SI:AM | Broncos Country Missed Its Ride

Plus, behind the scenes of Aaron Judge’s breakthrough season.

Good morning, I’m Kevin Sweeney. I still don’t get what the Broncos were doing last night.

In today’s SI:AM:

🏈 Denver’s late-game woes

🗣️ Geno Smith’s triumphant return

⚾ Inside Judge’s race for 61

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What went wrong for the Broncos on MNF

Last night’s messy 17–16 win for the Seahawks in Russell Wilson’s not-so-friendly homecoming to Seattle was the perfect encapsulation of a wacky Week 1 in the NFL. Yet another big upset happened to wrap up a weekend of surprises, but it took plenty of sloppy play and some strange late-game decisions to get there. Here’s everything that went down.

Goal-line miscues

The Broncos had no issues moving the football in the second half, getting the ball inside the 3-yard line on three consecutive drives. Yet Denver scored just three total points on those drives, a fourth-quarter chip-shot field goal by Brandon McManus on the last of those three red zone trips.

The other two drives were ended by fumbles. First, Melvin Gordon coughed up the ball as he extended across the goal line to end a promising drive. Then, backfield mate Javonte Williams had the ball poked away as he searched for the end zone after the Broncos played out of the shotgun rather than under center from inside the 1-yard line.

The Seattle defense was no doubt opportunistic, but there’s a reason it’s rare to win a game when you get outgained by 180 yards: Denver’s sloppiness in the red zone cost them the game.

Clock management woes

First-year head coach Nathaniel Hackett’s first time navigating an end-of-game situation was baffling, to say the least.

Despite all the red-zone issues and massive amounts of penalty yardage, the Broncos were still incredibly well positioned to march down the field and win the game when they got the ball back with just over four minutes to go and all three timeouts in hand. The drive started methodically, with Denver’s offense moving just 16 yards before the two-minute warning. That should have been the time for the Broncos to pick up the pace, but they never did.

After a nine-yard pickup set up a fourth-and-5 from the Seattle 46-yard line, outside typical field goal range, Hackett held off on using a timeout until the play clock approached zero with the offense still on the field. Then, he sent out McManus for a long-shot 64-yard field goal that pushed wide left and sent the Broncos home losers.

As Conor Orr writes, it just didn’t feel like the right move … especially with a new QB worth a quarter of a billion dollars:

In these moments, we’d all like to imagine ourselves doing the cool coaching thing, lowering the aviator shades over our eyes, going with our gut and dialing up some kind of finger pistol-inducing piece of football trickery that just so happened to be laying in our back pocket, setting up an easier game-winning field goal. We’d imagine doing the opposite of what Broncos head coach Nathaniel Hackett did, which was pulling a quarterback on whom the franchise spent years’ worth of draft capital to acquire and hundreds of millions of dollars to extend.

Seahawks find a way

It’s hard to believe that the Seahawks will win many games moving forward if they are outplayed so drastically between the 20s like they were against Denver. But it’s hard not to be impressed with the resolve coach Pete Carroll and quarterback Geno Smith’s team showed in the opener with a rowdy fan base cheering them on.

Smith was quiet in the second half but was an efficient 23–28 passing and threw for two touchdowns without a turnover. Plus, his “They wrote me off, I ain’t write back though,” postgame quote was money after his first Week 1 start since 2014. Is this team a likely playoff contender? Perhaps not. But Carroll loves his young team and the fight they displayed to open the season means the Seahawks might be a tougher out in the NFC West than most thought coming into the season.

The best of Sports Illustrated

Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

In today’s Daily Cover, Tom Verducci writes about Aaron Judge’s historic season:

This season is defined by the intersection of forces in Judge’s career. Of the wisdom gleaned from those 12,000 pitches. Of the Yankees’ offering him a contract extension of $213.5 million just before Opening Day and then, to his disappointment, going public with the terms of it after he turned it down. Of his impending free agency. Of the advice he received from a former teammate about how to protect what had been his injury-prone body. Of accomplishing by July 28 the one goal this year that makes him proudest—and has nothing to do with hitting home runs.

