The Skeptic's NFL Training Camp Guide: AFC West

The preseason previews continue. It's AFC West time. I only write these brief introductions because the features look a little odd if they begin with the subheaders. I know I am supposed to back these intros with keywords like Patrick Mahomes, Justin Herbert and Taylor Swift to titillate the search engines, but that's just not my style.

Denver Broncos

The Texans, only weirder.

Leadership Structure

Sean Payton loves to simultaneously praise and neg his players, even Bo Nix, sounding a lot like a 1950s husband on his second martini. (Bernice sure is doing a fine job of almost keeping the weight off, isn’t she?) 

Vance Joseph dials up blitzes by the dozen. Up-and-coming offensive coordinator Davis Webb will call the plays this year. GM George Paton is just Payton wearing Groucho glasses. 

Quarterback

Bo Nix is a meditation cairn. He is the sound of one hand clapping. Stop striving for hot takes. Just accept his existence. Then accept your own existence. Breathe out noxious Nix takes. Breathe in the mysteries of the universe. Can you hear the faraway trees rustling in the warm summer stillness? That’s the sound of your soul inching closer to enlightenment. 

Offense

Jaylen Waddle should liven things up a bit, thank heavens. Rookie running back Jonah Coleman will keep the fantasy speculators busy. Incumbents like Courtland Sutton, Evan Engram and J.K. Dobbins have returned to trudge down the field four yards at a time. Garett Bolles and one of the league’s best offensive lines keep the Broncos trudging in the right direction.

Defense

Blitz-happy, loaded with troublemakers, and generally much more fun than the offense. 

Special Teams

Return man Marvin Mims provides the offense with much-needed field position boosts. Wil Lutz makes most of the kicks he’s supposed to make, at least until nuclear winter arrives in late January. 

Camp Stuff

Nix underwent surgery on his broken ankle on January 19th, then cleanup surgery in April. He was participating in 7-on-7’s by June minicamp. 

“He’ll clearly be ready in time for training camp,” Payton said of Nix in June. This may mean that Nix will be ready for camp, or it may mean that Payton wants Nix to know that everyone knows that Payton expects him to be ready for camp. Everything Payton says is actually an intricately coded message. 

Dobbins played well for the first ten weeks of last season. He then remembered that he was J.K. Dobbins and immediately suffered a Lisfranc injury. “What I’m going to show is that last year wasn’t a fluke,” Dobbins said in June. ”I’ll be No. 1 this year. And there won’t be any injuries.” Sorry, J.K. last year wasn’t a fluke, except that you only missed half the season instead of the traditional three-fourths. 

RJ Harvey, on the other hand, struggled to crack the 3.0-yards-per-rush barrier until Week 14, but improved as both a rusher and receiver late in the year and in the playoffs. And then there’s Coleman, a fourth-round pick from Washington, was one of the best tackle-breakers in the nation before trying to play through a late-season ankle injury. Jaleel McLaughlin and Tyler Badie also refuse to go away.

Payton has always used deep committee backfields. The plan for 2026 may be to ride the Dobbins-Harvey platoon until Dobbins’ annual season-ending injury, then pivot to a Coleman-Harvey platoon. But anything is possible.

Early Thoughts

Nix-watching, running back speculation and running Payton’s press conferences through Duolingo will keep Broncos camp-watching entertaining, offsetting the scarcity of rookies to gawk at and the fact that we won’t see much of Waddle. 

The Broncos may be contenders hiding in plain sight: they were one playmaker away from the Super Bowl last year, then they traded for said playmaker. But the Chiefs appear to be back, and Nix is very unassuming, making it easy to toss the Broncos back into the Wild Card bin. The DVOA projections for the Broncos are also a little lukewarm. I think we might be sleeping on them. But let’s make sure Payton isn’t gaslighting everyone (including Nix) about Nix before projecting another deep playoff run. 

Kansas City Chiefs

Devastating injuries! Prison sentences! Sexy newcomers! A wedding. The Chiefs have become a long-running daytime soap opera. Liking them is now a guilty pleasure. 

Leadership Structure

Andy Reid became a Vince Lombardi-like figure at about the same time Bill Belichick became a Hugh Hefner-like figure. 

Quarterback

Patrick Mahomes set off his own fireworks during a Fourth of July celebration. That was dumb. Everyone knows that Justin Fields was signed to set off Mahomes’ fireworks for him. 

Offense

Travis Swift-Kelce still gets it done, somehow. Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker will reintroduce the Chiefs to the concept of the broken tackle. Rashee Rice recovered from knee surgery while in prison for a parole violation this summer; if you can’t change your ways, you can at least learn how to multitask.

Defense

Trent McDuffie and other veterans are out. Rookies Mansoor Delane, Peter Woods and R Mason Thomas are in. Chris Jones still anchors everything. Coordinator Steve Spagnuolo has rebuilt the Chiefs defense on the fly in the past.

Special Teams

Harrison Butker was reportedly not invited to the Swift/Kelce wedding. 

Wait: being a misogynistic, neo-Puritanical, right-wing stick-in-the-mud can get you uninvited to expensive, inconvenient destination weddings where you will just feel out of place and socially awkward? Hmmm…

A woman’s place is beside the butter churn! The Stepford Wives were sexy! Beef tallow! Beef tallow!