BRONCOS’ OFFENSE MUST JOIN 21ST CENTURY
Unless the Broncos are truly committed to changing the way they think about football, John Elway should stop wasting his time scouting quarterbacks Baker Mayfield and Josh Allen down in Mobile, Ala., and just go order himself a big bowl of boiled crawfish.
Were those tears of frustration shed by Paxton Lynch all in vain? Let’s hope not. The Broncos have more than a quarterback problem. They have a stubborn problem. Have the public and painful NFL failures of Lynch, whose proficiency in the spread offense at Memphis made him a first-round draft pick, finally taught Denver a lesson?
“We have to take what those guys do best and kind of put it in our plan,” said Vance Joseph when he arrived at the Senior Bowl to coach Mayfield and Allen. “We can’t watch those guys on tape for four or five months and then draft those guys and ask them to do different things. … We have to implement spread concepts for those guys to be successful on our level.”
Well, hallelujah. It’s nice to see the Broncos finally intend to join the rest of the NFL in the 21st century.
Now we will find out if Elway actually gives Joesph the authority to modernize Denver’s offensive philosophy.
If Elway wants to give Mayfield, Allen or Sam Darnold a real chance to succeed
after investing a first-round draft choice in a quarterback, the Broncos must adapt their system to a rookie signal-caller, rather than repeat what Denver did on its way to a 5-11 record.
Watch tape of Mayfield winning big games for Oklahoma, check out why scouts like the potential they saw in Allen at Wyoming and review Darnold’s jaw-dropping moments with Southern Cal. It’s obvious none of these ballyhooed prospects is from the classic, old school of Peyton Manning.
The pro game changed, and maybe Denver was too busy shining its Vince Lombardi trophy from Super Bowl 50 to adapt. When a team goes from champs to chumps within a span of two years, there’s something more wrong than a simple lack of football talent. In an Instagram world, the Broncos were stubbornly clinging to Myspace.
From the looks of the vapid offensive game plans that resulted in Denver finishing 27th in scoring, Joseph and his 2017 coaching staff didn’t know what RPO meant, much less know how to implement run-pass option principles into their attack.
There’s some truth to the getoff-my-lawn rant that college football fails to prepare quarterbacks for the pro level. But if the Broncos want to stick to their traditional offensive ways, their choices for a new QB are pretty much limited to spending big bucks on Kirk Cousins in free agency or hoping Josh Rosen of UCLA falls to them at No. 5 in the draft.
“There are a lot more unknowns going into the draft then there is in free agency,” Elway told reporters covering the Senior Bowl. “We look at all the holes that we do have, see what’s available and how everything fits with what we want to do, and the value that’s there.”
If Washington allows Cousins to hit the open market, his experience probably gives the Broncos the best chance to make noise in the playoffs next season. But at a price tag that could reach $30 million annually, how much value is there to be had in Cousins?
When Lynch dabbed away tears after being forced from a loss at Oakland, it didn’t make him any less of a man. But it did reveal how painful it can be to force a round peg into a square hole. An NFL quarterback does win from the pocket. The runpass option, however, is here to stay, even if Denver moves on from Lynch.
Until the Broncos get unstuck from the past, they are not going back to the Super Bowl.