Dontari Poe threw more touchdown passes than Trevor Siemian on Sunday night. If you missed the game or the name just sounds unfamiliar, Poe is the Kansas City Chiefs' 346-pound nose tackle.
With a little less than two minutes remaining and the Chiefs already hanging onto a comfortable lead, he rose up and did this:
As the enormous man in red throwing a touchdown pass suggests, Sunday did not go well for the Denver Broncos. The Chiefs bulldozed them 33-10, ending any hope Denver had of making the playoffs and defending its Super Bowl crown.
A lot of the Broncos' season-long issues reared their head in the loss. They got off to a slow start, allowing the Chiefs to score three first-quarter touchdowns. Their running game was nowhere to be found. Their offensive line was pitiful. And their quarterback was bad.
Siemian finished the game 17-of-43 passing for 183 yards with no touchdowns and one interception. He was hardly the only thing wrong with a Broncos' offense whose only touchdown came after the defense set them up at the Chiefs' 6-yard line. But it's evident he can't be the team's starting quarterback in 2017.
The Broncos can't afford to waste another year developing a quarterback. They need to go out and get one that can help this team win playoff games immediately. This defense is too good not to be terrorizing quarterbacks in the postseason. These are Von Miller's prime years. DeMarcus Ware — a free agent this offseason — and Aqib Talib are getting up there in age.
The Broncos' defense won them a championship at the beginning of 2016. The rest of 2016 proved that asking your defense to shoulder so much of the load simply isn't a sustainable way to win football games. Denver has lost seven of 11 since going 4-0 to start the new season.
Siemian isn't terrible. It's not hard to envision him carving out a long career as a good backup, or even a low-end starter. But he shouldn't be the starting quarterback on a team that's in win-now mode.
Denver's season will officially end Jan. 1 against the Raiders. When it does, this team's brain trust should go to work figuring out how it can repair an abysmal offensive line, a broken running game and determine who they can plug in at quarterback in 2017. Siemian isn't the answer.
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