In the first quarter against the Cowboys, Siemian threaded the needle after a play-action fake to hit Emmanuel Sanders over the top in the end zone.

“That’s a big-time throw with the right placement of the ball,” head coach Vance Joseph said. “That’s hard to do.”

In the second quarter, Siemian recognized a mismatch in coverage on a third-and-9 and found running back C.J. Anderson, who cut inside and left Cowboys safety Jeff Heath on his back as he sprinted into the end zone.

“We knew we were getting man coverage in the red zone and Trev gave me a little double move route out of the backfield,” Anderson said. “Thank God we worked on that route in practice multiple times.”

Then in the third quarter, Siemian changed the call on a third-and-6, yelled “Omaha” and handed the ball off to Anderson, who skated around the right guard and up the middle of the line for a first down.

“The third-and-6 run check was something that 18 would have done,” Anderson said. “… The things he has seen, you can definitely see him go, ‘Hey, I’ve seen that before’ and puts us in the right position.”

Returning from surgery

Three days after the Broncos’ 2016 season ended, Siemian flew to Los Angeles to have his left shoulder repaired. It was crushed in a Week 4 game at Tampa and for nearly three months he played in pain and with an ugly bump atop his joint. It was his separated clavicle pushing up under the skin.

Colleen (his mom), a nurse, and Walter (his dad), a surgeon, knew he needed to get it repaired and knew he would need help after surgery, so they flew him back to Orlando for a month of their care. By then Siemian was a bona fide NFL starter, with plenty of bruises as proof. But he still carried around a perceived stain on his record.

“I think he’s always going to have that stigma that he was a seventh-rounder,” Colleen said. “He even said to us when he was home after his shoulder surgery, ‘I’m going to have to get that seventh-round stigma off my back.’”

When he was cleared to return, Siemian was tasked with re-earning the job he had already won once before. And he’d do so with a new coaching staff and another offense, and amid another summer of noise, dramatically titled The Decision by local sports talk radio.

At the start of the year, when Mike McCoy was hired as offensive coordinator and began to rebuild the playbook, he spoke to his quarterbacks about their preferred plays. He wanted to know what they liked and disliked so he could tailor a system to fit both Siemian and Paxton Lynch. Now, when McCoy asks Siemian to review playsheets before game days, Siemian liberally uses his red pen.

“Mike gives me a hard time sometimes because we highlight our favorite plays on the call sheet and sometimes I give it back to him with freaking 70 percent of the call sheet highlighted,” he said. “I think I’m just comfortable with a lot of the stuff we’re doing. I don’t speak for myself, but everybody’s really comfortable at any given time of the game with what’s being dialed up. We’re just doing our best to execute.”