In the shell-shocked silence of the Hard Rock Stadium visiting locker room, a group of reporters filtered away from Alex Singleton’s locker.
The linebacker motioned one back and asked a question, quietly, not knowing whether he actually wanted the answer.
“Was it the worst of all time?”
The answer brought no comfort.
Technically, Sept. 24, 2023 was not the worst defensive outing in NFL history. But it was, far and away, the worst in Broncos history.
Seventy points allowed. More than 350 yards surrendered running and passing each to Miami.
Denver was not just 0-3 under head coach Sean Payton, but off to the worst defensive start in franchise history under new coordinator Vance Joseph after the worst game in franchise history. The next week, the Broncos trailed 28-7 to Justin Fields and the Bears, who shredded Denver’s defense, too, before a massive second-half comeback.
To put it mildly, Joseph had a bad opening month in his return to Denver as the coordinator. He already arrived with questions, given his earlier head coaching tenure with the club ended when he was fired after two seasons. Payton very publicly talked about several other candidates he’d considered for the coordinator posting before landing on Joseph.
As Joseph tried to mesh some of his own system with a more Vic Fangio-style scheme run previously by Ejiro Evero in Denver — a style many of the returning players liked — the new coordinator found himself inside a burning defensive building.
“I mean, 70 points is a (crap) show,” said defensive tackle Zach Allen, who has had Joseph as his coordinator for all seven of his NFL seasons dating to 2019 in Arizona. “You do that, you’re 0-3, then Chicago, you’re down 28-7 at half and it’s like, ‘Oh my god.’”
“It was brutal,” cornerback Riley Moss, a rookie in 2023, told The Post recently. “That was my first NFL experience, like, is this how this (crap) is supposed to go? Obviously not.”
Two years later, Joseph is among the most popular head coaching candidates in the NFL.
Far from getting fired or continuing to struggle, the veteran coordinator instead turned the Broncos into one of the most feared defenses in football.
Far from the passive, read-and-react front deployed in 2023, Joseph has engineered an unprecedented assault on opposing quarterbacks, racking up 131 sacks and 306 quarterback hits in the past two regular seasons.
He did it, at the core, by being himself.
“That’s a Harvard Business School case study of leadership right there,” Allen told the Post.
‘I’ll go out on my shield’
In the spring of 2023, the only remnants left from Nathaniel Hackett’s time as Denver’s head coach were in the defensive meeting rooms.
The Broncos’ defense put forth a salty 2022 season under Evero before finally caving late in a lost season.
When Payton was hired, he cleaned out just about everybody on staff except a pair of talented young assistants in secondary coach Christian Parker and defensive line coach Marcus Dixon.
Joseph and players talked about taking some of the previous defensive principles and incorporating them into his system.
“Year 1, there definitely were people who were like, ‘I want to stick to the old ways and Evero’s way,’” Allen said. “And Vance tried to do that because it was a successful defense. We were kind of mixing the two.”
That quickly backfired when the season began. It wasn’t their only problem, but Joseph decided quickly that striking a balance wasn’t going to work.
“He wanted to try to meld a little bit of that, but especially after that Dolphins game, he was like, ‘If it’s going to go like that, I’ll go out on my shield,’” inside linebacker Justin Strnad told The Post.
The problem: There’s no good way to make a massive overhaul on the fly. The Broncos’ defense did improve dramatically, though, over the rest of the season. Denver won five straight and pushed to the doorstep of the playoff picture before finishing 8-9.
Publicly, the Broncos’ quarterback situation dominated offseason headlines. First, cutting Russell Wilson and taking $85 million in dead salary cap in the process. Then, drafting Bo Nix.
Joseph, meanwhile, helped oversee a defensive overhaul that drew far less attention.
Parker and Dixon left for jobs in Philadelphia and Minnesota, respectively — two very productive defenses in their own right. Denver promoted Jamar Cain to defensive line coach and hired Jim Leonhard to coach the secondary. Stalwart safety Justin Simmons was cut in the spring, the biggest in a series of personnel changes. The Broncos signed safety Brandon Jones in March and traded for defensive tackle John Franklin-Myers during the draft.
Then the group showed up for organized team activities in May. Joseph had a message in the first defensive meeting.
“He said, ‘I’m just going to rip it and do it my way,’” Allen recalled.
Added Moss, “We all kind of sat down and they taught us, this is how we’re going to do it. If you see it another way, yes, you can bring it up. Yes, we can have that conversation. But this is how we’re going to start off doing it.”
‘It’s something special’
Over the subsequent two seasons, few defenses have been more consistent and more disruptive than Denver’s.
Joseph’s group this year finished third in scoring and second in total defense. First in the red zone and second on third downs.
Over the past 34 regular-season games, the Broncos have 33 more sacks than anybody else. The Vikings are a distant second, with 98.
There are myriad reasons for the success. The Broncos have major hits in free agency like Allen, Jones and safety Talanoa Hufanga, among others. They’ve developed a host of draft picks and undrafted players into All-Pros and high-quality starters like outside linebackers Nik Bonitto and Jonathan Cooper, nickel Ja’Quan McMillian, Moss and more.
They, of course, have one of the best defensive players in football in cornerback and reigning defensive player of the year Pat Surtain II.
