If Pat Bowlen had lived today, general manager John Elway would be gone tomorrow.
The Broncos ended the strangest season in NFL history in an all-too-familiar way by doing what they have done best over the past five years. Denver has found a way to lose.
While coach Vic Fangio is everyone’s favorite uncle, he handles the end of the game like Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels did comedy: dumb and dumb.
Las Vegas beat Denver 32-31 when Fangio restored cheap order to a confused Raiders sideline by naming a timeout ahead of the two-point conversion that was the deciding score during the dwindling seconds of the game.
Same old, same old. Anyone else in Broncos Country besides me is sick of it? This is not football. It’s slapstick.
“It’s the way it was,” Fangio said Sunday. “We just could not complete the matches if we were in the lead the right way.”
And know what sadness is? While the bickering Bowlen kids go to court and make up about the family gem Daddy bequeaths to them, there is no way franchise president Joe Ellis is going to fire Elway or Fangio.
So, what’s next? The Broncos need to do something more dramatic than bring back the same mess and hope for the best in 2021.
Elway’s first off-season move would have to limit Justin Simmons’ contract extension, immediately after the Broncos made a painful farewell.
He is our Vonster. Always will be. But as a 31-year-old linebacker recovering from a serious injury that cost him the entire 2020 season, linebacker Von Miller is not who he used to be. In exchange for the nearly $ 100 million Denver has paid him since his MVP performance in Super Bowl 50, Miller delivered a poor return on investment.
Unless Miller is willing to accept a massive pay cut, Elway would be wiser to save $ 13.875 million against the salary cap by letting Miller go to seek happiness with the Dallas Cowboys, or elsewhere in the league.
The Broncos need to open the barn doors and clean the stench.
Their climb back to respect has become a spiral staircase to nowhere. This franchise stubbornly takes back the same mistakes and mumbles that everything will be fine with a little more patience and a little luck.
This is a big hope misleading.
For five long seasons, the Broncos were unremarkable and boring on average. On their best days.
While Denver may be home to the most loyal fans in the league, how many season ticket holders are glad they did not waste their money in 2020? During this pandemic, a football-mad city is reminded that there are far more troubling issues, from grandma’s health to toilet paper in the pantry, than whether the Broncos will ever do anything.
Since winning Super Bowl 50, the Broncos have won 32 out of 80 games, exactly the same victories that the minor Detroit Lions achieved during that period.
The Duke of Denver has been reduced to Johnny Try Hard. Elway does not get the job done.
It’s not that Bowlen will kick number 7 out of the door without ceremony, because Elway deserves better than a hastily written pink slip. But Mr. B would not be afraid to hold a farewell party for a Colorado football legend who has no one in charge at the team’s headquarters right now.
So it seems the Broncos are content to extend their time and wait for a judge to resolve this ridiculous food battle among the two-year-old Bowlen children, spitting up the legacy of their deceased father with an ugly spit over the control of solve a $ 3 billion franchise.
Why is Uncle Vic still here, watching over the team for another year? Because no promising young coach with the right mind would take this job before the ownership of the property was dissolved.
Unless Beth Bowlen stops sis to Ellis (congratulations, buddy), or the Broncos are sold to new ownership, does it really matter who plays quarterback?
Before a knucklehead suggests that Elway should go and rescue veteran QB Matthew Stafford of Detroit, allow me to offer three words.
Stop, please.
Stafford is not the answer. Stafford has won exactly as many NFL playoff games as you and I have during a dozen seasons with the Lions: zippo. Winning is the only stat that really matters to a QB at this level. If Stafford could not succeed in making Detroit competitive in a competitive way, someone who thinks he can make the Broncos elite will probably have to fetch a beer from Coors to wash off a real pill.
Do you really trust Elway to find a quarterback better than Drew Lock, with a top 10 pick in the next NFL draft? Well, Brigham Young’s Zach Wilson does mark a lot of subjects on the Elway wish list.
However, Lock promises that he is worthy of your trust. And his responsibility is the same as the job of all NFL quarterbacks worthy of elite status.
‘Let the other ten guys around us look like they’s benefits. This is what our job is. If they get confused, it is our job to fix it, ”Lock said. “I think this is the hardest job in the world. And I like to do that. ”
I admire mr. Lock’s swing. But he will need a bigger shovel to carve out this barn.