Eleven things about the Broncos as they head to Kansas City as two-score underdogs to face the Chiefs on New Year’s Day.

1. Denver offensive coordinator Justin Outten knows he may well be looking for the next stop in his coaching journey in the coming weeks. The man who hired him, Nathaniel Hackett, has been fired and that means most of the coaching staff will be somewhere else in 2023 as well. Asked about that reality this week, Outten provided perspective on the matter.

2. “You really can’t think about that,” Outten said. “That’s where I go back to the (message) with the players. Opportunities are going to be there for us as coaches, whether it’s high school or this league. The importance is the players. … Their window of opportunity playing in this league is very minute and that window closes very, very quickly. I feel for those guys because just feeling success through every week, it’s very difficult.”

3. A year ago, the only two full-time assistants held over by Hackett from Vic Fangio’s final staff were wide receivers coach Zach Azzanni and defensive backs coach Christian Parker. Parker had spent 2019-20 on the same staff as Hackett in Green Bay before coming to Denver in 2021. Azzanni, meanwhile, has served as the receivers coach for one year under Vance Joseph, all three for Fangio and now one for Hackett.

4. Mike Mallory, the veteran special teams coach now serving as interim coordinator, told reporters he’s going to enjoy the time working with interim head coach Jerry Rosburg despite the rough week that led to this arrangement. Rosburg is widely considered one of the best special teams coaches in football and oversaw a decade of mostly excellent units in Baltimore from 2008-18.

5. “He’s had great success, so for me personally it’s a great opportunity to learn and it’s a great opportunity to coach these guys and get them better and let’s go get a ‘W,'” Mallory said. “… The coverage is always something you want to make sure you’re on top of, especially with (Kansas City’s) returners. You’ve got to be on your best, so that’s something we’ve got to make sure we’re good with.”

6. Mallory’s father, Bill, was the head coach at Colorado from 1974-78, when Mike was a teenager.

7. “Certainly they had some really good teams, really good players, really good people,” Mallory said. “With my high school days with (then-Fairview High coach Sam) Pagano, we had good success there and that was a lot of fun. They’re great memories, they really are. When I got back here, it just felt really comfortable. … I love being in Colorado, I’m glad to be here and hopefully I’ll be here for a while.”

8. Rosburg opened his Wednesday news conference with a nearly 13-minute monologue about his background and his unlikely path from retirement to an assistant helping Hackett with game management in Week 3 to now the interim head coach for two weeks. He also provided a bit of insight to the team he worked with in helping funnel a raft of data to Hackett in a usable way.

9. “I was digging in on game management and trying to do math with a bunch of guys that scored a 1600 on their SATs,” Rosburg said, listing off several members of the Broncos’ off-field staff involved in collecting and analyzing data. “I can assure you, I did not.” But he said he was impressed by the amount of information cultivated and was able to use it to help the Broncos smooth out their decision-making processes by being “the voice” at the front of all that data.

10. Outten, in turn, said he and the other coaches learned from Rosburg’s ability to synthesize it. Of course, none of that started until the Broncos already had one loss on their record.

11. “Having these weekly meetings with him and (the other coordinators), he takes us around the league and things that pop up and educates us,” Outten said. “Some rules you’re sitting there and they’re on the back page of the rulebook of the NFL and you didn’t even know they existed. He’s digging on things and finding ways to bring light to things that might pop up in a game. He’s really advanced me and I know our other coaches in these situations.”