The Denver Broncos were outplayed so badly for three quarters that even the Defensive Player of the Year had given up on the game.
"I lost hope, I ain't gonna lie. I lost hope," cornerback Patrick Surtain II said, via The Associated Press.
Denver trailed, 19-0, entering the fourth quarter. The offense put up an anemic seven total first downs across its first eight possessions, ending on the New York side of the 50-yard line once on those drives.
Then the fourth quarter started, and the wind shifted in the Mile High City. The offense finally got out of its own way, and the defense started looking more like its normal self.
Denver clawed its way back with four fourth-quarter touchdowns and overcame a Jaxson Dart score with under 40 seconds left to drive for the game-winning field goal in an epic 33-32 victory.
"We fought to the end," Surtain said. "In this league, no matter how much you're down, there's always a will, and there's always a way."
The Broncos pulled it to 19-8 early in the fourth quarter, but a wacky tipped pass allowed the Giants to answer with a 41-yard score from Dart to Theo Johnson. Bo Nix answered again, getting Denver to within 10 with 5:19 left on a 7-yard TD run. The defense forced a Dart INT that the Broncos turned into another quick score. A three-and-out gave Nix the ball with 2:42, and he marched the crew 68 yards in six plays for the go-ahead score.
The defense gave the lead back, with the aid of several penalties, but the 37 seconds were plenty of time for Nix to not only get his club into field-goal range, but make it an easy 39-yarder for Wil Lutz.
"I don't even know how to score 33 points in a quarter," Nix said, per the team transcript. "That's kind of insane, but it's just whatever we had to get done and we did it."
The 33 points scored by the Broncos in the fourth quarter set a franchise record. It also marked the most points in the fourth quarter in NFL history by a team that was shut out through three quarters, per NFL Research.
"We're fighters," Marvin Mims Jr. said. "We fought back and ended up winning. Being down that much and coming back to win, it says something about our team."
The dismal part early was that it wasn't a bunch of fluke plays that cost the offense. There weren't back-to-back pick-sixes or something wild that dug their hole. The offense simply couldn't get out of its own way. Awful penalties, bad throws, poor catch attempts and bad blocking. You name it, the offense struggled through it early.
"We had to find a way to clean up our mess,'' Broncos coach Sean Payton said.
In the fourth quarter, they finally figured out how to move the ball again.
After the first score of the final stanza was capped by a Troy Franklin two-yard TD on a fluke tipped ball, Nix felt things turning.
"I was thinking about how I was going to answer questions if we got shut out,'' Nix said. "Once we scored and got the two-point conversion, it was like we knew how to play again."
Hopefully, for the sake of blood pressure concerns in Denver, moving forward, it won't take three-quarters of a game for the Broncos to figure out how to play again.
