Offense – C

It was an all-or-noth­ing game for the Bron­cos. On their two scor­ing dri­ves, they ran 19 plays and gained 125 yards. On their oth­er nine dri­ves, they had a total of nine first downs. Drew Lock had 11 incom­ple­tions and three were drops — one by tight end Jake Butt and two by rook­ie receiv­er Jer­ry Jeudy. Lock was sol­id over­all (95.0 rat­ing) and found tight end Noah Fant ear­ly and often. When they look back, though, two dri­ves while lead­ing 14–13 will be mad­den­ing. On the first, the Bron­cos moved 24 yards, but had no gain on sec­ond-and‑3 and an incom­ple­tion on third-and‑3. On the sec­ond, Jeudy dropped a quick slant on first down that might have sealed the game.

Defense – C

The Bron­cos couldn’t make a third fourth-quar­ter stop, allow­ing Ten­nessee to kick the win­ning field goal with 17 sec­onds left on the clock. Der­rick Hen­ry rushed 31 times for 116 yards, gaudy num­bers, but the Bron­cos lim­it­ed him to only 3.7 yards per car­ry and a long of 13 yards. But the cov­er­age was too leaky and soft. Ryan Tan­nehill com­plet­ed 29-of-43 pass­es for 249 yards and the Bron­cos had trou­ble account­ing for slot receiv­er Adam Humphries (six catch­es). The Titans con­vert­ed sev­en of their 16 third-down oppor­tu­ni­ties, allow­ing them to run 19 more plays than the Bron­cos. Inside line­backer Alexan­der John­son had a cru­cial per­son­al foul penal­ty to negate rook­ie Michael Ojemudia’s inter­cep­tion. But like last year, there was no clos­ing kick by the Bron­cos’ defense.

Spe­cial teams – B

Only return­er Dion­tae Spencer’s bad deci­sion to catch a punt at his 3‑yard line kept the spe­cial teams from get­ting an A on Mon­day. Shel­by Har­ris blocked a field goal attempt and Sam Mar­tin was ter­rif­ic in his Bron­cos debut, plac­ing his punts toward the side­line to allow the cov­er­age play­ers to get down the field. Mar­tin aver­aged 42.6 yards net.

Coach­ing – D
 
Two deci­sions should be sec­ond-guessed. In the first half, the Bron­cos faced a fourth-and-goal from the Titans’ 1‑yard line. The pre­vi­ous three plays had gained a yard, but Pat Shurmur’s thought was good, using three tight ends. But on the final play, the Bron­cos used three receivers and one tight end (Jake Butt). The shov­el pass to Butt in traf­fic was doomed and the Titans made a stand. And in the final two min­utes, coach Vic Fan­gio had three time­outs to save some sec­onds for his offense after Ten­nessee moved into field goal range. But Fan­gio opt­ed against using of them, ques­tion­able because it left time for only three plays at the end.