Bill Belichick fell short of the necessary votes to be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2026, but he may have another chance in 2027.
The Hall of Fame announced the five coaches who have advanced to the next round of consideration in the current selection process. One of those coaches will be selected for consideration by the full selection committee ahead of the Super Bowl.
Belichick is joined by Tom Coughlin, Mike Holmgren, Dan Reeves, and Mike Shanahan. All five coaches also advanced to this point in the selection process last year. This is the fourth time that Holmgren has advanced to this point.
Don Coryell was the last coach selected for the Hall of Fame. He was part of the Class of 2023.
Broncos Clips
Broncos linebacker Alex Singleton’s strong play in October drew recognition from the NFL on Thursday.
Singleton compiled 54 tackles for the Broncos in their four October games, including a 19-tackle effort in their Week 7 win over the Cardinals. Singleton also had a sack in that game and he added four tackles for loss and four quarterback hits as well.
The NFL announced that Singleton has been named the AFC’s top defensive player for the month. He was also the defensive player of the week for that outing against Arizona.
Singleton leads the league with 101 tackles so far this season. He also has five tackles for loss, six quarterback hits and two sacks.
With four regular-season home games played and four to go, the Broncos are being proactive — again — about the quality of the playing surface at Mile High Stadium.
The entire field is being ripped up and replaced, despite the absence of any complaints about the quality of the grass there.
For the fifth straight year, the Broncos are spending the money to ensure that the players will be performing on the highest-quality surface, emphasizing that “the Walton Penner Family Ownership Group’s commitment to player safety and a best-in-class playing surface throughout the season.”
At a time when the debate regarding real grass vs. fake grass continues, with the situation boiling down to whether the owners are willing to write the check to ensure the best and safest surfaces for players, the statement made by the Broncos makes their ownership look good and, in comparison, owners who cling to artificial turf look bad.
Beyond caring about player safety, having the best playing surface provides the best protection of the investment the owners have made in their rosters. Which would be a sensible position for any owner — especially the cheap ones.
Now that it has morphed into a matter of collective bargaining, those who choose to be pennywise have even more cover for their pound foolishness. Which makes it even more important that the NFL Players Association apply not general public pressure to the league but specific scrutiny to the owners who won’t ditch artificial turf for grass, or who won’t replace low-quality grass with high-quality grass.
It’s been a somewhat strange second year in Denver for veteran running back J.K. Dobbins. As coach Sean Payton tells it, however, everything is going as planned.
“He’s a huge part of what we’re doing,” Payton told reporters on Wednesday regarding whether the team is managing Dobbins’s workload. “So each week we look at — a lot of times who’s the back that’s in there with the hot hand. But he’s been fantastic. So to answer your question: No, that’s not a hot button topic with us here. It might be with you guys, but not with us. So we’re good. We’re good with the rotation.”
Payton is generally using a three-back rotation, with Dobbins joining R.J. Harvey and rookie Jonah Coleman. Still, with Harvey on injured reserve for Sunday’s showdown against the Chiefs, Dobbins got fewer chances than Coleman.
Coleman, who was on the field for 41 offensive plays, had 11 carries for 41 yards and four catches for 63. Dobbins played 13 snaps, getting seven carries for 13 yards and no targets in the passing game.
“Look, it’s always easy to work two [running backs] and it becomes more challenging when you’re trying to work three, but he’s doing a great job,” Payton said of Dobbins.
For the year, Dobbins has 94 carries for 306 yards in eight games, with eight catches for 27 yards. That’s 333 yards from scrimmage — an average of 41.6 per game.
In 10 games last year, before he suffered a season-ending foot injury during a Thursday night game against the Raiders, Dobbins was averaging nearly twice that amount, at 80.9 yards from scrimmage per game.
Through it all, the Broncos have been linked to a potential trade for Colts running back Jonathan Taylor. While the prospect of acquiring a workhorse would cut against Payton’s longstanding approach to use multiple running backs, Taylor’s arrival would surely result in even fewer chances for Dobbins.
Bryce Young was listed with a knee injury on the Panthers’ practice reports over the past four weeks. The quarterback was listed with an ankle injury Wednesday.
Young, though, was estimated as a full participant.
The Panthers did not practice Wednesday.
Outside linebacker Jaelan Phillips (hamstring), left guard Damien Lewis (knee), linebacker Bobby Okereke (foot) and rookie cornerback Will Lee III (hamstring) were listed as non-participants.
Phillips has missed the past two games, and Lewis missed last week’s game against the Packers.
Offensive linemen Corey Bullock (quad) and Torricelli Simpkins III (ankle) were limited.
Appearing Tuesday on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas, Cowboys owner and G.M. Jerry Jones made a clunky case for the absence of a correlation between coaching pay and wins.
