The head man smelled blood.
Dallas came to Empower Field on Sunday afternoon wielding some of the best weapons in the game, but riddled with holes from weapons they couldn’t stop.
This would be an old-fashioned mountain shootout between the Broncos and the Cowboys, the latter a franchise ranked dead-last in the NFL in total defense.
“We wanted,” Sean Payton reflected later Sunday, “to keep them last.”
On Saturday night, in the kind of film-review meeting that normally glazes eyes, Payton introduced a semi-surprise. Joe Harrington, the Broncos' director of football video, stitched together tape of 11 plays they'd repped throughout the week that Payton felt could go for touchdowns.