Coming off a franchise-tying 14-win season and a trip to the AFC Championship Game, the Denver Broncos enter 2026 with a different problem than most of the league: they’re not trying to prove they belong, they’re trying to prove last year wasn’t a fluke. That’s a harder needle to thread than it sounds, and our team’s full breakdown digs into why.
2025 Season Recap
Denver’s 2025 season was one of the more improbable rides in recent NFL memory. The Broncos finished 14-3, tying the franchise’s single-season win record set back in 1998, and captured their first AFC West title since their 2015 Super Bowl-winning run. They became the first team in NFL history to string together nine consecutive comeback victories, highlighted by a Week 7 explosion against the Giants in which Denver scored 33 fourth-quarter points alone after trailing 26-8. The defense did its part too, at one point holding the Jets to -10 passing yards in a game, the fewest allowed by any team since 1998.
The playoff run added to the legend before it ended painfully. Denver beat Buffalo 33-30 in the Divisional Round in a game that became the most-watched Saturday sports telecast since the 1994 Winter Olympics, but starting quarterback Bo Nix suffered a season-ending broken ankle late in that win. Backup Jarrett Stidham was forced into the AFC Championship Game against New England and the Broncos fell just short, 10-7, in a game most observers felt could have gone either way with a healthy Nix under center.
Offseason Moves
Denver’s biggest swing of the offseason came on offense: the Broncos traded first-, third-, and fourth-round picks to Miami for wide receiver Jaylen Waddle, adding a legitimate downfield and after-the-catch threat to a passing game that had leaned heavily on efficiency over explosiveness. On the ground, the team retained J.K. Dobbins on a two-year, $20 million deal after he led the backfield with 772 rushing yards despite missing time, and re-signed rotational back Jaleel McLaughlin as a restricted free agent.
The front office also prioritized keeping its defensive core together, re-signing linebacker Alex Singleton (two years, $15.5 million) off a 135-tackle season and linebacker Justin Strnad (three years, $18 million) for depth and special teams value. But the defense didn’t come out of free agency unscathed: pass rusher John Franklin-Myers, who racked up 14.5 sacks over his two seasons in Denver, left for Tennessee, and safety P.J. Locke — whose playoff interception off Josh Allen helped seal the Divisional Round win over Buffalo — departed for Dallas. Linebacker Dre Greenlaw, last year’s marquee free-agent addition, was released after playing just eight games. To help patch the safety room, Denver signed Tycen Anderson away from Cincinnati and promoted Devon Key internally, while also using its third-round pick (No. 66 overall) on defensive tackle Tyler Onyedim out of Texas A&M. The rest of the draft class leaned toward depth and developmental pieces, including running back Jonah Coleman (Washington) and offensive lineman Kage Casey (Boise State) on Day 3.
2026 Season Outlook
Denver’s strength of schedule checks in around 15th in the league, but the shape of it matters more than the ranking. The opening six weeks are brutal — road trips to Kansas City, San Francisco, and the Chargers, mixed with home dates against Jacksonville, the Rams, and Seattle — and the closing stretch isn’t much kinder, with three straight games against playoff teams from a year ago in Buffalo, New England, and the Chargers again to finish Weeks 16-18. In between sits a genuinely favorable middle stretch (Weeks 7-15) against Arizona, Carolina, Las Vegas, Miami, and the Jets, with a well-timed Week 10 bye. If Denver can survive that opening slate at .500 or better, there’s a real path to build a cushion before the schedule tightens back up again down the stretch.
Our Team’s Projection
We’re projecting Denver at 9-8 for 2026. The Broncos’ season win total currently sits at 9.5, with the over priced around -125 and the under around +105, and our number lands just on the under side of that line.
The case for the over starts with a defense that ranked second in yards allowed per game and first in yards allowed per play a season ago, and that returns most of its core despite losing Franklin-Myers and Locke. Denver also got genuinely unlucky in a few statistical categories last year — opponents made an unsustainable 94.9% of field goal attempts against them, and the Broncos ranked dead last in net penalty EPA, both of which point toward natural improvement rather than decline.
The under argument deserves equal airtime, and it’s mostly about regression to the mean. Eleven of Denver’s 14 wins in 2025 came by one score, an extraordinarily high rate that’s unlikely to repeat, and the Broncos won 71.4% of the games in which they trailed at halftime, an outcome no team should expect to sustain. Add in a defensive schedule that gets meaningfully tougher this year and the loss of two established defensive contributors, and it’s easy to see the record settling back closer to earth even with a talented roster. If you want the deeper mechanics of how a number like this gets set and why the shape of a schedule matters as much as the total itself, our team broke that down in Bet Smarter: How Season Win Totals Actually Work.