Those are premium tools and Joseph’s carpentry has been excellent and ornate.
“V.J.’s an aggressive play-caller. He’s going to dial stuff up,” Strnad said. … “His defense, there’s a lot of moving parts. Even on some of the pressures — not to give things away, but there are blitzes where you’re reading things on the fly that can change what goes on on that blitz. There’s a lot of things that go into the defense, but he’s done a great job.”
Joseph preaches players before scheme and lives by it.
He’s convinced players who struggled early that they could excel.
Bonitto this summer recalled Joseph bringing him up to his office after a dismal rookie year and telling him he could be special.
Moss, same thing.
“As a rookie, I was still kind of, ‘Can I play in the NFL?’” Moss said. “Everyone questions that. But he’s always been behind me, always had my back.”
Joseph’s match-heavy system requires players to think on the fly and communicate at a high level, but now, three years in with much of the core, they operate daily as Ph.Ds.
“He’s really good at just understanding (situations) and he’s not tied to, ‘It has to be this play, this play, this play,’” Allen said. “He looks at, what are our strengths? What are our weaknesses? And then he works in that space. From day dot, he’s been awesome with that. …
“This year, it was just that perfect mix where it’s the culmination of the talent and then on top of that, I think he’s done a hell of a job of explaining why we’re doing certain stuff and getting guys to 100% buy into it all. When you combine those two, it’s something special.”
‘His standard is set high’
Of course, should Joseph land a head coaching job, that kind of expertise is not necessarily waiting for him in a new locker room.
Systems take time to learn. Talent takes time to accumulate.
The New York Giants have a wealth of defensive difference-makers as they pursue a head coach, but not every team with a vacancy can say the same. Baltimore and Miami each have talent, too.
Plus, defense is just part of the equation when you’re in the big chair. The Broncos were in quarterback purgatory when Joseph had the head coaching job in 2017-18 and it showed. The current openings range from having promising young quarterbacks in place — Jaxson Dart with the Giants and Cam Ward in Tennessee — to Las Vegas owning the No. 1 pick in April’s draft, question marks in Atlanta, Cleveland, Miami and Arizona and MVP winner Lamar Jackson in his Baltimore prime.
Quarterback, staff, ownership, general manager. There are so many elements at play for head coaches that go beyond how to get your nickel on a free run to the quarterback in a critical moment.
In the Broncos locker room, though, players are just as likely to rave about Joseph the leader and person as they are Joseph the tactician.
Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning recently said on the “This is Football” podcast that, “I’m not sure there’s a better characteristic or quality for a head coach than, ‘Do your players play hard for you?’”
There are different ways to achieve that. Hufanga has seen multiple versions during his years in San Francisco and now as a first-year Broncos safety.
With Joseph, he said, two words come to mind: Accountability and consistency.
“There’s games this year where we’ve come in afterward for film and he’s been like, ‘This call is on me,’” Hufanga said. “ And you’re like, dang, there’s not a lot of coaches that are going to do that. They’re going to figure out a way to coach you through a play, but he’ll be like, ‘This play here: bad play, bad call, bad timing. That’s on me. That’s not on you guys.’”
If the guy standing at the front of the room is willing to put failure on his own shoulders, Hufanga said, then there’s no room for anybody else to pass off blame.
“That’s what he expects out of us, too,” the All-Pro candidate said. “If I make a mistake, I’ve got to be willing to own what I was thinking during that play. Why did I make that mistake? That way, they can help coach me to better processing and better reads. …
“If he’s going to do it, then who are we to not be accountable, too? We want to be our best for him. We’ve got to go out there and play to his standard. And his standard is set high.”
Hufanga said Joseph is “ferocious in the way he attacks life” and said he hasn’t noticed a difference at all as the season’s progressed and Joseph’s name has come up more and more as a head coaching candidate.
“Some people can get lost, especially like in his situation, where he’s getting odds to go other places or could be thinking about other opportunities, but, man, he’s been the same person every single day,” Hufanga said. “And that’s all you can ask for in this profession. That’s what he expects out of us and that’s the way he coaches us.”
Make no mistake, though, Joseph has been taking notes throughout his time in Denver. He’s talked extensively about what he’s learned from Payton and how he’d apply it if he gets the chance to run his own team again.
“How he paints the picture for each player. Each week’s game plan,” Joseph said on Thanksgiving, of what he’s taken from Payton’s style. “The best thing he has done is change the culture and that’s players. How we draft players — the draft process is a deep dive into players. The person, the player, what’s the vision for the player? There’s no guessing when you’re drafting players and we’ve drafted really well the last three years.
“Even in free agency, very careful of who you bring into your culture. The culture is changed by the players.”
The Broncos are hoping for a long playoff run and a trip to the Super Bowl to start February. Along the way, several teams will be kicking the tires on Joseph. Six of the seven with head coaching openings have asked to speak with him about head coaching jobs.
That would have been hard to imagine given the way his coordinator tenure started in Denver, but it’s plain to see why he’s in demand now.
“He’s a fighter. He persevered through it,” Allen said. “I’ve been with him the longest, obviously, but everybody here loves him. It’s awesome to see his success. He’s not just a great coach. He’s a great person.”
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