DENVER (at Sea.): The Broncos are a 5.5-point dog, but that seems high. At 8-9, their record was only one game worse than Seattle’s last year.
They might have one of the top half-dozen coaches in the league, while the Seahawks have an up-and-comer in his first game in the top spot. It seems like the offense should be decent, with Seattle last year allowing more points than all but two teams. Mike Macdonald presumably will help, but it took him a few weeks to get Baltimore’s defense dialed in when he showed up in 2022, with Tua Tagovailoa throwing 6 TDs in their home opener and Mac Jones passing for 321 the next week. We’ve got the Broncos projected to score 38 touchdowns this year, and we’re rolling them out in Week 1 as if they’ll produce at that kind of clip.
Bo Nix is a rookie, but he looks surprisingly decent. He was in command of the offense in the preseason, getting the ball out of his hands quickly, completing 77 percent of his passes, with no sacks in 30 attempts – he looks like he’s better than Russell Wilson already. Sean Payton knows how to put together an offense. He’s not going to ask Nix to do too much. But he’ll have him peppering the field with short passes, and that should result in at least spurts of production. Of the last nine first-round quarterbacks, over half of them threw for more than 240 yards in their first start, and Nix is looking like one of those kind of guys. Only three passed for fewer than 200 (Lance, Fields, Young), and Nix doesn’t look like one of those. Typically, rookies don’t step on the field and crank out touchdowns. Those previous nine combined to throw only 8 TDs in their first starts. But this is a Payton offense. His last two teams have thrown 29 and 28 TD passes. The Broncos produced 28 TD passes versus only 8 TD runs last year; if we’re working under the premise that Nix is better than Wilson right now, that makes 2 TDs look like a possibility. He’s got some mobility as well, with 26 rushing touchdowns in 61 college starts.
Javonte Williams and Jaleel McLaughlin look like an underrated pair of running backs. (We’re considering them a pair, with Audric Estime probably not showing up much until later in the year.) They’re working against a defense that ranked next-to-last against the run last year. The Seahawks will be better this year (they have a new coaching staff and picked up 306-pound Byron Murphy with the 16th pick in the first round), but a credible enough matchup. More notably, Williams and McLaughlin should be heavily involved as pass catchers. The Broncos completed a league-high 131 passes to running backs last year, and that’s long been a staple in Sean Payton’s offenses. With the pass catching, Williams and McLaughlin have a nice floor of production for PPR formats. Denver scored over 3 times as many touchdowns on passes last year, but you don’t get everything.
It looks like a decent-enough matchup for Courtland Sutton. He’s the No. 1 option here, and his highlight tape last year was among the most impressive in the league, overcoming pass interference on two touchdowns and catching two others that were so unlikely they were originally ruled incompletions. He’s good, and a league-high 17 percent of his catches last year went for touchdowns. But Sutton is working with a new quarterback, and they haven’t overworked him. That is, they didn’t pad his stats with a bunch of easy catches last year. He caught 10 touchdowns, but he also averaged only 3.7 catches for 48 yards per week. That ranks him only 37th among wide receivers in per-game production (in PPR leagues). That climbs to about 23rd if we toss out a couple of games he left early. But he’s not a 90-catch guy. At least he wasn’t with Russell Wilson. But whatever you thought of Sutton coming into the season, that ranking is reasonable for Week 1.
Prior to the cutdown to 53, we would have figured Tim Patrick would have been the team’s 2nd-best receiver. He started all of the preseason games, catching all 5 of the passes thrown his way. But they released him. That leaves them with Josh Reynolds and a trio of youngsters. Reynolds averaged only 2.7 catches for 38 yards in his last 28 games with the Lions, with 8 TDs. Previously, the Rams and Titans have given up on him. Marvin Mims and Troy Franklin have more potential to maybe hit on a big play, but neither played much with the first-unit offense in the preseason. This situation is wide open enough that even seventh-rounder Devaughn Vele could be their No. 2 guy.
Best to pass on the tight ends. Adam Trautman, Greg Dulcich and Lucas Krull may all play, and probably none of them will be used all that much.
Wil Lutz looks like a middle-of-the-pack prospect at kicker. He’s not great (the Broncos scored a below-average 119 kicking points last year) but he’s facing a modest opponent. The Seahawks allowed 130 points to the position last year, 8th-most in the league.
We’re putting a below-average grade on the Broncos Defense, but there are some selling points. The Seahawks are starting the season without their right tackle, and they’ve got a new offensive coordinator who’s never coached at the NFL level. Marvin Mims was a Pro Bowl returner last year, with a 99-yard touchdown on a kickoff and a non-scoring 52-yard punt return. Geno Smith has been a neutral quarterback the last two years (for fantasy defense purposes), averaging 2.4 sacks in his 32 starts, with 20 interceptions and 7 lost fumbles.
This report is just a small snippet of the Week 1 edition of Fantasy Index Weekly, part of the In-Season Analyst & Super Fanatic Packages. The newsletter includes our player rankings and 20-plus pages of matchup previews, plus stat projections and custom rankings for the games being played this weekend.
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