The Broncos lost the first game of the Russell Wilson era on a missed 64-yard field goal attempt on Monday night with 20 seconds remaining. Wilson was initially on the field to attempt a fourth-and-5 conversion, but the offense bled about 30 seconds off the clock as Wilson accepted a play from the sidelines, casually spacing out his teammates and correcting a receiver’s positioning before ultimately taking a timeout and bringing the kicking unit on.
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.
Of course, that’s not what happened. Despite the call being analytically defensible (if, as ESPN noted, you run the numbers from the 20-second mark and not the 50-second mark), we’re going to spend the space and time between the end of Week 1 and the beginning of Week 2 roasting the Broncos. It is our low-hanging fruit of sustenance. The kick missed by a few inches. We all had a good time pointing out that we would have done anything else.
