Report: Broncos’ pre-snap problems last season were not just on Hackett, but Wilson, too

“Five … four … three … two … one …”

The defining sound of the ill-fated Nathaniel Hackett era in Denver might have been the home fans counting down the play clock during the second half of the Broncos’ Week 2 win over Houston.

The crowd was counting down the play clock before the Broncos’ first-and-10 at the Houston 42. Like a Duke basketball crowd counting down the shot clock to help remind its team to get a shot off.

— Andrew Mason (@MaseDenver) September 18, 2022

It showed the savvy of the fanbase. It was also embarrassing for the team. Some players weren’t on-board with it; edge rusher Randy Gregory said that day, “I don’t know if they were in the right by doing that.”

And while the blame at the time rested at Hackett’s feet, it might not have all been on the beleaguered, since-dismissed coach.

Among the many nuggets unearthed by The Athletic in an exhaustive report on Russell Wilson’s first Broncos season was this: The four delay-of-game penalties and slow pre-snap procedure were at least partially on Russell Wilson.

Citing “several team sources,” Hackett relayed the play calls to Wilson with 20-25 seconds left, and that Wilson “sometimes struggled to repeat the calls efficiently.

Other sources noted in the Athletic piece put the source of Wilson’s extra instruction on the coaches, noting that coaches request Wilson “over-communicate” in the huddle to get the players on the same page.

“Mostly in the beginning, (Wilson) would give us a motivational speech to get us going before that play,” wide receiver Jerry Jeudy told The Athletic. “I don’t think he would say anything extra or anything unnecessary. He would give us the call and some motivational words and a little something extra like, ‘Get this block,’ but I don’t think it was nothing long-winded.”

According to fellow wide receiver Kendall Hinton, Wilson would often say, “Keep believing.”

But after that Texans game, George Paton called on Jerry Rosburg to fix the game-management issues. Rosburg would eventually speak positively of Wilson’s presence and play when he became interim head coach in Week 16.

But in September, the Rosburg Effect was real on the pre-snap issues. The Broncos had just two delay-of-game penalties in the remaining 15 games — half of their total in Weeks 1 and 2.

False-start penalties dropped as well — from 3.0 per game in Weeks 1 and 2 to 1.1 per game the rest of the season. But the Broncos still finished second in the league in false starts.

That had a story involving Wilson, too. An unnamed coach said Wilson “added cadences in games that the offensive line hadn’t practiced much during the week.”

Eventually, the line pushed back.

“When Russell would be like, ‘Hey, we are going to do this,’ they would be like, ‘Hell no,’” the unnamed coach said to The Athletic.

After the Texans game, Hackett empathized with the fans — while also noting he could have gotten plays in faster.

“I don’t blame them,” Hackett said of the fans’ countdown that day. “I was booing myself. It’s frustrating.”

The question is, was Hackett metaphorically booing his own work? Or booing his quarterback? That answer, we may never know.

But with this nugget, the coach can — at minimum — absorb shared blame for one of the harbingers of the debacle that followed.

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