Broncos coach Sean Payton says he has complete confidence that quarterback Jarrett Stidham can and will play well when he starts the AFC Championship Game in place of the injured Bo Nix.
Payton said the Broncos know what kind of player Stidham is because of “our three years watching him, day in and day out,” and that even though Stidham hasn’t thrown a single pass in either of the last two seasons, he’ll be ready next weekend.
“He will be ready to go and ready for the moment,” Payton said.
Payton said every coach who has worked with Stidham has come away impressed. Payton said past coaches like Bill Belichick, who drafted Stidham in New England, and Josh McDaniels, who coached him with both the Patriots and Raiders, have thought highly of Stidham.
“I know how he was coached in New England. I know exactly how he was coached in New England, and then I know how McDaniels felt about him when he brought him from New England to Las Vegas,” Payton said.
Payton noted that backup quarterbacks have won Super Bowls before, citing Jeff Hostetler with the 1990 Giants and Nick Foles with the 2017 Eagles. Payton believes Stidham could be next.
Broncos quarterback Jarrett Stidham can view it as a tall test, or a golden opportunity.
If Stidham manages to engineer a victory next weekend in the AFC Championship, he’ll become only the second quarterback in the modern era of football to get his first start of the season in the playoffs and win.
Stidham will get the start in place of Broncos quarterback Bo Nix, who suffered a broken ankle near the end of Saturday’s overtime win against the Bills.
Via Kalyn Kahler of ESPN.com, six quarterbacks since 1950 have started a postseason game after not starting a single game in the regular season. Only Frank Reich won, replacing Jim Kelly for the epic 1992 wild-card game against the Oilers, in which the Bills erased a 35-3 third-quarter deficit for a 41-38 overtime win.
Reich got another win the next weekend, beating the Steelers at Three Rivers Stadium in the divisional round, 24-3. (Kelly took over from there.)
Even though Reich hadn’t started a game during the 16-game 1992 season, he had thrown 47 passes in five appearances. Stidham didn’t throw a single pass during the 17-game 2025 regular season. Or during the 17-game 2024 regular season.
Stidham, via Kahler, will be only the second quarterback to get his first start of the season in the conference title game or later. In 1972, Roger Staubach made his first start of the year in place of Craig Morton in the NFC Championship; the Cowboys lost to Washington, 26-3.
Stidham last played in Weeks 17 and 18 of the 2023 season, after the Broncos benched Russell Wilson for financial reasons. Stidham also started two games at the end of the 2022 season, after the Raiders benched Derek Carr for financial reasons. Those are Stidham’s only four career starts.
In seven days, he’ll be facing either the team that drafted him in 2019 (the Patriots), or the Houston successors to the Oilers franchise that fell victim to Frank Reich, 33 years ago.
The game-changing ruling in the Bills-Broncos playoff game got short shrift at the time. It has since become the most dominant topic of discussion in the entire sport.
The folks at NFL Network, which is owned and operated by the league, repeatedly made that point during Sunday morning’s show. The critical decision that Buffalo receiver Brandin Cooks failed to complete the process of catching the ball and Denver cornerback Ja’Quan McMillian intercepted it happened too quickly, with no explanation from referee Carl Cheffers as to the ruling on the field and/or any review of it.
During his weekly appearance on the NFL Network Sunday pregame show, NFL officiating spokesman Walt Anderson went through the reasoning that resulted in the play being not a catch but an interception. The ball, as Anderson explained it, immediately came loose when Cooks hit the ground and ended up in the control of McMillian.
Anderson said that both the replay assistant in the stadium “and New York” reviewed the ruling on the field of an interception.
Steve Mariucci pressed Anderson on one key point: “Who made the call?”
Anderson said that, in the league office, there’s an entire staff of instant-replay officials, with “multiple people at the same time reviewing every play.” Anderson pointed to the “millions of dollars” the NFL has invested in the Hawk-Eye camera system, so that they can look at all angles, talk to each other, and confirm the call on the field.
To his credit, Mariucci kept pushing Anderson. Why, Mariucci asked, didn’t referee Carl Cheffers explain the situation to the millions who were watching the game?
Anderson said that, even without a full-blown replay review, every play is being reviewed by multiple people. “If you can confirm the ruling on the field was correct, they want to move the game along,” Anderson said.
Anderson then added that CBS did a good job of explaining the situation to the audience. Mariucci quipped that he doesn’t want to hear about it from Tony Romo.
“I think Carl should have done that,” Mariucci said.
And then Colleen Wolfe said “more transparency would be good.” She’s absolutely right.
We’ve been saying for years that there should be public access to the replay-review process, whether during a quick look or a full-blown review. We need to see what they’re seeing, and to hear what they’re saying The current process, as Kyle Brandt said earlier in the show, feels “Orwellian.”
That was the risk of exporting replay review from the stadium (where the referee made the replay decisions) to the league office. At the time, we were led to believe Dean Blandino would be making all replay-reviews decisions. And maybe he would have been, if he hadn’t left for Fox because, as Blandino later said, the NFL doesn’t properly “value the position.”
Now, there’s apparently no one person whose name is on these decisions. Combining that with zero transparency creates natural curiosity regarding how and why such an important decision was made — and why it all seemed to be so rushed.
It’s one thing to move along a regular-season game that started in the cluster of 1:00 p.m. ET kickoffs. It’s quite another to slip the engine into overdrive when so much is riding on the outcome.
That’s separate from whether the call was right (there was no effort to reconcile the decision with the Week 14 Steelers-Ravens play that started as an interception and ended via replay review as a catch by Aaron Rodgers). Instead of having Gene Steratore interpret the video evidence for CBS, we should have heard about it from the people who were making the decision, while they were making it.
