Broncos enough to make a man cry
The tears of running back C.J. Anderson turned to sobbing, in the way a nasty storm builds to a crescendo. The champions of Super Bowl 50 don’t live here anymore, and the pain of it all stuck in the back of Anderson’s throat. He covered moist eyes with his hands to hide the shame, refusing solace for a costly fourth-quarter fumble during a loss when the Broncos came undone.
“It’s on me, man. This (expletive deleted) hurts. That (expletive deleted) hurt,” Anderson muttered Sunday, choking on his tears, after a 20-17 loss to Cincinnati.
Is this what John Elway calls soft? He made this mess, but the architect of a last-place football team chose Friday to insult his players with just about the most offensive four-letter word any athlete can ever be
called.
“None of us is soft … For him to call us soft, it just rubbed us the wrong way,” Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall said. “Our game is so physical; you get shunned out of this league for being soft.”
Elway stuck a dagger in the soul of his football team, and Cincinnati slowly turned it, as 75,707 witnesses moved past their anger and grief with dark humor.
In Section 134 of the South Stands, two die-hard fans sat side by side in Row 13, where the feeling is: If something bad can happen to the Broncos, it will. Steven McClellen and Brian Nett, both 36 years old, have been best buddies since kindergarten.
“It’s like a car crash. You want to look away, but you can’t. That’s what it’s like being a Broncos fan right now,” said Nett, shortly after quarterback Brock Osweiler threw an interception in the end zone that was returned nearly the length of the field by Cincinnati’s Dre Kirkpatrick, setting up a touchdown that put the Bengals ahead 6-0 in the first quarter.
And the boos began to fall on the Broncos.
“There was no energy, no life, no juice in the stadium,” said Marshall, who felt there was no real home-field advantage for the first time since he joined the team in 2013. “I guess they boo because they expect so much from us.”
McClellen, whose grandfather purchased season tickets way back in 1961, felt the need to clarify the source of his displeasure. “I’m not booing Osweiler,” he said. “I’m booing all of them.”
For the first time since 1990, the Broncos have lost six times in a row.
Vance Joseph might be a leader of men, but as an inexperienced head coach given a shoddy offensive line and a mess at quarterback by Elway, every time Joseph glances up at the scoreboard, he sees no way out.
“You are who you are,” said Joseph, the leader of a 3-7 team sinking into the abyss. “It’s our record.”
With Terrell Davis in town this weekend to celebrate his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Elway took time to lament how the Broncos have lost that championship feeling.
“To be dead honest with you, we got a little bit soft,” Elway said fewer than 48 hours before the dog came out in Broncos too busy lamenting the way they were to overcome adversity when it strikes on the field.
Soft? Is Joseph the leader of soft men, as his boss suggested?
“I was initially offended,” Joseph said. “In some aspects, he’s right.”
If the Broncos have not already quit on Joseph, they have more reason to do so now. One of their captains, quarterback Trevor Siemian, has been tossed aside and was forced to watch this debacle in street clothes as an inactive player. Aqib Talib, another captain, was burned in man-to-man coverage by the Bengals, and has contract terms that suggest the veteran cornerback might well be playing his final weeks in Denver.
It’s time to put Paxton Lynch in at starting quarterback and find out if he has any future in Denver. The offense, which hasn’t scored more than 20 points since Sept. 17, cannot possibly get worse. Let the creative tanking begin. All the Broncos are playing for now is a good pick in the NFL draft.
Blow it up. The whole thing has gone stale for these Broncos.
“What do you mean by stale?” Marshall asked.
This group, led to the summit by Von Miller, Peyton Manning and the No-Fly Zone, had its time. And it was a very good time. But the run is over. In the NFL, it’s all not for long.
“I guess what goes up must come down,” Marshall said.
At 6:04 p.m., more than a half hour after time and hope expired on the home team, Anderson sat in his locker, dressed in black, his face buried in his hands, inconsolable.
How badly do these Broncos stink? It’s enough to make a grown man cry.