How Broncos' Week 16 loss to Jaguars can be turned into a positive

How Broncos' Week 16 loss to Jaguars can be turned into a positive originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

The Denver Broncos tasted defeat for the first time in three months on Sunday, losing at home to the Jacksonville Jaguars, which snapped their league-best 11-game winning streak.

It's a tough loss for the Broncos, but it's far from a crippling one.

This can be turned into a positive for the team, and Sean Payton and his staff need to keep certain things as the focus heading into the team's Christmas night matchup against the Kansas City Chiefs.

For starters, the Broncos still have the inside track to get home-field advantage throughout the playoffs as the AFC's No. 1 seed. All they need to do is beat the Chiefs and then the Los Angeles Chargers in the season finale and they will clinch that spot.

But in addition to that, this could have been a needed smack in the face for the Broncos. It's easy to get lackadaisical as a team when winning becomes so common and taking a huge winning streak like that into the playoffs, along with one that had not seen the team lose at home in over a year, could have become a hindrance.

Instead, the Broncos now get to remember the taste of losing. They recognize that they're not invincible and that on any given Sunday, another professional football team is capable of pushing them around like Jacksonville just did. This should help the team sharpen its focus in several areas.

Towards the end of this game, play-by-play commentator Kevin Kugler suggested that maybe the Broncos needed to get punched in the mouth. Sometimes in sports, that wake-up call is exactly what a team needs.

The long winning streak is over and the Broncos have dropped a game at home. The playoff race has gotten tighter, but at the end of the day, that is the worst thing that happened with this loss. The Broncos still have all of their goals right in front of them, and they are still in control of their own destiny.

Heading into Week 17, that's about the best that any team can ask for.

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Payton needs to have his team remember this feeling, store it somewhere, and do whatever they can to not feel that way again this season. It was a great win for the Jaguars, who are a very good team, but the Broncos still have the best record in the AFC and this beatdown should be used as fuel for a much bigger fire.

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