Broncos are Blake Bortles of NFL
It’s perfect and sad, all in the same sigh. Blake Bortles and the Blake Bortles of NFL franchises. Together at last.
No, Bortles doesn’t have three Super Bowl rings. He’s not been blessed with one of the most loyal fan bases on the planet.
But the surface parallels between the last five years of the Broncos’ newest quarterback target and his new team’s travails since 2015 are more than a little uncanny:
Flashes of brilliance. Doesn’t always close. No consistency. Sometimes feels like they’re making it up as they go. Not terrible. Just good enough to break your heart.
Sound familiar?
Over his last 28 regular- season starts, Bortles is 3- 8 in games decided by eight points or fewer. The Broncos are 4- 7 in games decided by eight or less under coach Vic Fangio, who is in his second year.
“We’re plays away,” linebacker Josey Jewell said of his Broncos, who take an 0- 2 mark — after narrow defeats to Tennessee and Pittsburgh — into Sunday’s showdown with Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “It’s frustrating, but at the same time we’re really close. We know that.”
They are, but it’s not like Bortles gets them all that much closer. The kid was drafted out of Central Florida in 2014 as a franchise savior. By his fourth season, his best, he was the guy whose job was to hand off to Leonard Fournette and get the heck out of the way.
If Bortles is Plan B because Jeff Driskel is Plan A, you have a Plan A problem.
Although let’s be clear: Not all of this — the injuries, the frustration, Bortles — is Fangio’s fault. We snicker at preseason games for being shameless cash- grabs, but those tilts also help smooth over some of the chemistry and infirmary headaches we’ve been handed in September. The crowd at Mile High is probably worth at least a win a season, and we’ll likely never see it raging and rocking at capacity the rest of this calendar year. Those are COVID things, life things, elements that were out of the Broncos’ control.
It’s the things that have been in their purview that worry you. The lack of a central focus, a central mantra, a central vision — other than
LOSE and — from the top down. Filling some holes with talent, while leaving others — right tackle, cornerback, backup quarterback — to be patched by hope.
Hiring an old head coach with a defensive background in an NFL era driven by youth, speed and offensive complexity. Game management. Situational awareness.
Giving your best wideout a jumping jacks test before deciding whether or not to send him out onto the field is cute, but it’s hardly the most scientific way to assess one of your most valuable assets. Not in a league that’s got more lasers at its disposal than Darth Sidious.
At his most charming, what you love about Fangio are those
WE HATE TO DO IT FOR MR. B
little moments when he reminds you of Ken Reeves, the coach from the ‘ 70s TV show “The White Shadow.” Those occasions when he’s everybody’s streetwise dad, the cool gym teacher.
On the flip side, there are the four losses under Uncle Vic in which Denver held the lead in the game’s final 30 seconds. That takes some doing, even in 2020. In 18 months, the Broncos have gone from death by inches to tortured by timeouts.
The NBA is about the name on the back of the jersey. Major League Baseball is about the general manager. The NFL is a QBandcoach league, no matter how complicated, how nuanced, we try to make it.
Few franchises have seen their success so intrinsically linked to the pedigree of their respective signal- callers as the Broncos. Legends ( Elway, Manning) reached Super Bowls, the very good came very close ( Plummer), and almost everybody else, including the Almighty Tebow, went up and down.
The surest ways to beat the Chiefs are to either remove Patrick
Mahomes from the equation or to counter Kansas City with one of your own game- changing quarterbacks. The plan for 2020 was to figure out if Drew Lock was/ is that guy. We might never get a true picture of that now, even if that rotator cuff strain was nothing more than a fortnight’s speed bump.
Given the landscape of the AFC West, tanking the rest of 2020 for a crack at Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence might be a sensible, if alarmist, plan for the long view. Although it’s also hard to imagine John Elway blessing that agenda with a straight face.
Besides, there’s going to be plenty of traffic on that turnpike, and Carolina, the Jets and Giants are already about six car lengths ahead of you on the road to nowhere. Although they can all just about make the Broncos out in their respective rear- view mirrors now, with Bortles tied to the roof rack like a Fraser fir. That’s not a compliment.