The Denver Broncos outlasted the Cleveland Browns Monday night in a battle of big plays, taking a back-and-forth explosion, 41-32.
"Holy cow," Broncos coach Sean Payton said in his first words stepping to the podium. "Some games go in a direction you think they are going to go. Obviously, that one went in a much different direction. We did enough and made enough plays in the end to win."
The Broncos put up 400 yards, including a 93-yard scoring dart from Bo Nix to Marvin Mims Jr., and the defense added two pick-sixes, including cornerback Ja'Quan McMillian's score with 1:48 left to secure the victory.
"It was a big play, the game was full of them," Payton said of McMillan's pick-six. "That was significant. That was one of the key plays."
That's an understatement.
Given how easily Jameis Winston and the Browns offense moved the ball up and down the field, a two-point lead with just under two minutes remaining seemed tenuous at best.
Monday night offered more explosives than a Fourth of July festival. Sides combined for 952 yards, 73 combined points, 47 first downs, 145 offensive plays, 6.6 yards per play and a partridge in a pear tree.
Each time the Broncos looked to pull away early, the Browns answered. A Nik Bonitto pick-six in the second quarter gave Denver a 21-10 lead, only to see the defense allow Winston to march Cleveland down to end the half in the end zone.
Early in the third quarter, Nix lasered a pass so picture perfect even da Vinci would have been jealous that Mims took 93 yards to the house to stretch Denver's lead to 28-17. The next play from scrimmage, Winston hit former Broncos wideout Jerry Jeudy for a 70-yard TD bomb. And around we went.
It marked the first time since at least 1991 that there were 70-plus-yard offensive TDs on back-to-back plays in a game, per Research.
A previously impervious Denver defense got walked up and down the field, allowing 552 yards of offense, including 497 yards and four TDs from Winston and 235 yards and a score on nine catches from Jeudy.
"Obviously when we go back and look at that tape, we are going to look at a lot of things defensively that we would have done differently," Payton said. "We have to. We had two interceptions for touchdowns and a third interception. I told them in the locker room that it was not pretty, and yet in the end we did what we had to do, especially late."
The two pick-sixes saved the day for Denver. The victory pushed Payton's crew to 8-5, solidifying their two-game lead for the No. 7 seed with four games to play.
