Regular season grades for every NFL team

If you had told me at the beginning of the 2015 NFL season that Peyton Manning would look washed up as the starting quarterback and that he wouldn’t make it through the entire year healthy, I would have said that the Denver Broncos would have struggled more than expected this season. Yet here we are at the conclusion of the regular season and Denver is 12-4, at the top of the AFC West, and occupying the No. 1 seed in the AFC heading into the playoffs.

However, their shortcomings on offense, even after Brock Osweiler came into the fold for the struggling and injured Manning, keep them from getting top marks for the season. That being said, their defense was simply unreal for most of the year. While teams like the New York Jets and the Buffalo Bills got all of the preseason hype leading into 2015 about being the best defenses in the league, there wasn’t a more fearsome defense on a weekly basis than that of the Broncos.

The defense helped Denver overcome a lot of glaring issues that this team had throughout the year, ranging from Peyton’s performance to a lack of a consistent running game to a poorly performing offensive line. They are in about the position that many people would’ve expected them to be coming into the year, they just took a roundabout and relatively unconventional way of getting there due to the hardships they faced.

Next: Detroit Lions