Denver Keeps Winning. The Practice Squad Is Now Starting in the Secondary.
Taylor Rapp and Sam Fresch Jr. were elevated from the practice squad for the Arizona game. That sentence is the entire argument. Not because elevations are unusual — every team uses them — but because of what their presence on a game-day roster reveals about the depth beneath a defense that has somehow held together a 5-2 football team.
The number that matters here is 92. That's the production gap between Brandon Jones and the next usable safety on Denver's depth chart. Jones is carrying the back end of this defense essentially alone, and the options behind him are a practice-squad veteran and a return specialist who doubles as a corner. Fresch is listed as a CB/KR — his primary value to an NFL roster is catching punts, not covering tight ends on third-and-seven. The Broncos dressed him to play defense. That's not a depth chart. That's an emergency.
Pat Surtain II missed the Cardinals game — Ian Rapoport reported he was unlikely to play — and Jaylen Waddle exited with an injury during the contest itself. Three starters compromised in the secondary over six weeks, and the organizational answer has been to pull from the practice squad twice. The math on that is brutal: Denver's defense has been good enough to win, but it has been doing so with fewer and fewer viable bodies each week. The 3-0 home record looks like competence; the 2-2 road record looks like what happens when opponents have time to find the cracks.
What makes this genuinely alarming rather than just roster-page trivia is the context around it. Denver is a half-game out of first in the AFC West with 10 games left. The defense is the reason this team is a contender rather than a .500 afterthought with a pedestrian offense — Que Robinson's three sacks and Alex Singleton's 91 tackles are doing real work, but both of them are one play away from turning this unit from thin to hollow. The secondary, already operating at skeleton crew, has no margin left. My read is that the Broncos are one more injury from a back end that cannot credibly cover an NFL receiving corps, and the schedule doesn't get easier.
Last year's 2025 team won 14 games and then lost to New England in the Wild Card, a result that made more sense when you understood how much of that record was built on close-game variance that wasn't going to repeat. This year's team is winning the same close games — +0.43 per game, no better, no worse — but doing it with a secondary that is now, factually, being staffed by practice-squad elevations. Denver is proving it can win close games the hard way. The question is how much harder it gets when the margin for error in the secondary has already been spent.