The Denver debacle

I've been a Denver Broncos fan ever since I barely needed my other hand to show how old I was. There wasn't any profound reason for it: I turned on the television one Sunday to see what was on, saw a football game on and liked the helmets of one of the teams.


They had a Bronco rearing in the heart of a large D. It just looked cool, I thought. Denver won that game, in the late '60s, so I figured they were good.


Little did I know.


Oh, sure, I found out most folks in central Kansas - where our farm is - were Chiefs fans. But I've never been one to do the same thing everyone else did, just because they did it.


Even when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.


In those days, I soon discovered, 5 wins was a good season for the Broncos. A .500 season? That was almost a pipe dream. The playoffs? Those seemed to take place on an entirely different planet...a place the Broncos had no clue how to reach.

The playoffs weren't even part of the considerations as Broncos fans talked about the upcoming season. That would eventually change, of course. When the Broncos won their first division title in 1977, thanks to the "Orange Crush" defense, I almost didn't know how to act. Is this real? Denver just doesn't win this many games. After they were dominated by the Dallas Cowboys in the Super Bowl, I thought they'd never get there again.

Oh, sure, there were other playoff games, but the Broncos never seemed like serious threats to reach the Super Bowl again.


Then John Elway arrived. He redefined expectations in Broncoland. I remember watching "The Drive" with my girlfriend at the time, thinking "What a great game!" and "What a remarkable drive" ---- but it didn't hit me that Denver was going back to the Super Bowl until after Karlis' kick had sailed through the uprights (and, yes, it was good, Browns fans, if you see it from a camera angle shown during "NFL's Greatest Games").

Ah, the Super Bowl. Three times the Broncos would beat the Browns in the AFC title game, only to lose in the Super Bowl; each time in more convincing fashion. I never blamed Elway, but each time it was clear the Broncos weren't the better team. Oh, the Giants took advantage of a series of breaks to win (people seemed to forget Denver led at halftime of that game), but I also knew that the Broncos had to take full advantage of their opportunities against that strong Giant defense to have a realistic chance, and that didn't happen.

I only needed to see about 20 minutes of the next Super Bowl (when Denver jumped out to a 10-0 lead, only for Washington to score two quick touchdowns in the second quarter to take the lead) to know how it would end. "Why'd you do that?" my girlfriend at the time (no, not the same one) asked me.

"It's going to be a blowout," I said.
"How can you say that? It's a close game."
"I just know."

A half-hour or so later, I turned the game back on, it was halftime - and Denver trailed 35-10. "Wow," she said.
"What'd I tell you?"
She never questioned my football instincts again.

We'll never know what the final score would have been had the referees not blown the call on Doug Williams' fumble deep in Redskin territory when he hurt his knee (recovered by the Broncos) with Denver still up 10-0. They ruled him down, though he clearly wasn't when he dropped the ball. But I have a feeling the final score would have been 42-17, not 42-10. The Bronco defense was cheddar cheese, and the Redskins were the grater.

It reminds me of what Slingin' Sammie Baugh said after the Bears beat his Redskins 73-0 in the 1940 NFL Championship. A Washington receiver had dropped a sure touchdown pass with the game still scoreless. Reporters asked him what he thought the final score would have been had the receiver caught the ball. "Oh," he drawled, "73-7."

Things got so bad for Denver fans that after the San Francisco pounding there were those who said it would be better for the Broncos to not go to the Super Bowl rather than to go there and lose. Which I always thought was absurd. You can't win it if you're not in it.

I had a feeling Mike Shanahan would be the coach to win a Super Bowl for Denver after he was hired, because of his experience with the 49ers, his relationship with Elway when he was a Denver assistant and his acumen at play-calling. When Terrell Davis arrived to balance the Bronco offense, I knew our moment was at hand. It took some tough wins at Kansas City (remember what playoff football was like, Chiefs fans?) and Pittsburgh, but the Broncos won the AFC title in 1997.

I may have been one of the few people in the country outside of Denver who thought the Broncos had a chance against the Packers. When Denver won in what I still consider to be a strong candidate for best Super Bowl of all time, I sat on my couch (recovering from the flu) and wept.

I always wondered where I would be and what I would do if Denver ever won the Super Bowl......and I was couch-ridden with what I called "The Fiesta Flu" (several of us who covered the Fiesta Bowl a few weeks earlier came down with this nasty bug). So my answer was "Alone, with a glass of 7-Up."

And then came the sequel....a flirtation with perfection and then a march through the playoffs that was little more than a coronation of the reigning champions. It was awesome. Shanahan seemed a genius, and more Super Bowls a certainty.

Denver had gone from laughingstock to one of only a handful of hallowed teams to win back-to-back Super Bowls. Only Steelers fans old enough to have lived it can relate. Pittsburgh had been losers for decades before skyrocketing to the summit in the '70s, and avoiding a lengthy plummet ever since.

I'm not sure anyone else who has a rooting interest in an NFL team can relate to what Broncos fans feel. The Chiefs and Raiders? Please. They were early powers in the AFL, giving their fans a false sense of entitlement that changes even now how they respond to success.

I share all of this to offer a sense of the hallowed place Shanahan has in the hearts of Bronco fans. That's what makes his firing such a jolt for many of us (not to mention most of the NFL).

Oh, on paper you can see why Pat Bowlen decided a change was needed. A .500 record over the past 3 years. One playoff win (against Tom Brady and the Patriots, no less) since Elway retired. A defense that seemed to redefine "dreadful" year after year. A disturbing pattern of late-season fades.

Yet this was Shanahan, the mastermind who brought Denver Super Bowl titles. Coaches like that can't be found just anywhere. Frankly, I didn't expect more than an 8-8 season at the start of the year, given where the roster was. To go 8-8 despite losing 7 running backs to season-ending injuries, along with your entire linebacking corps and half your secondary.....that's pretty remarkable.

In many ways, I considered this was Shanahan's best coaching job in years. And now there a tiny voice inside me asking the same question it did after Denver lost Super Bowl XII: "Will we ever get back there again?"

Broncos fans everywhere can relate.