Jonah Coleman, the Broncos’ Last Back Standing, Delivered the Win Denver Was Losing

Every box score from Denver’s comeback will lead with the receiver who caught everything and the quarterback who finally stopped throwing it away. The game itself turned on the one player nobody had penciled in — the only rookie the Broncos dressed, a depth back who by the closing minutes was the last healthy runner they had. Jonah Coleman did not play like a contingency. He played like the plan.

That is the tell with Coleman, and it has been since Stockton. Put him in the worst spot on the field, with the least margin, and something in him settles rather than tightens. When both of the backs ahead of him walked off with hamstring trouble, Denver did not so much reach for a fallback as discover it already had a fighter — and Coleman, it turns out, is a literal one.

He grew up boxing in Stockton, California, and went back to it this offseason, training in a gym in Chandler, Arizona, between the draft and rookie minicamp. “I got back into it because it really teaches you how to think when you’re tired and you’re exhausted,” he said. That is not a line a coach hands a player. It is the exact skill a four-minute drill demands, which is why the end of a one-score game could land on the roster’s only rookie without the roof caving in.

The touchdown was three yards, first-and-goal, midway through the fourth quarter — Denver’s first rushing score of the season and its first lead of the day. Coleman answered it with the Mile High Salute, the celebration Terrell Davis turned into Broncos scripture. It was not a rookie borrowing a legend’s move for the cameras: Coleman and Davis share a marketing representative and have talked more than once. “You just have to pay respect to the guys that came before you,” Coleman said. “He’s one of the best to ever do it. At the end of the day, you are playing for something bigger than yourself.”

Then he closed the game out, which is the harder thing. On the drive that sealed it he carried six times, stayed inbounds, took what the clock needed and did not put the ball on the ground. “He handled that situation perfectly, the best you possibly can,” receiver Courtland Sutton said. “He went out there, got down, got the first downs and protected the ball.” Sean Payton, who has spent a career distrusting rookies in exactly these minutes, did not bother hedging. “That certainly didn’t feel like a rookie series,” the coach said. “He came up big, and we needed it.”

The résumé said this should have been beyond him. Coleman is 5-foot-8 and 220 pounds, a build scouts file under “compact” when they mean overlooked. He began at Arizona, transferred to Washington, and left college with more than 3,000 rushing yards and a fourth-round grade — the 108th pick, the only rookie Denver put in uniform on game day. The man he leaned on to be ready was the one he replaced. “J.K. always preach to me, be ready for your opportunity, be ready for your moment,” Coleman said of J.K. Dobbins, the starter whose hamstring opened the door.

None of this erases the name the game will keep. Jaylen Waddle, the receiver Denver paid a first-round pick and more to pry out of Miami, turned a one-catch opener into a 138-yard afternoon — the most by a Bronco in a home debut since Rick Upchurch in 1975 — and a 49-yard strike carried the offense to the doorstep. Bo Nix, 24-11 as a starter and now level with John Elway’s mark through 35 games, stopped forcing it after an end-zone interception and threw the touchdown that started the rally. They earned the billing.

But the billing was not what won it. Denver trailed by ten, was down to its third running back, and beat the one team that had taken its home field a year earlier — snapping a nine-game Jacksonville regular-season winning streak — because the last man in the backfield trains like he expects the lights to go out. The Broncos went shopping for stars this offseason and found one they had drafted 108th. The next time a hamstring goes, they already know the answer.

Tags: NFL, running backs, Denver Broncos, Jaylen Waddle, Jonah Coleman, rookies