You can only stay on a team so long before your presence becomes stale. The Denver Broncos have allowed John Elway’s consultancy role to expire, thus officially marking the end of Elway’s near 30-year run with the organization.
This is the dawn of a new era for the Denver Broncos.
When one thinks about the history of the Denver Broncos, the first name that should come to mind is the legendary John Elway.
The QB not only was the greatest player in Broncos history with his 50,000 passing yards, 300 TDs, 148 wins, 9 Pro Bowls, 3 All-Pro Teams, 2 Offensive Player of the Year awards, Walter Payton Man of the Year award, 1987 MVP award, Pro Football Hall of Fame 1990’s All-Decade Team selection, 5 Super Bowl appearances (1987, 1988, 1990, 1998, 1999) 2 Super Bowl wins (1998, 1999), and Super Bowl MVP award (1998), but he also is one of the team’s greatest ever GMs as he built the early 2010’s team that won 5 AFC West titles, reached two Super Bowls (2013, 2015) and won Super Bowl 50 (2015).
Obviously, every single great thing the Broncos franchise has accomplished has been heavily influenced by John Elway as he brought the team unprecedented success (15 playoff appearances, 12 AFC West division titles, 8 AFC Championship game appearances, 8 Super Bowl appearances, and 3 Super Bowl victories) which was unheard of in the 23 years of Broncos history before Elway joined the team.
Seriously, the Broncos had only made the playoffs 5 times, won 3 AFC West division titles, and made a sole Super Bowl appearance (blown out 27-10 by Roger Staubach’s 1977 Dallas Cowboys) before Elway.
Nevertheless, most of the Broncos’ failures since that 2015 Super Bowl, such as missing the playoffs in each of the last 7 seasons to set the second-longest playoff drought in franchise history, have been solely down to Elway’s inability to find a replacement for Peyton Manning once the all-time great QB retired after the Super Bowl win.
In those seven seasons Elways has been in the GM role (2015-20) and then as a consultant (2020-23), the Broncos have gone through QBs like crazy as they started an astonishing total of 13 QBs.
Brock Osweiler, Trevor Siemian, Paxton Lynch, Case Keenum, Joe Flacco, Drew Lock, Brandon Allen, Jeff Driskel, Brett Rypien, Philip Lindsay/Kendall Hilton (Lindasy started the game in the wildcat formation, but Kendall Hilton was the actual QB), Teddy Bridgewater, and Russell Wilson have all featured under center as the starting QB, which is obviously insane for any organization.
You can’t expect to win games, let alone division titles and Super Bowls, if you are rotating through QBs like a Logan Roy when deciding a successor in Succession. I mean, at least Logan Roy didn’t actually want to choose someone to replace him and was only placating his children, yet Elway just completely failed to pick a half-decent QB in 13 attempts.
Sure, there’s obviously other issues (poor receiving options, shaky offensive lines, etc.) that has derailed the Broncos, but the lack of a competent QB to battle the rise of the Kansas City Chiefs mini-dynasty (“mini” for now) was the undoubted nail in Elway’s Broncos career coffin.
Nonetheless, Elways will always be a living legend in Broncos folklore as he almost singlehandedly transformed the franchise from a dysfunctional, rudderless mess into one of the premier teams in all of the NFL, while new HC Sean Payton will be tasked with performing immediate heart surgery to resurrect the team.
It’s just unfortunate that Elway’s magnificent career ended with a whimper rather than a bang.
Images Source: Featured Image: (Wikimedia Creative Commons License/Author: All-Pro Reels) (All-Pro Reels, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
