It wasn’t Kendall Hinton’s fault.
The Broncos were getting ready to play the Saints and their top-3 defense in Week 12 of the 2020 season, and everything went south with a quickness. Backup quarterback Jeff Driskel tested positive for COVID, and all three of Denver’s other quarterbacks — Drew Lock, Blake Bortles, and Brett Rypien — were all identified as close contacts. Thus, it was up to Hinton, the QB/WR hybrid from Wake Forest, to take the field at the game’s most important position.
It went about as well as you could expect. Hinton completed one of nine passes for 13 yards, no touchdowns, and two interceptions, as the Broncos lost, 31-3. During his five years at Wake Forest from 2015 through 2019, Hinton had completed 133 of 251 passes for 1,504 yards, eight touchdown passes, and seven interceptions.
Again, not his fault. Whose fault was it? As Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday regarding the NFL’s plans to work within the structure of the pandemic during the 2020 season, it was more about Denver’s actual quarterbacks trying to be cute.
John Elway, Denver’s president of football operations, made several frustrated pleas to Goodell to postpone the Sunday game until Tuesday, when the quarterbacks would be available. The league denied those requests because surveillance video from Denver’s facility showed the quarterbacks had tried to fool the system. They had removed their contact-tracing devices and put them in the four corners of the meeting room, then they sat together to watch film. That close contact automatically made them ineligible to play.
Way to blow it, guys. Lock’s statement at the time now seems a bit… disingenuous.
— Drew Lock (@DrewLock23) November 29, 2020
“I was disappointed on a couple levels,” head coach Vic Fangio said after the game. “That our quarterbacks put us in this position and that our quarterbacks put the league in this position. We count on them to be the leaders of the team and leaders of the offense and those guys made a mistake and that is disappointing. Obviously, I haven’t done a good enough job of selling the protocols to them when they are on their own so part of that could fall on me. I thought I was. We have emphasized it a lot and we’re really doing good with COVID up to this point as it relates relative to other teams. There was a failing there, and that’s disappointing.”
Now, we know exactly how disappointing it really was, and how easily it could have been avoided.
