Adam Trautman has seen this movie before.

The Broncos tight end started his career in New Orleans playing for Sean Payton. His rookie year in 2020, they went 12-4 and secured the NFC’s No. 2 seed.

Payton is an intense coach by nature. Start winning, his reputation goes, and there’s no sense of a lighten up. He only gets more demanding. Like several of his core coaching principles, this one comes from the years he spent with Bill Parcells.

“The hardest time working with Bill was when you were three or four wins in a row,” Payton said earlier this season. “I mean, you couldn’t wait for the game. You’d have a couple tough losses, and then he’d be a little bit more pick-me-up.”

Payton’s wired himself in a similar way. He’s pulled big stunts in the past, “creating a crisis,” as he calls it, or putting mousetraps in the Saints’ locker room to implore his team not to “eat the cheese.”

The methods can be slightly more subtle, too.

“It’s little things like, ‘Hey, I don’t care that we’re winning. We’re still in full pads,’” Trautman said. “Stuff like that. It could be as little as that and as wild as the mousetraps. You can do it in a lot of different ways, but at the end of the day it’s just an expectation.”

Added a fellow former Saint, receiver Lil’Jordan Humphrey: “He’s always been big on detail, but once you get in that little groove like he’s been talking about, he really harps down on the details.”

The Broncos, of course, have won three straight and on Sunday night aim for their first four-game heater since Gary Kubiak’s 2016 team started 4-0. The difference between these Broncos and some of Payton’s New Orleans teams, though, is that this group hasn’t done it previously. They’re just starting to catch the high that comes with winning. Heck, the club’s only had three three-game winning streaks in six-plus seasons before this current one.

Now, though, they can sense the progress. That’s how Payton’s intensity and obsession with seemingly inconsequential details turns from, “Is this guy nuts?” to “This guy’s nuts, but I’m with him” in a locker room.

“I think everyone is getting a taste of it,” Trautman said. “And once you see how you’re teaching the program and how you’re creating the culture and you’re like, ‘Holy (crap), it’s working.’ It took a little time, but it’s working. Now guys are like, ‘(Shoot), this is the way we’re going to do it because it’s working. This is how we’re going to win.’

“It’s all about buy-in and once you have that, you start winning games. Once you have that, you start fighting complacency.”

You might think complacency would be impossible among a group that hasn’t won in the recent past, remains below .500 on the season and has to likely go 6-2 down the stretch to have a shot at the postseason.

But Payton on Friday called the notion to relax when times are good, even by just a sliver, “human nature.”

There’s no room for that in an NFL locker room this time of year.

Three games doesn’t make a season and there’s no guarantee the Broncos will roll through the Vikings and Cleveland and play really meaningful games through December.

But this week still marks the first test of the next phase of Payton’s tenure here: Handling success.

“The intensity goes up because the taste of winning goes up,” right tackle Mike McGlinchey said. “Those two things go hand-in-hand. I don’t think it has anything to do with pressure or anything like that. It is in a way, but it’s more about the want to win. The belief to win. When you believe you can win and you don’t, it hurts more.

“When you have success, the expectation becomes more and more success.”

Number to know

1,533: Consecutive defensive snaps played by Denver cornerback Pat Surtain II, the longest playing time streak of any NFL defender, according to NFL Next Gen Stats. Next best is Indianapolis’ Julian Blackmon at 913. Surtain last missed a defensive snap Week 2 last year against Houston when an injury cost him the final 38 of the game.

Bonus number

500: It’s not a milestone you’ll find on Pro Football Reference or in a media guide, but it’s a tremendous one nonetheless. While slightly shrouded by history, our best counting — journalism math warning inserted here — indicates Sunday night is Denver Post columnist Mark Kiszla’s 500th Broncos game covered. Kiz just celebrated 40 years at the paper this fall and now he’s got another big, round number added to his ledger. I’ve had the good fortune to sit next to him for the most recent 4.6% of those games and I’ve heard stories about at least a few of the others. In an effort to not drip too much sap or ink, suffice it to say it doesn’t take long working alongside him to figure out why he’s still the best in the business so many years later. It’s love of craft and love of place. And, of course, a seemingly bottomless reservoir of bad jokes.

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