The Atlanta Falcons head west with their collective feathers between their tails after a rough Saints loss. However, it’s time to lock in on the Denver Broncos defense. Surprisingly, a team coached by an offensive-minded coach in Sean Payton actually deploys a balanced defense at all three levels.

The Broncos have the No. 4 scoring defense and the No. 5 overall defense in the NFL heading into Week 11. That unit is a big reason why Denver is a surprising 5-5 with a rookie quarterback and an NFL-high $82 million in dead money on their salary cap.

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The Falcons need to leave Colorado, avoiding a two-game slide, heading into late-November. On paper, Atlanta can match up well with Denver. Now, let’s see how that could look on the field on Sunday.

Hit the Boundary

The Broncos utilize the 3-4. Vance Joseph, the defensive coordinator/former head coach wants to disrupt at all costs. He believes in heavy blitzing and man coverage behind it. As aggressive as you will find, Denver will throw caution at the wind and get upfield. The stats bear that out as they rank in the top ten league wide in several defensive categories including No. 2 in sacks.

The outside linebackers leave the sideline-to-sideline pursuit to the inside ‘backers. The edge rushers, Nik Bonitto and Jonathon Cooper want to bend the corner, leaving the spots they vacate empty. As a result, swing passes to Bijan Robinson and Tyler Allgeier force matchups versus Justin Strnad and Cody Barton. 

Both Strnad and Barton play well in space but lack the explosion to prevent the Atlanta backs from gaining the perimeter. Meanwhile, faking a jet sweep will draw the defense away from the far side of the first few yards beyond the line of scrimmage. Misdirection could help Atlanta open up the offense early. 

Safety Unconcerned

For as stellar as cornerbacks Pat Surtain and Riley Moss played so far in 2024, the same does not apply to safeties P.J. Locke and Brandon Jones in pass coverage. Jones has replaced Justin Simmons well and leads the team in tackles, but he’s not as strong against the pass (when the Broncos aren’t sacking quarterbacks). Tight end Kyle Pitts in games like this, must see the majority of the targets not intended for the running backs. 

Intermittently, Pitts shows the skillset that made Atlanta select him in the first place. Too often, he vanishes into thin air. Now, against a team with strong corners but safeties and linebackers that allow roughly seventy percent of opponent targets completed, the best answer remains the simplest. 

Allowing Pitts to climb the route tree in the intermediate to deep areas benefits the Falcons. On top of that, using the crossing routes to pick or wash the defender away will work as well. 

Overview

Make no mistake, the Atlanta Falcons will line up versus a top-10 defense in the Denver Broncos. This is the best defense, by some distance, that they will have played since Week 3 against the Kansas City Chiefs.

Yet, holes exists and prosperity will arise all over the field. Granted, Denver thrives against the run and possesses two excellent corners on the outside.

Yet, a veteran like Kirk Cousins can find a seam, a sliver of daylight to move the ball. While this may not end up a high scoring affair, the Falcons possess the talent to not only succeed but win the game.

Provided that they do not fall prey to playing into the Broncos; strengths, Atlanta can escape with a quality road win.

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Bill Husted, who charmed and inflamed Denver’s elite as a columnist for both The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, died at his Denver home in hospice care on Saturday at age 76.

He died from complications related to cancer, according to his wife, Polly Kruse.

The thousands of articles Husted wrote from the early 1980s through 2010s leave an archive of Denver culture that’s nearly unmatched in its detail and nuance, friends and colleagues said, from the foibles of the ultra-rich (some of whom he enraged with his writing) to tender moments at society galas.

“People always got that feeling reading his work that he was our guy, one of us,” said Joe Rassenfoss, who hired Husted away from a server job at Boccalino to write his first column for the Rocky Mountain News in 1983 — for $50 per week. “He wasn’t above us. He was our eyes and ears.”

That included literary quips on society culture and gossip, withering humor and, perhaps most importantly, fierce competitiveness in a town where more people knew each other than they do now.

Time was, Denver was smaller, newspapers were bigger, and Husted was revered and feared as the primary chronicler of the city’s cultural scene, said Sen. John Hickenlooper.

“He was a real Herb Caen figure — a man about town,” Hickenlooper said, referencing the influential San Francisco gossip writer and journalist. “He wrote one of the first articles about the Wynkoop Brewery. He also named one of our events, where we walked pigs down the alley to the Oxford Hotel on 17th and back. He called it The Running of the Pigs, or Pamplona on the Platte, which I’ll always think is an amazing turn of phrase.”

Husted and Hickenlooper stayed friends through Hickenlooper’s political ascension to mayor, governor, and Senator — in part, Hickenlooper thinks, because of Husted’s incredible love of listening to and telling stories, and the bonding that promoted.

“There was no one who did it like he did,” said Kim Christiansen, a 9News anchor who worked with Husted when he appeared on TV to share his work. “Every time he saw you he asked about someone in your world, which is a gift. He remembered people’s lives, which is not always the case in superficial relationships. I think he got a lot of scoops that way.”

The news media ecosystem then supported more than one of those jobs in town at the time.

“We always had a friendly little competition going,” said Joanne Davidson, The Post’s former society writer. “Our goal every day was to make the other choke on their Cheerios, because inevitably one of us would have something really juicy that the other didn’t have.”

Husted debuted as the society writer for the Rocky in October of 1986 with a story on the Carousel Ball, which Rassenfoss described as “the biggest, baddest bash in Denver in those days, put on by Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara. Because Marvin owned 20th Century Fox, he got lots of stars, that year ranging from Gary Coleman to Henry Kissinger, to come and mingle.” (One of Husted’s best story ledes, Rassenfoss added, was the 1992 phrase “Geraldo Rivera wants to punch me in the nose.”)

Husted was a familiar presence at those events, but also restaurants and bars, holding his beloved cigar and martini, friends said. His car usually stood out in the parking lot, given his license plate TELL ME. All of that ran parallel to a silliness he was also unafraid to showcase.

“He always made me laugh with these stupid things,” said Nancy Sagar, who was married to Husted for two years in the early 1990s and stayed good friends with him after their divorce. “He would go into the bathroom and come out intentionally with toilet paper hanging off the back of his pants and his shoes. And he would walk through the restaurant like that.”

Husted was born on Aug. 13, 1948, on the Upper East Side of New York City. At 10 years old, he “was riding subways and cabs, sneaking into clubs, (and) soaking up New York’s last golden age,” according to a biography in his novel “Let Me Tell You About the #VeryRich.”

Husted bounced between Denver, the East Coast and overseas before returning to Denver, where he became a morning fixture for newspaper readers. The Denver Post lured him away from the Rocky in 1996, Husted wrote, where he was the paper’s featured city columnist through 2011.

“He had no journalistic training, but was urbane, well-educated and had such a natural, conversational way of writing that you were immediately engaged,” wrote former Post editor and columnist Suzanne Brown, one of Husted’s first editors, via email.

“Amused, intrigued, you were right there with him as he made his rounds to clubs, parties and hot restaurants,” she wrote. “As an editor, I just had to correct his many misspellings of names and places, as he didn’t let such minor things get in the way of meeting a deadline. He would rarely admit this was the case and thank me for saving his bacon!”

Services are still being planned, according to Kruse.

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Originally Published: November 11, 2024 at 11:13 AM MST