Conor Orr gives the Bills the top spot in his NFL power rankings after a dominant Week 1 performance. … Pat Forde’s Forde-Yard Dash hits on some surprising teams like Duke, Washington State and Kansas, as well as which coaches could be next on the chopping block after Scott Frost’s firing Sunday. … Richard Johnson updates his bowl projections after the second full week of college football. … Tom Verducci tells you why you shouldn’t count out the Brewers just yet despite their uphill battle to make the playoffs. … Plus, Avi Creditor explains what a new manager at Chelsea could mean for USMNT star Christian Pulisic with the World Cup looming.

💰 We also have a new episode of The Bag, SI’s podcast covering the world of sports business. Hosts Rashad Jennings and Lindsay McCormick welcome entrepreneur and sports agent AJ Vaynerchuk to the show, where they discuss the evolving crypto market’s impact on sports. Listen to this and past episodes here.

Around the sports world

Mike Trout has now hit a home run in seven consecutive games, but it wasn’t enough for the Angels to beat the Guardians. … After prematurely celebrating Sunday, the Dodgers became the first team to officially clinch a playoff berth with a win over the Diamondbacks last night as they inch closer to 100 victories. … The Premier League will return this weekend, though three matches will still be postponed. … There’s been plenty of NFL injury news coming out of Week 1, including positive updates for T.J. Watt and Mac Jones but potentially bad news for Jamal Adams. 

The top five...

… things I saw yesterday.

5. Richard Sherman’s Twitter trolling.

4. The return of the ManningCast.

3. This incredible bare-handed catch.

2. RGIII racing a hawk.

1. These mockups of an Olympic venue right next to the Eiffel Tower. 

SIQ

Geno Smith engineered the Seahawks to a win last night over former QB Russell Wilson and the Broncos in his first Week 1 start in eight seasons. Originally a second-round pick of the Jets, Smith was one of just three second-round QBs to start at quarterback in Week 1 this season. Who are the other two?

Check tomorrow’s newsletter for the answer.

Yesterday’s SIQ: Albert Pujols hit two more home runs over the weekend to inch closer to that 700 career home run milestone. Though he’s enjoyed a renaissance this season, the 42-year-old is not nearly the most prolific aging slugger in MLB history. What player has hit the most home runs in his age-40 season and later? (For this leaderboard, players’ ages are used on June 30 of that season.)

Answer: Carlton Fisk, who hit an impressive 72 home runs in his age-40 season and beyond. He actually played until his age-45 season in 1993, in which he hit just one home run for the White Sox.

Maybe even more remarkably, Fisk caught the majority of the games he played during those years.

The rest of the top 5 is rounded out by Darrell Evans, Barry Bonds, Dave Winfield and Raúl Ibañez. Pujols is down in 10th.

—Josh Rosenblat

From the Vault: Sept. 13, 1999

Photo Illustration by Amy Guip

This section often gives us a chance to reminisce about stories that make us smile or help explore our fandom through SI’s trove of historic articles. But with that, there are also examples of profound reporting that can reveal the dark underbelly of sports.

In 1999, SI published an extensive report on child molestation in youth sports. The story details numerous accounts of predation and trauma. William Nack and Don Yaeger wrote:

While there have been no formal studies to determine how many child molesters have coached youth teams, a computer-database search of recent newspaper stories reveals more than 30 cases just in the last 18 months of coaches in the U.S. who have been arrested or convicted of sexually abusing children engaged in nine sports from baseball to wrestling—and this despite the fact that child sex-abuse victims, for reasons ranging from shame and embarrassment to love or fear of their molesters, rarely report the crime.

In the decades since the story was published, massive scandals have come to light involving predators having access to victims through organized sports. In January 2018, former Team USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing 150 women and girls. Former Penn State football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted in ’12 of 45 counts of child sexual abuse and was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in state prison, and was resentenced with the same terms in ’19.

These are the types of investigative reporting and stories that make us shudder. But they cannot be ignored.

—Josh Rosenblat

Check out more of SI’s archives and historic images at vault.si.com.

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