For starters, it would help tremendously to know who exactly is making these decisions. We still don’t.
From the official rulebook: “All Replay Reviews will be conducted by the Senior Vice President of Officiating or his or her designee.” As explained last month in the aftermath of the crazy backwards-pass, two-point replay ruling in Rams-Seahawks, we don’t even know who the current Senior V.P. of Officiating is.
And we definitely don’t know who his or her specific designee was for one of the most important rulings of the entire 2025 season. At a bare minimum, we should.
In his usual postgame press conference, Bills coach Sean McDermott expressed concern about the process used to uphold a critical overtime interception ruling that likely decided the playoff game between Buffalo and Denver. Then, something unusual happened.
McDermott had more to say. Specifically, McDermott called Jay Skurski of the Buffalo News from the team plane. Here’s the full transcript of a rare coach’s pool report, as forward to PFT by Skurski.
“That play is not even close. That’s a catch all the way. I sat in my locker and I looked at it probably 20 times, and nobody can convince me that that ball is not caught and in possession of Buffalo. I just have no idea how the NFL handed it, in particular, the way that they did. I think the players and the fans deserve an explanation, you know?”
“That play is not even close. That’s a catch all the way. I sat in my locker and I looked at it probably 20 times, and nobody can convince me that that ball is not caught and in possession of Buffalo. I just have no idea how the NFL handed it, in particular, the way that they did. I think the players and the fans deserve an explanation, you know?”
Q: “Did you read the pool report?”
“Yeah, [Bills P.R. chief Derek Boyko] sent it to me. I just got it. I wish I would have gotten it before my press conference.”
Q: “Is there any recourse here for you? What can you do?”
“Here’s the deal, right? The fans deserve more. The players certainly deserve more. They deserve an explanation, and it’s a shame that a game is decided on a call like that, and there is no time spent with the head official going underneath the hood or to the replay booth, right? To the monitor. I don’t understand how that works. I don’t understand how that could be the case when it’s such a close play, so basically there is one person ruling on that play or, only New York ruling on that play? I don’t agree with that. If that’s the case, I don’t agree with that -- that that is the best approach to decide a game like that.”
Q: “You’ve always been cautious about commenting on officiating. Why do you feel in this situation that it is so important to share how you feel about it?”
“Because I only speak up when there is a wrong. In this case, it happened to be to our team. We win with class and we lose with class in Buffalo. That’s how we handle our business, but when I’m looking at the replay myself and I’m being objective and I’m saying, ‘you can not convince me that that was not a catch, Buffalo possession, ball at the 20. You can’t convince [me].’ I’m speaking up because I feel strongly that that was a catch and that possession should have been ball belongs to Buffalo. I can’t agree with their assessment of a change of possession or whatever the statement was. I can’t agree with that. We’re not just going to sit here and take it, is what I’m saying. We’re not just going to sit here and take it. I’m pissed off about it, and I feel strongly as I’ve looked at it in review in my own locker that it’s a catch, possession Buffalo, and that the process should have been [long pause] ... handled differently. I don’t understand why the head official who is at the game does not get a chance to look at the same thing people in New York are ruling on.”
McDermott may or may not be accurate regarding his interpretation of the play itself. (Under the standard the NFL applied and defended to overturn the same outcome and make it a catch by Aaron Rodgers in the Week 14 Steelers-Ravens regular-season game, McDermott is absolutely right.) The broader question — especially in an age of legalized, normalized, and heavily monetized gambling — is whether there should have been a more deliberate and transparent process for reviewing such an important play.
Apparently, there was an expedited review. Not a full and formal review. (There’s no mention in the official NFL game book of any review of the play.) Given that the replay assistant or the league office can perform an expedited review, it’s impossible to know who made such an important decision, unless the NFL tells us.
It goes back to the basic construction of the current replay-review process. The goal, more than a decade ago, was to ensure consistency in the application of the rules and the relevant standard by taking the final say from the referees and centralizing it in New York. And if NFL V.P. of instant replay Mark Butterworth — who explained the Rodgers ruling — would have been able to handle a full review of the question of whether Bills receiver Brandin Cooks had caught the ball and was down by contact before it came loose and was intercepted by Broncos cornerback Ja’Quan McMillian, would Butterworth have applied the same standard and reasoning that he applied in the Steelers-Ravens game? Would Butterworth have performed the pool report after the game, instead of referee Carl Cheffers? Would Butterworth have contradicted himself from the Rodgers play?
Cheffers shouldn’t have handled the official post-game pool report, because Cheffers didn’t personally make or review the call. Whoever decided the call was correct should have explained it — and, ideally, should have explained why and how the standard changed from December 7 (the day of the Week 14 Steelers-Ravens game) to January 17.
Bills cornerback Tre’Davious White was flagged for a 30-yard pass interference penalty that effectively ended Saturday’s game, setting up the Broncos for a chip-shot field goal to win in overtime. Afterward, White insisted he hadn’t committed a penalty and that the officials gave the Broncos a gift call because they were playing at home in Denver.
“I thought that I didn’t interfere with the guy, when the ball got there I swiped through, knocked the ball down, then fell on top of him,” White said. “I think the crowd probably played a big-time factor.”
White said he doesn’t think NFL referees understand what good coverage looks like.
“Referees are human and people make mistakes, I just think it should be up to the players to decide the game,” White said. “When the game is fought so hard and comes down to the wire, plays like that, that’s a professional bang-bang play. As a defensive back, that’s what you want, take the guy to the ground and finish the play. Referees just don’t know ball.”
White, who also got an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for yelling at an official after the penalty, was more composed after the game but still just as adamant that the officials had messed up.
“I just think they had bad judgment on that play,” White said.
