What gives?
“We have until Monday with his roster exemption,” head coach Sean Payton said on Thursday. “Officially by Monday, if he comes up, someone else has to come down. We’re at 53 plus him, and then we’ll figure out how we’ll handle it relative to this week and going forward.”
The Broncos are dragging their feet on bringing Jackson back, and there could be a couple of reasons for it. One of them, as Payton intimated, is the roster-math decision of cutting a player in order to make room on the 53.
That’s not easy for a team to do this deep into the season, but it’s one that NFL teams typically make in a heartbeat if it means adding a difference-making veteran back onto the roster, whether it’s from injured reserve or, in Jackson’s case, a suspension.
The other reason could be that Payton wants to keep Bill Belichick guessing this week on whether the Patriots can expect to see Jackson patrolling the Broncos’ secondary or if it’ll remain the Justin Simmons and P.J. Locke show. If I had to guess, I’d err on the side of the latter — a slight competitive edge in keeping the veteran’s standing under wraps.
Belichick and Payton are cut from the same Bill Parcells cloth, so New England’s venerated head coach will likely anticipate Jackson’s roster standing being used in Denver’s poker hand, so to speak. Then again, as good as Jackson has been throughout his career, we’re not talking about some perennial All-Pro here.
Jackson is 35 years old and has slowed down precipitously over the past two seasons. He isn’t the same difference-maker he was when the Broncos initially signed him back in 2019.
There’s one last possibility on why the Broncos are dragging their feet on Jackson, although it’s the least likely. Considering the target Jackson has become relative to the NFL’s disciplinarians in the front office, perhaps Payton doesn’t want that smoke, or, in other words, doesn’t want to risk that high-level scrutiny of the officials affecting the Broncos’ outlook on gameday.
We can argue about Jackson being unfairly persecuted by the NFL, and trust me, there’s plenty of water under that bridge, but his lack of poise as a hitter has cost the Broncos severely at times this season. It definitely helped contribute mightily to Denver’s opening-season loss to the Las Vegas Raiders, and it can be argued that Jackson’s recklessness has contributed to more than one loss.
But at the end of the day, Jackson has forgotten more about football than most of us will ever know. He’s a leader in the Broncos’ locker room that players look to, he’s a tone-setter, and he’s still very physical and experienced. There’s a reason he was named a team captain to open the 2023 season, even though he was re-signed as almost an afterthought post-draft.
The question for the Broncos is whether all those assets Jackson brings to the table offset the liabilities he presents on gameday. After serving two suspensions this season, and being fined multiple times, he traveled to New York for a meeting with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, looking for answers on how the league had obviously placed him in its crosshairs.
Jackson came away from the meeting with the takeaway that he’ll have to be an “ankle-biter” from now on relative to hitting and tackling. In other words, aim for the hips and below when tackling. Whether the veteran safety is simply paying lip service to Goodell and Jon Runyan or if Jackson will actually amend his play to account for it remains to be seen.
Bottom line, with three games left to go, the Broncos can’t afford to lose another contest and in that effort, could use all the help they can get. But whether Jackson is a net-positive for the Broncos, and thus, a no-brainer to reinstate to the roster, isn’t as simple of an answer as it may appear at first glance.
I do expect Jackson to be reinstated in time to suit up vs. the Patriots. But I also anticipate the Broncos limiting his exposure and the opportunity for costly unnecessary roughness penalties by keeping Locke in the starting lineup.
As a long-time cornerback, though, Jackson can contribute to the Broncos’ secondary in more ways than one, and in the wake of that 42-17 beatdown the Detroit Lions handed out to Vance Joseph’s defense, beggars can’t be choosers.
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