Remember Sunday to look back and cross your fingers that the Broncos don’t move the season back years.

The Broncos are 5-3 and remain viewed with suspicion.

These are the CU Buffs of the NFL: entertaining, improving, but not ready for prime time. This is the opinion of smart people and several national media.

And the truth is, the Broncos haven’t earned our trust. Not yet anyway. That will come when they make the playoffs, a prediction I’m doubling down on. Facing the Baltimore Ravens, however, offers a chance to immediately change the narrative, to prove that they are more than a promising young team that has taken advantage of the weak NFC South.

Baltimore is to the Broncos what Nebraska was to CU. Except much better. The Huskers beat the Buffs. It didn’t stop them from achieving their goals, but it exposed CU, showing how far it still needed to go in a rebuild.

As Winter made a flirtatious appearance Wednesday, he served as a reminder that the Broncos are on a similar slippery slope. A national audience – extending beyond Amazon’s reach on Thursday – will get its first look at the Broncos. They are the featured game on CBS. To hear Jim Nantz in recent years, Broncos Country had to watch The Masters.

The Broncos have played several games like this since 2016 and come away with toilet paper stuck to their shoe and urine running down their legs.

They collapsed against the injury-riddled Giants in prime time in 2017, sparking an eight-game slide. They choked against Cleveland under the lights in late 2018. They choked against the Bengals in 2021. They left a nation with bloody students in an overtime loss Thursday to the Colts two years ago and who can forget the 2023 performance against the Patriots when Rudolph was barely the only one lit on Christmas Eve?

Sunday provides a platform to put bad luck and bad decisions aside. Win – damn it, come close – and affirmation will arrive in the form of 150-point Helvetica headlines. Lose badly and it will raise questions about how good the Broncos were in the first place.

A subtle and encouraging difference emerged on Wednesday. The Broncos viewed this location as a challenge. Current players called it an opportunity, signaling a change in mentality under coach Sean Payton.

It features Baltimore’s #1 offense against the Broncos’ #3 defense.

“On a big stage like this, we’re obviously not looking for validation from anyone, but when it comes to defense, this is the time for us to show who we are and why we’re one of the best,” said Nik Bonitto. , who is riding a six-game sack streak into the game. “We’re really looking forward to it.”

Payton and his team inject confidence through preparation and game plan. The days of playing the victim, of looking for excuses, are over. Leave that to the Panthers and any team that employs Nathaniel Hackett.

“I think a lot of people write us off because of the personnel we have on our team, and that’s completely normal. We like it. We like to go into these games as underdogs,” receiver Courtland Sutton said. “We know if we go out there and play the way we know how, we feel like we can compete with anyone.”

The Broncos have won five of their last six games, and three in a row on the road. And yet the 5-3 Ravens are 9.5-point favorites, the largest gap in the league this week.

“The Ravens are probably one of the two best teams in the league. And the Broncos have to prove it against better (or the best) teams,” said Jay Kornegay, executive vice president of sports and racing at the Las Vegas SuperBook. “And the Ravens are a little hot after last week (losing to Cleveland).”

The Broncos own the fifth seed in the AFC playoffs at the halfway point. If we look at this week’s media power rankings, they range from 11th to 23rd. The Ringer said of the Broncos: “Disregard all the results against the Panthers. Where is all this offense when Denver is playing real teams?