The Broncos just might be the worst 10-2 team in NFL history.

And they don’t care.

Yes, they hear the noise. The Broncos have been cursed with the F word as frauds and dissed by the computer rankings that rate them no better than 12th in ESPN’s football power index.

Know what has become the new favorite hobby of football pundits?

“Try to knock our wins,” Broncos receiver Courtland Sutton said Wednesday.

Go ahead. Knock ‘em. Call ‘em frauds. 

Frankly, my dear, they don’t give a damn.

Sutton made that abundantly clear to me on a snowy December afternoon, as he stood in the warm glow of the franchise’s Super Bowl trophies on display in the grand lobby of the Broncos’ practice facility.

“If you sit here and worry about everybody’s opinion, you’re going to be constantly frustrated about everything going on in your life. We know in our locker room that we earned those wins. At the end of the day, you can’t take a W off the board because of how it looks,” Sutton said.

“The outside perception is going to be the outside perception. Everybody is going to say whatever they want to say. There are probably 200 different talk shows out there that speak their opinion about the Broncos. They are definitely free to have their opinion. But that doesn’t mean we have to listen. Or care.”

This is what Sutton does care about: Life in orange and blue is better than he has ever known it. During way too many of his seven previous years with the Broncos, Sutton woke up on a chilly, gray December morning and rolled out of bed to work with gritted teeth, well aware that Denver had no shot at making a playoff run.

Before he ran off to North Carolina with Jordon Hudson, coach Bill Belichick had a mantra older than his 24-year-old girlfriend: “Football season doesn’t start until after Thanksgiving.”

Through a dozen games, the Broncos have thoroughly established that they will never surrender.

But now the real work begins to establish themselves as serious championship contenders.

With a quick look at the landscape in the AFC, it appears there has never been a better time than now to be a team on the rise.

The Chiefs’ Kingdom has fallen. When quarterback Josh Allen doesn’t play like the MVP, the Bills can lose to anybody. The Ravens are still digging themselves out of the hole of their 1-5 start. When Jonathan Taylor fails to rush for 100 yards, the Colts’ record is 3-4. As the current No. 1 seed in the conference, the Patriots are a whole lot like Denver: young, scrappy and hungry.

The power vacuum in the AFC is the Broncos’ best friend. Their opportunity reminds me more than a little of the championship ring seized by Nikola Jokic and his teammates in 2023, when the Nuggets took full advantage of the sweet spot after the decline of Golden State and before the ascension of Oklahoma City.

With these Broncos, maybe the question isn’t how they keep doing Houdini things, and instead focus on how many other of the league’s 31 teams have found a way to win at least 10 times in 2025.

“The worst thing you can do is let other people tear down a 10-2 record,” Denver quarterback Bo Nix said, “whether (they’re) saying you don’t play anybody or you’re just relying on the defense or whatever negative somebody is going to put on a positive.”

Way back in September, during a conversation with Broncos co-owner and CEO Greg Penner, I wanted to know the nature of the football rivalry between his family and the side of the Walton fortune represented by Stan Kroenke and the Los Angeles Rams.

It pained Penner to admit how the Rams had put a 51-14 hurting on the Broncos in the Christmas Day massacre of 2022.

But Penner quickly added: “Hopefully, the next time we play ‘em, we’ll whip their butts.”

Three months ago, when the record of Penner’s team was on the verge of dropping to 1-1 with a walk-off loss at Indianapolis, I would’ve laughed if you told me the grand finale of this NFL season could be the Walmart Bowl, with the Broncos facing the Rams for the league championship.

Now?

After making a habit of pulling victory out of their … hat,  nothing seems so farfetched as to be impossible.

Heck, we’ve seen stranger things happen. Repeatedly. When all looked lost for the Broncos.

Call ‘em frauds if you want. They don’t care.

This NFL season, the Broncos are the kings of stranger things.