretty good team,” Payton said on Friday. “We went to the divisional round. Then in 2014 we were certainly a lot of people’s picks to get deep into the playoffs, Super Bowl, and we weren’t close to that. During that timeframe you find yourself on all four ends of the spectrum. The perfect scenario is to be the underdog with the better team. You can be the favorite with the better team. You can be the favorite, maybe not necessarily with a good team. I think there’s a bit of pride in all of us in what we do and a competitive nature. Does winning feel greater than losing feels terrible. I think a really good motivating factor, and not just in sports but with all of us, is fear or failure. That’s pretty powerful. I think—and I don’t want to use the word I, I think we like a challenge and that’s a challenge.”
Over the last eight seasons, we have seen the Broncos win as underdogs many times. In almost every situation, it was a bad team winning as an underdog. They’ve also lost many games they were favored in. Again, just a bad team losing as a favorite. To Payton’s credit, he covered all of that and noted that being an underdog only matters if you have a good team and being favored only matters if you have a good team.
The funny thing here is that he seems like he may think this is a good team he’s got in 2024. I could be projecting there, but I certainly think this is a good team. So being an underdog is a good thing in that situation.
One more sleep, Broncos Country, and we’ll find out!
