Broncos blitzed by four straight TD drives, outclassed across the board in 41-10 loss to Ravens: “We got whooped”

One minute, Nix was in the end zone and the Broncos were thinking it’s going to be 17-14 before the break and the next they were down 38-10.

“It’s a big swing,” Payton said. “You know when you play a good team like this on the road, you’re wanting to get it into the fourth quarter and we weren’t able to do that.”

Not even close.

After punting on their first possession, the Ravens scored on seven straight drives. Tucked in the middle of that: Four straight touchdown marches that turned a potential fight into an early knockout. Defensive coordinator Vance Joseph’s group got shredded in a way that’s been rare since that 70-20 blowout in Week 3 last fall.

Joseph on Thursday noted the balance and explosion in Baltimore’s top-ranked offense but had an approach he was set on taking.

“You have to take something away and my preference is the run game and make them throw it,” he said. “We’ll see how that works out on Sunday. We have a plan to get both stopped, but we’ll see how that comes out.”

It did not come out well.

Jackson torched the Broncos, completing 16 of 19 passes for 280 yards and threw two of his three touchdowns to Flowers. He only ran three times — one turned a quality pass rush into an easy first down — but routinely extended plays to find good matchups down the field.

“There’s going to be a number of things when we do our meeting tomorrow and say, ‘Alright if we played them again next week, what would we do differently?’” Payton said. “Certainly (keeping Jackson contained) would be one of them.

“He’s too good a player.”

The Broncos didn’t just miss opportunities Sunday. They handed far too many to a team that already had several advantages.

In the grand scheme of 17 games, 5-4 still leaves plenty of routes to postseason contention. The complexion of this one casts at least some shadow on any belief that the Broncos actually have enough to get there, but wide receiver and captain Courtland Sutton (six catches for 122 yards) said he remains confident.

“We had a lot of opportunities that could have went another way,” Sutton said. “But one of my boys always says, ‘If ‘if’ was a fifth, we’d all be drunk.’

“That’s a great way to go about it. We can say ‘if this, if that’ all day, but we didn’t capitalize when we needed to and that’s the moral of the story, I think you can say, for this game.”