I am very proud of Splinter’s coverage of the Los Angeles fires today, but the homepage is pretty bleak right now, and I need to put some positive thinking up there if nothing more than for my own mental health, so I’m going to blog about something nice that happened to me and my Colorado community this week.
The Broncos are the sun at the center of Denver’s solar system. It would not be a stretch to call them a civic religion for our mid-sized city that admittedly, has a Napoleonic complex that I have long believed we express through our unhinged fandom for one of the NFL’s signature franchises. The last decade of Broncos football has tested our city’s neurosis in ways that most of us had never experienced, producing the worst period in this franchise’s 65-year history.
Peyton Manning threw his last NFL pass to Bennie Fowler on February 7th, 2016. It closed out a Super Bowl victory and was also the last scoring play that a Denver Broncos offense ran in the playoffs, as this once-proud franchise has been reduced to a decrepit status similar to that of the laughingstock New York Jets, as that shitshow is the lone NFL franchise with a longer playoff drought than my beloved Denver Broncos.
I have spent a lot of money to witness this drought unfold, as a friend and I developed an annual tradition where we go to a Broncos away game every year, which has taken us from Miami to New York to Las Vegas to London. Across the pond, we reached something of an emotional breaking point and wore bags over our heads and caused a mild stir in local Denver media by confirming that yes, things had gotten so bad that some fans were spending a pretty penny to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to put on a show for the cameras that they were embarrassed to be Broncos fans.
Driving to the Broncos home opener a couple years ago that was such an unprecedented disaster that we, the home fans, counted down the play clock to try to help an offense who couldn’t snap the ball in time, I heard a local radio station put together a list of what they said were the worst Broncos losses in recent years: the 30-6 loss at home to the Chiefs where Patrick Mahomes’ leg fell off in the first quarter, and the game unfolded the same way as if the best quarterback alive was still out there, the 17-16 loss in Denver to the Browns where Vance Joseph effectively fired himself by kicking a three-point field goal down four points late in the game, the 35-9 loss in Miami where former Broncos coach Adam Gase humiliated his previous employer who he held a grudge against by trying an onside kick with a 33-9 lead and recovering it, and the blowout loss at the lowly Jets where the Broncos allowed 300 yards rushing for just the sixth time in franchise history, I paid to see them all. That game above with me and my buddy wearing paper bags over our heads? The Broncos won that one. That’s one of the highlights of our trips these past several years.
But all that misery had a chance to ende on Sunday. The Denver Broncos, after squandering two opportunities to clinch a playoff spot the last two weeks, had a golden opportunity against Kansas City’s backups. All the Broncos had to do was beat a team playing a preseason game who did not care whether they won or lost so long as they stayed healthy, and Denver would snap the NFL’s second-longest playoff drought that spanned across three different presidents. If they lost to a bunch of randos cosplaying their rivals, it would slot in the extremely competitive pantheon of all-time Denver Broncos embarrassments, as they would miss the playoffs and extend the drought through a fourth presidential administration.
Thankfully, the Broncos annihilated the Chiefs with zero drama, and provided one of the best answers to the perpetual question of “what would happen if a college team played a motivated NFL team?” It would probably look like this, a wholly unfair 38-0 fight between starters and backups. Denver posted the 4th-best game ever as measured by DVOA, and calmed the nerves of nervous fans like me by closing a dominant first drive with a nifty screen pass to the dangerous Marvin Mims, scoring an opening touchdown that had me letting out a cathartic roar that surprised myself. To say I was stressed and feeling the weight of the last decade on my shoulders on Sunday was an understatement.
But as much as my own personal baggage weighed my emotions down last weekend, I was more nervous for longtime Broncos veterans like star left tackle Garrett Bolles (pictured celebrating in the titular photo) and star wide receiver Courtland Sutton along with other younger Broncos fans who suffered through this lost decade. I was born in the sweet spot of elder millennial Broncos fans who learned at a very young age that this franchise is tortured just like the Buffalo Bills and Minnesota Vikings and other experts at losing Super Bowls in increasingly embarrassing fashion, but we got to live through the glorious triumph of them winning back to back championships in the late 1990s and elevating our little cow town to NFL royalty. I have already lived my best fan life that most fans don’t ever get to experience, but younger Broncos fans like my sister or Splinter writer Caleb Brennan didn’t get to truly live through the Denver glory years, and that 2016 championship with the ghost of Peyton Manning is the lone taste of the good life they have had since their brains fully formed.
On Sunday, as the Broncos eviscerated a bunch of guys wearing the jersey of their chief rival, my thoughts turned to Caleb and my sister and the litany of younger Broncos fans who felt this past decade of dreck the hardest. They have to grow up listening to older schmucks like me wax poetic about the Mike Shannahan glory years building the foundation of the modern West Coast offense in the NFL, or boomers like my father detailing how the Orange Crush teams helped set the stage for modern defense (they did, just ask their 1978 defensive assistant and future all-time great head coach, Bill Belichick), while all that younger Broncos fans have in their memory banks are the four Peyton Manning mercenary years that we all are secretly disappointed only produced one Super Bowl.
There are a lot of fanbases who will rightfully roll their eyes at the entitlement inherent in much of the last couple paragraphs, but those are just some of the lovable features that make us one of the NFL’s more divisive fanbases. A lot of you love us and a lot of you love to hate us and we are acutely aware of each dynamic and admittedly enjoy leaning into both. Younger Broncos fans have had to suffer under our insufferable tyranny the most as they cannot abandon us like those not afflicted with the Broncos brain worm can. They don’t have many concrete memories of what this vibrant, welcoming and completely insane football community feels like the day of a playoff game, and the memories they do have all largely came before they were legally able to order a drink at a bar. Between college and the NFL, we are about to enter an all-time great stretch of playoff football watching tomorrow, and for the first time in the last decade, my hometown gets to join the party. Even if our city’s favorite son Von Miller and the heavily favored Buffalo Bills are likely to make this a one-day only celebration, I cannot wait to welcome newer Broncos fans into this wonderful experience that I can promise is worth the indignity of being a fanatic.