Denver's Ground Game Has Burned Through Every Layer of Its Safety Net
The depth chart at running back now reads like a cautionary tale someone wrote in advance and nobody heeded. J.K. Dobbins — the man Denver extended and built its ground game around, the player who carried 772 yards of rushing production in just ten games last season — is gone from the active equation heading into Week 4. RJ Harvey, the versatile second option who quietly produced 597 rushing yards and seven touchdowns last year while also functioning as an emergency passer, is down too. What remains is Tyler Badie, a receiver-shaped player pressed into the lead back role, and behind him Cody Schrader, whose name sits third on the depth chart precisely because that is where third-string running backs sit.
The number that keeps haunting this conversation is ten. Dobbins played ten games in 2025. The Broncos knew this going into the offseason. They extended him anyway, which was defensible — the talent is real — but they never built meaningful insurance behind him. The roster analysis confirmed it plainly: no viable depth behind Dobbins at running back, full stop. That was a pre-season finding. It is now a Week 4 crisis.
What makes this particularly difficult to absorb is that the warning signs arrived in sequence, not all at once. I wrote after the offseason that this backfield was one injury away from exposure. It turned out to be two injuries, arriving in rapid succession, and now Denver is operating on the contingency plan's contingency plan. Badie is a football player — his receiving work out of the backfield showed enough to keep him on the roster — but he was never designed to be the lead carrier in a ground game that Sean Payton needs to function to keep defenses honest off play-action.
Schrader's presence as the emergency option is the part that should concern Denver's coaching staff most. There is nothing in his production profile that suggests he can absorb a significant workload if Badie hits any kind of wall. The Broncos have essentially arrived at a place where the running game depends on a receiver staying healthy enough to keep running, backed by a third-stringer who has never been asked to carry anything meaningful.
My read is that Denver's offensive identity through Week 4 will have to lean even harder on Jarrett Stidham's arm and whatever Courtland Sutton and Troy Franklin can generate from the outside — which is its own set of concerns, given that Sutton is on an expiring deal and the receiver room itself carried only two players with real production last season. The irony is that the pythagorean gap from 2025 — that 17.7-win luck delta that suggested Denver's record was fragile — was always pointing toward a moment like this. The Broncos won close games at a rate their underlying numbers couldn't justify. Now the roster is being asked to absorb depth losses it was never built to handle, and there is no cushion left to absorb the next one.