When he makes his second weekly visit of the team’s flagship station, he should be asked this question: Would you want Andy Reid, Sean Payton, John Harbaugh, Sean McVay, or Kyle Shanahan to be the Cowboys’ head coach?
They’re the five highest-paid coaches in the league. And any team that doesn’t have an objectively great coach would absolutely want one of those five.
Because they win. In 2026, their combined record is 25-11-1. They have six Super Bowl trophies, and 11 Super Bowl appearances.
They’re highly compensated because they win. Which makes them worthy of high compensation.
It’s obvious. And it’s insulting to the intelligence of anyone with reasonable cognitive skills (which barely qualifies me to be insulted) for Jerry to insist that there’s “zero correlation” between coaching pay and wins.
So what’s really going on here? At one level, he’s being cheap when it comes to a budgetary line item that has no salary cap, or salary floor. At another level, he likely doesn’t want to have a true alpha whose W-2 would allow him to take over the team, and to minimize the outsized influence of anyone named Jones.
Whatever the case, Jones’s strategy to treat a coaching search like an exercise in wildcatting ignores the fact that he can afford to pay for a high-functioning oil well. But he doesn’t want to spend the money — and he doesn’t want to give the coach the power that comes from being highly paid.
Through it all, the Cowboys haven’t been to the NFC Championship since 1995. And there’s definitely a correlation between Jerry’s approach to hiring coaches and the continuation of “this ‘drought’ that people say we’re in.”
To no surprise, the top late-afternoon game from Week 8 of the 2026 NFL season generated very big numbers.
According to CBS, the Chiefs-Broncos game racked up 28.175 million viewers.
It was, per CBS, the most-watched Week 8 game on record.
The game was competitive and exciting until the very end, with the Broncos erasing a 24-13 fourth-quarter deficit before keeping the Chiefs from turning a first-and-goal from the four into a game-winning score, with the fourth-down play being the last one of the game.
It will undoubtedly be the most-watched Week 8 game, given the NFL’s decision to leave the game between the Eagles and Commanders in prime time, despite multiple viable flex options.
The Broncos trailed the Chiefs 24-13 with 10 minutes left on Sunday, but anyone who thought the Broncos were out of it hasn’t been watching Bo Nix.
Nix led Denver’s offense to two touchdowns and a two-point conversion in the fourth quarter of a 28-24 win, marking Nix’s 15th career game-winning drive in the fourth quarter or overtime. No quarterback in NFL history has as many game-winning drives in his first three seasons as Nix.
Dak Prescott, who had 14 game-winning drives in his first three seasons, had the previous record. Nix has surpassed Prescott and isn’t even halfway through his third season.
A game-winning drive is defined as an offensive scoring drive in the fourth quarter or overtime that puts a team ahead for the final time. Nix had three of them as a rookie in 2024, an NFL-high seven of them last year, and has an NFL-high five of them already this year.
The all-time leader in game-winning drives is Tom Brady, who had 58 of them. It would take Nix many years to catch Brady, but being more than a quarter of the way there through two and a half seasons is an impressive achievement.
When the schedule is released every May, plenty of standalone games that look good at the time morph into something not quite as appetizing as the season unfolds. Some standalone games get better with time.
This year, there’s a trio of massive games lurking on Christmas Day.
At 1:00 p.m. ET, it’s the Packers at the Bears. At 4:30 p.m. ET, it’s the Bills at the Broncos. At 8:15 p.m., it’s the Rams at the Seahawks.
With the Bears emerging as a threat to win the NFC North and the No. 1 seed in the conference, the rematch with their biggest rivals (who beat them 31-7 in Week 5) becomes must-see TV. Bills at Broncos, a rematch of a postseason overtime classic that got Buffalo coach Sean McDermott fired, should have direct implications on two division races and the chase for the lone bye in the AFC.
The nightcap shapes up to be not a battle for the NFC West title and/or the top seed but a potential elimination game, given that both Seattle and L.A. are currently 4-4.
Regardless, all three games should be significant. Impactful. Consequential.
And they’ll more than make up for the Christmas Eve game, which has the 2-5 Texans at the 2-6 Eagles.
There’s a new favorite to win the AFC West.
After beating the Chiefs on Sunday and improving to 6-2 on the season, the Broncos are now the betting favorites to win the division, for the first time this season.
The Broncos’ odds to win the division are at -130. The Chiefs are close behind at +115. The Raiders are very long shots at +2500 and the winless Chargers are extreme long shots at +15,000.
The Chiefs had spent this season as the favorites, especially after blowing out the Broncos in Week 1. But the Chiefs are now on a two-game losing streak, and at 5-2 a half game behind the Broncos in the division.
The AFC West looks like it’s going to be a two-horse race that goes deep into the season. At the moment, it’s the Broncos who have the edge.
