Sean Payton emphasizes the importance of a Week 1 win, even if it’s sloppy

The Denver Broncos looked like a JV offense on the field Sunday, but still managed to score enough points against an inferior opponent to emerge victorious. Bo Nix’s three turnovers kept the Titans in the game all afternoon, and Sean Payton made some puzzling decisions at times.

The defense came to save the day, as they had rookie quarterback Cam Ward in the pressure cooker all afternoon long. They pressured him on 53% of his drop backs and held the Tennessee offense to a grand total of -2 net yards in the entire second half. The performance from the defense was so good, it managed to break analytics charts in the process.

The Titans offense somehow crashed the graph here pic.twitter.com/LMFOiz1vh5

— Timo Riske (@PFF_Moo) September 8, 2025

WINNING IN THE NFL IS HARD

While there are plenty of things for Payton’s staff and his offense to improve upon moving forward, that tick in the win column looks the same on Monday morning, and he emphasized the importance of just winning to open the season, something that the Broncos haven’t done since 2021.

“We just had the team meeting, and I just started clapping and said, hey, you know, look, it’s been the first time in three years, you know? And we looked at the schedule, we said, I know it’s a little cliche, one at a time,” Payton said in a conference call on Monday morning. “The first thing I said to them was, ‘You have to understand how difficult it is to win in this league each week.'”

AVOIDING THE 0-1 HOLE FROM PREVIOUS SEASONS

There’s also a psychological factor that goes into seeing a “1-0” on the sheet instead of an “0-1” following the season opener. As a team, you instantly get ahead of half of the competition and put yourself in a better position going forward, no matter who the opponent was.

“Getting that first win was important to us because we had talked about the prior two years, talked about digging ourselves in a little bit of a hole last year, and they’re all [important]… The division games seem more important, but when it comes to playoffs… each of them are worth the same unit. And so you know, you don’t want to look back and say we missed out on this Week 1 game,” Payton said.

Looking forward, Payton and the Broncos are looking to correct many of the mistakes they made to start the season off when they travel to Indianapolis to take on the Colts. That squad looked like a well-oiled machine on Sunday, as quarterback Daniel Jones led a scoring drive every single time he got the ball in his hands en route to a 33-8 victory. He became the only quarterback in the Super Bowl era to do so in a regular season game.

Kickoff for that game is set for 2:05 p.m. MDT on Sunday, and the contest will be televised on CBS.

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