Laddie Morse
“Shake and Bake, and I Helped!” It’s a commercial that I’ll never forget, and unfortunately, many Denver football fans will never forget the day they watched their beloved Broncos Bake (fire) their head coach, Nathaniel Hackett, during Week 16, like they did yesterday. Does that effect the Kansas City Chiefs? Well, indirectly, yes. The Chiefs have beaten the Broncos — who they will play on Sunday — fourteen (14) straight times and it looks like that streak could now become the longest in the history of the NFL, which belongs to the Miami Dolphins over the Buffalo Bills in the 1970s… and that streak is/was 20 straight wins.
Do I feel sorry for Broncos fan? I have relatives who live there, so, maybe… a little bit. What the Denver team is facing is worse than any year for our K.C. team in the 34 years between when Todd Blackledge was drafted in the first round, in 1983, and the year Patrick Mahomes was drafted in the first round in 2017 (it was a loooong wait). I know that’s quite a comparison, but I lived through those years as a Chiefs fan and K.C. never made a trade like the one Denver did last offseason for a QB. They traded for another, older, QB, in this case, Russell Wilson, who moved from Seattle to Denver for:
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“… two first-round picks, No. 9 overall this year [and the Seahawks already chose OT, Charles Cross] and a 2023 first-rounder*; two second-round picks, No. 40 overall pick this year [and the Seahawks already chose DE Boye Mafe] and a 2023 second-rounder, this year’s fifth-round pick, [plus] tight end Noah Fant, quarterback Drew Lock and defensive end Shelby Harris. In addition to Wilson, the Seahawks will send [sent] a 2022 fourth-round pick to Denver [and the Broncos already chose DE Eyioma Uwazurike].”
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DE Boye Mafe was a player that many of us here at ArrowheadOne were hoping the Chiefs would take but in Seattle this season he’s played on 36% of the Seahawks snaps and has 2.0 sacks.
Note: The Chiefs traded for… QB Joe Montana in 1993, along with Safety Dave Whitmore, and a 3rd-round pick for… the Chiefs 1st-round selection in the 1993 NFL Draft.
The way the AFC West Division looks right now:
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e = Eliminated from the playoffs and z = clinched the division
The Broncos will be traveling to K.C. to face the Chiefs this Sunday at noon in Arrowhead Stadium followed next by the Chargers at Home in Week 18. It looks like they’re knocking on the door of a 4-and-13 season.
The Head Coaching job in Denver has to be one of the worst positions… situations… to ever come along in recent memory. The new head coach there has to be a QB coach who can turn Russell Wilson around, even though there is little hope of that happening. While their defense is solid and SportsNaut.com has them ranked at #6 (after losing to the Rams on Christmas evening, 51-to-14), it’s still the Broncos Offense that needs massive amounts of attention.
This team is so bad — and mostly on the offensive side of the ball — that I’m hoping the Broncos don’t try to sign Chiefs OC Eric Bieniemy to be their next HC. Although I doubt that will happen, I see no reason why EB would want that job, and the same goes for Sean Payton. Although the Broncos currently have the 3rd spot in the draft locked up, that pick now belongs to the Seattle Seahawks which was part of the trade for Russell Wilson.
Alisha de Artola has a piece about the Denver Broncos for their Fansided website called, “NFL QBs who deserve to be benched after Week 15” in which she says that Russell Wilson is one of those players. The problem is… the Broncos can’t bench a player who has a 5 year, $242,588,236 deal in place. The Broncos are so upside down on Wilson’s contract that it isn’t until the 2027 season that they could really think about cutting ties with him and even then, they’d have $12.8M in Dead Cap money owed to him (and $4.4M the next year) but it’s not until that year that they’d save more cap space than they’d owe him. That year, in 2027, they’d save $40.6M in cap space.
Perhaps the most important figure for them to consider is that they gave him $124M guaranteed.
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General Manager and Owner Questions
The Broncos GM is George Paton and he’s the one who hired Nathaniel Hackett just this past January. NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport has said that George Paton’s future is “something to monitor” especially now that head coach Nathaniel Hackett has been fired. If the GM is in “iffy” land then how is the hiring of the next head coach going to be a stable decision?
The Broncos got themselves into this mess and a great part of the reason is that they thought hiring John Elway as their GM would solve their problems. So many times, great players don’t make great coaches, or executives. Take Magic Johnson for example. Great player. Horrible coach. However, under Elway’s watch, Peyton Manning was hired to take over as their QB. Manning helped win them a Super Bowl, or so they thought, when it was mostly their defense.
The Walmart heir, Rob Walton, his daughter Carrie Walton-Penner and son-in-law Greg Penner bought the Broncos just last year for $4.65 Billion and Penner, who now serves as CEO, said at that time, that he wants to make the Broncos into, yearly contenders. On that count –> FAIL! Why bring Penner up? Because it was Penner who made the announcement about the firing of HC Nathaniel Hackett. When Penner made the announcement, he also did so while confirming his support for GM George Paton, who was hired as the Broncos GM in January of 2021, just last year. If he’s not going to be the GM long term, then keeping him around is a huge mistake. Plus, if his job is not in jeopardy, then why bring up the idea that you support him? “The lady — err, gentleman — doth protest too much, methinks.”
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In any event, it looks like Denver will be bottom-feeders for at least the next couple of seasons, if not longer. While I’ve heard criticism that the Broncos pick of CB Patrick Surtain II in the 2021 NFL draft, because they were (are) in need of a QB, it’s hard to argue with a guy who is that good and makes the Pro Bowl in his second season. Yes, QB Justin Fields was still on the board, but even if Fields does work out, and there’s no certainty of that moving forward, he might have been a complete failure in Denver. Why? Because it’s where QBs go to die.
The Chiefs had the right pieces around Patrick Mahomes when he was drafted, not the least of which were his Head Coach, Offensive Coordinator, front office staff AND Alex Smith. Plus, and let’s not forget, copious weapons. The downfall in Wilson’s play has been fast and furious. From a piece by Gary Mason — a Russell Wilson fan — called, “The shocking decline of Russell Wilson has been difficult to watch” for the globeandmail.com, he says:
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“Last spring’s trade of Wilson has been an unmitigated disaster for Denver, and may go down as one of the worst in NFL history. I’ve never seen Wilson play this poorly, ever. He’s missing routine throws to open receivers. He’s not seeing others who are in the clear, opting for someone who is covered instead. Because of his size, he’s never been a quarterback who passed over the middle of the field much. But he made up for it by being one of the purest deep-ball throwers in the league. But even that magic power seems to have abandoned him.”
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A man named Will Keys of BenchWarmersBrew.com‘s podcast thinks that it’s possible for the Broncos to win their last two games and then they’d jump onto the bubble of the bubble. When I heard him say that I thought he was living in a fantasy world. Although he did say later that the last two games will be much easier to lose than win and… Keys does see it right by saying, “How do any of the coaching possibilities [see below] who might come here [to Denver] really want to come here if their future is dependent upon Russell Wilson doing good?” Brandon Perna, Keys’ partner on the podcast, is “more realistic” and can’t see any reason why one of the mentioned head coaches would want to come to Denver to coach the Broncos.
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With Wilson now but a shaken shadow of himself, and with his massive contract locked in, the only way this plays out well for the Broncos, is if Russell Wilson somehow retires. As David Bell said to me on the phone yesterday: “That’s not happening.”
That pretty much sums up the Broncos ability to compete over the next decade: “That’s not happening.”
Let’s Ride… Like a Chief!
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Laddie Morse — ArrowheadOne
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