The Broncos are still trying to solve the riddle of offensive three-and-outs

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Broncos kept hammering away throughout the offseason and training camp at working to start faster. Not just the season or individual games — but drives.

Denver had 62 regular-season possessions last season that ended without them moving the chains once — excluding kneeldown drives — according to data from Pro Football Reference. Just five teams were worse.

What made up for it? A defense that ranked second in the NFL in forcing such possessions from opposing offenses — 69, one fewer than the league-pacing Houston Texans (71).

So, the Broncos worked on it. The coaches called for occasional periods of training-camp practices where the offense was tasked only with getting a first down in three plays.

The drill was designed to get the offense prepared to start drives faster and avoid the three-and-outs that plagued them at times in 2025. After all, an offense can’t find its rhythm if it doesn’t hang onto the football in the first place.

Thus, amid the geyser of negative numbers to emerge from the 31-10 shellacking dealt by the Kansas City Chiefs to the Broncos on Monday night, perhaps the most frustrating one from an offense was the fact that six of 11 non-kneel down series ended without moving the chains once: 55 percent.

For Kansas City, the ratio was 3-of-12 (25 percent).

Two drives opened with sacks. Another began with a holding penalty. Two more saw incompletions. So, on four of the five series that saw the Broncos fail to gain yardage on first down, they ended up failing to move the sticks at all.

New primary play-caller Davis Webb found himself dealing with the same issues that bogged down the offense last year when too many of its possessions failed to launch.

“Penalties. Self-inflicted wounds,” wide receiver Pat Bryant said. “It’s hard as a play-caller to start drives behind the sticks. Obviously we’ve got to play a lot cleaner.

“It’s the first game for a lot of guys getting back out there, getting back rolling. But it ain’t nothing we can’t fix this week in practice.”

BRONCOS ISSUES MOUNTED THROUGHOUT THE GAME

Perhaps the most frustrating such series Monday night came in the third quarter after Brandon Jones’ interception return set the offense up at the Kansas City 5-yard line.

Bryant incurred a holding infraction — the second assessed to him in the game — that turned a 2-yard pickup into a 10-yard loss. The offense never recovered, and in the end, the Broncos’ lone scoring drive of the final three quarters saw them lose eight yards in three plays.

“It was the right call,” he said. “Obviously, when a man gets outside of me, I’ve gotta let him go. It comes back to technique, something I can work on during the week.”

It was one of two holding penalties assessed to Bryant, who led Broncos wide receivers with 42 yards on four receptions — both of which exceeded the combined total of the rest of the WR room.

“I had a penalty before that that I felt like shouldn’t have been called,”
 Bryant said, referring to his first-quarter infraction. “But at the end of the day, they called a penalty.

And like his third-quarter penalty, it came on first down. The Broncos didn’t recover from that first-and-20, either.

“We kind of beat ourselves starting behind the chains,” Bryant said. “You don’t got many plays on the call sheet for first-and-20.”

And thus, last night looked like the worst moments of previous years. The glitches haven’t been fixed.

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