The Denver Broncos are not going to be picked by many to be a good team in 2024. A true bold prediction would say that they are going to be. Instead, Conor Orr of Sports Illustrated, as part of his 100 bold predictions before the 2024 season, emphatically predicts that they will be really bad.
Reading through these predictions, some are interesting, some that aren't bold at all, and then some that are just so quirky that it's hard to tell which category they should fit into. But he makes two predictions concerning the Broncos.
Toward the end of his piece, Orr predicts that Bo Nix will win the starting job outright. While this is far from bold, it's a prediction most Broncos fans hope to see come true.
But it's his other prediction that caught my eye and the one I will focus on here.
Riley Dixon will lead the league in punts
Will Riley Dixon beat out Trenton Gill for Broncos' punting job?
First, Orr's prediction assumes that Riley Dixon will even be the Broncos' punter in 2024. The team signed Trenton Gill during the offseason and there is a decent chance that he will win the job. Either way, Orr may be willing to put either of them into this prediction.
The player who leads the league in punts is almost always going to be on a bad team, or at least one that is offensively challenged. Orr predicts that Dixon will punt the ball 97 times this season.
Last year, only two players punted the ball more than that — Thomas Morstead of the New York Jets (99) and Bryce Baringer of the New England Patriots (98). What do those two teams have in common? Aside from playing in the same division, they were two of the worst teams in 2023.
Looking down the list, Jamie Gillan of the New York Giants was third with 95 punts, playing on a terrible team.
Dixon was sixth in the league last season with 79 punts. Orr predicts him to punt it nearly 20 more times? Ouch. In other words, he expects the Broncos to be perhaps the worst team in the league in 2024, or certainly one of them.
