The Denver Broncos had a chance to make a statement in their 2026 season opener. That wouldn’t come to fruition as the defense cratered and quarterback Bo Nix collapsed in an embarrassing 31-10 Monday Night Football defeat to the rival Kansas City Chiefs.<\/p>\n
Nix made his first appearance since going down with an ankle injury in last year’s playoffs and looked extremely rusty. Denver’s opening offensive drive began with Nix getting sacked and ended with rookie corner Monsoor Delane picking the signal-caller off, the first of three turnovers the Broncos’ QB had on the night.<\/p>\n
Those turnovers, along with a modest 131 yards and one touchdown through the air and just two yards on three rushing attempts, led Nix to finish Week 1 with just 6.4 fantasy points. It marked the lowest scoring total of the passer’s career, while his QB31 ranking was also his worst since taking over as Denver’s starter in 2024.<\/p>\n
After finishing as the QB7 in back-to-back seasons, there was optimism that Nix would once again rate as a top-10 QB and potentially even make a leap into the top-five performers of his position. Monday’s performance, along with a brutally tough schedule\u2014one that will see the Broncos take on a slew of top defenses over the coming two months\u2014should have tempered those expectations.<\/p>\n
While Nix shouldn’t be discarded quite yet, Denver’s passing offense is clearly still a work in progress. The quarterback has to show improvement before he can be safely started in standard leagues again, so consider Nix nothing more than a decent backup option for the time being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Denver Broncos had a chance to make a statement in their 2026 season opener. That wouldn’t come…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":893030,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,593,85],"class_list":["post-893029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/893030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}