DENVER — There's just one set of numbers that ultimately matters from the Broncos' wild "Monday Night Football" showdown with the Browns.
Sure, Cleveland's yardage totals will likely earn a share of the headlines, as Browns quarterback Jameis Winston's and wide receiver Jerry Jeudy's stat lines were gaudy.
But in a difficult, grind-it-out win that pushed Denver to 8-5 on the season, wide receiver Courtland Sutton knows there's just one area of the box score that matters:
41-32.
"We fought," Sutton said. "We had a fight on our hands, and it took four quarters. And at the end of the day, we had more points than them at the end of the game, and that's all that really matters. A lot of our character got to be shown [and] got to be put on display today. We didn't flinch."
A lesser team, perhaps, would have folded. The Broncos held a pair of double-digit leads, and the Browns clawed back each time. After the Broncos turned the ball over early in the fourth quarter, Winston and the Browns marched down the field for a go-ahead score.
It didn't matter. Denver responded with a "big-boy drive" — as quarterback Bo Nix later called it — to retake the lead for good. Denver's defense then sealed the game by capitalizing on a pair of late Winston passes.
"I told them in the locker room that it was not pretty," Head Coach Sean Payton said, "and yet in the end we did what we had to do, especially late."
Payton said he was "proud of the way we fought," and that will was on display throughout Monday night's game.
"We've got a tough team here," outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper said. "We've got a tough team all across the board, from the back end to the front. We all play for each other. I think that's the key. We play for each other. We care about each other. We're playing for something."
After finding a way to close out a difficult win, the Broncos may soon be playing for something even greater. Denver enters its bye week with two fewer losses than the next closest team in the wild-card standings, and the Broncos' eight wins are tied with the two other existing wild-card teams in the Chargers and Ravens.
An imperfect win is always preferred to a statistically impressive loss, and the Broncos found a way to come out on the right side of the ledger. As Cooper said Monday, that may not have been the case in prior years.
"There's been a couple hard-fought wins that we've had this year that in the past we kind of didn't come home with those wins," Cooper said. "… I don't know exactly if we would've got this, but all I know is I'm proud of the team that we've got now and how we won this one."
The win was unlike any the Broncos have notched this year — wide receiver Marvin Mims Jr. likened it to a Big 12 shootout in which he would play at Oklahoma — but it counts all the same in the standings.
And as the Broncos head into their bye week, their ability to find various ways to win has only given this young group an increasing sense of belief.
"We're a confident bunch right now," Nix said. "We're playing aggressively. We're playing together. We're playing with a little bit of confidence and a chip on our shoulder. [We are] just trying to continue to prove not only to other people but to ourselves that we have a really good football team. We're starting to play like it. Playing with that confidence is important. It's good to see us win in games like this.
"It doesn't matter how it happens. We just make the next play. Continue to do it, and don't get down. When we go down by a point, we have to go find a way to score, and we did. Then our defense [says], 'We have to find a way to stop them,' and they did. Just a complete team effort. It was good to see."
