Thursday Night Football Afterword: Raiders vs Broncos

After a high-profile NFC South matchup last week, TNF went
back to low-profile games with this AFC West matchup.
Photo credit to NFL Network.

The game wasn’t really all that memorable outside of some benchmarks Peyton Manning reached over the course of the affair in Oakland.

In 2004, Jake Plummer tied John Elway’s franchise record for touchdown passes in a season at 27. Eight years later, Manning has 30 so far, his seventh season with that many, and he has three games to go.

Manning also threw his 5,000^th completion, second all-time, during the game.

More importantly, Manning led the Broncos to their eighth straight victory. Though it was less impressive due to Oakland’s low run defense rank, Denver made it a point to use Knowshon Moreno, who carried the ball 32 times with Ronnie Hillman spelling him for four carries. Manning threw the ball 36 times, so it was an extraordinarily balanced attack for a Peyton Manning-led offense.

Denver’s primary focus over the next three games is to continue to show improvement from one week to the next. The semi-close final score of 26-13 doesn’t really show how thoroughly Denver beat Oakland last night. Manning threw for over 300 yards while Moreno and Hillman combined for nearly 150 rushing yards and nearly four yards per carry.

Denver is not pleased with the final result though. When you gain that kind of yardage and give up less than 300 passing yards and fewer than 75 rushing yards, you expect to win by more than 13 points.

Manning made one particularly bad throw in the red zone which kept the score from being a little more indicative of the kind of game Denver played. He had to adjust his release very quickly but ended up severely under-throwing his receiver on what should have been an easy touchdown pass. Phillip Adams made an excellent play on the ball and managed to pick it off.

This was the second time in three weeks that Denver played a bad AFC West opponent – they played Kansas City in Week 12 – and seemingly barely skated by with a victory. They played much better last night than they did against the Chiefs, but they also were not pleased with last night’s game and know that it isn’t the kind of game that equates to playoff victories when you have New England and Houston to go up against.

The Broncos will come over to Maryland next Sunday to play the Ravens before heading back home for what should be easy wins against the Browns and Chiefs. With the schedule winding down, next week’s matchup will be a good indication of how much the easy schedule in the second half of this season has affected Denver’s ability to play good teams. They will be watching closely as the Ravens take on the Redskins in Landover this Sunday.

Thanks for reading everyone and enjoy the rest of Week 14. I’ll be back Monday with my Sunday Afterwords!