Denver's Center Position Is a Vulnerability the Broncos Cannot Afford Right Now
The depth chart at center tells you everything you need to know about where this team's real danger lives heading into preseason. Gavin Ortega is listed as the starter. His production share from last season: zero percent. That is not a slump. That is a player with no established NFL footprint being handed the most communication-intensive position on the offensive line, at exactly the moment when the man who was supposed to compete for that job just landed on season-ending injured reserve.
Michael Deiter going down on August 13 is the kind of move that gets buried under bigger headlines — and Denver has plenty of those right now. Matt Henningsen's Achilles, Jonathon Cooper's legal situation, Bo Nix's shoulder. But losing Deiter matters in a specific, structural way. The Broncos brought in Lecitus Smith as the replacement, a veteran addition that signals the front office understands the urgency. What it cannot signal is that the problem is solved. Signing a center in the second week of August, weeks before a season opener, is triage. Triage is not a plan.
The broader offensive line context makes this harder to dismiss. Left tackle Garett Bolles is genuinely elite — he earned Pro Bowl and first-team All-Pro recognition last season, and he is the one pillar of this unit that does not require anxiety. Ben Powers had his contract restructured in late July, which at least keeps continuity at left guard. But continuity and competence are different things, and the interior of this line, the center position specifically, now rests on a player with no proven production and a just-signed veteran who is learning a system on the fly. That is a lot of uncertainty to hand to a quarterback who is himself recovering from shoulder surgery.
This is where the pythagorean math from 2025 becomes genuinely alarming rather than merely interesting. Denver's 14–3 regular season record was built on winning close games at a rate their point differential could not justify — a gap of nearly 18 games between their actual wins and what their scoring margin predicted. That kind of overperformance tends to correct. When it does, the margin for error shrinks, and the things that were hidden by good fortune become exposed. A shaky center in a close fourth quarter is not an abstraction. It is a snap count gone wrong, a protection bust, a pressure that finds Nix's surgically repaired shoulder.
My read is that the Broncos have underestimated how much of their offensive identity depends on getting the center position right. J.K. Dobbins ran for 772 yards last season behind this line, and the ground game is the team's most reliable stabilizing force — particularly if Nix's availability remains uncertain into the regular season. Interior line continuity is not glamorous, but it is what allows a run game to function and a quarterback to operate without his pocket collapsing from the inside. What Denver has at center right now is an unproven starter and a veteran newcomer who arrived in August. That is a thin foundation for a team that needs to outperform its own regression curve just to stay relevant.