It’s time for the Broncos to go ahead and embrace the tank
Sep 24, 2019, 6:30 AM | Updated: 10:42 am
The NFL season is a war of attrition. Just three weeks in, it’s time for the Broncos to make some difficult decisions. Spare me the “it’s too early to know what this team is” and “the guys are just now getting into gear” babble. The time for evaluation and evolution has passed.
Sure, there may be room for small improvements. But three regular season games (plus five weeks of practice and exhibitions in the preseason) is plenty of time to assess exactly what Vic Fangio is working with.
In short: It’s not good.
Don’t get me wrong, Vic Fangio and Company have a collection of talented pieces to work with. Emmanuel Sanders, Phillip Lindsay, Bradley Chubb, Von Miller and Chris Harris Jr. top that list. Unfortunately, having five to 10 quality guys doesn’t guarantee you anything in the NFL.
Partly out of necessity, Fangio is only using somewhere between 30 to 35 of his 46 active players on any given week. Injuries aren’t really an excuse, though. He can’t use his pieces because he doesn’t trust them to compete. That’s not a winning formula.
Against the Packers, Denver dressed seven rookies (Noah Fant, Dalton Risner, Dre’Mont Jones, Justin Hollins, Juwann Winfree, Malik Reed and Andrew Beck). While that provides quality experience for your young pieces, except for the rarest of occasions, it’s just not something winning teams do.
Now sitting on a virtually insurmountable 0-3 record, a realistic best case for the Broncos would be 8-8 in the standings come January. For the long-term health of the franchise, though, that might be the worst-case scenario.
The treadmill of mediocrity is a difficult thing to overcome. You’re not good enough to make the playoffs and not bad enough to pick a “can’t miss” talent at the position of your choice in the 2020 draft. The latter is a critical piece to the Broncos putting the winning puzzle back together.
Now, what if you could add multiple valuable pieces for next season? Good news, you can.
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It’s never too early to start planning for the future, so the smartest course of action for John Elway and the organization would be to take the talent you do have now in guys like Miller, Sanders and Harris and use it to help you down the road. Follow the model set by the Dolphins this year, the Raiders last year and the Browns in the five years prior.
Sure, it would sting. And it’s not that those guys aren’t valuable members of the organization. But to be honest, they’re likely even more valuable elsewhere.
Rebuilding isn’t fun. It takes plenty of patience and the product on Sundays will likely be a miserable watch. To be fair, though, sitting through the games against Oakland, Chicago and Green Bay in three consecutive weeks has been, well, pretty much that.
At least when you commit to a full-fledged retooling, you have the benefit of knowing the pain will be worth it in the end. Right now, I’m not sure the Broncos have that.
The Joe Flacco trade, the Chris Harris Jr. pay raise, and the Noah Fant draft pick told Broncos Country “we’re in win now mode”. Adding Drew Lock in the 2nd round, refusing to address critical depth issues, and Vic Fangio’s weeks-long conversation about where he’d be doing his coaching screamed “we don’t know what we’re doing”. A harsh assessment? Maybe. Yet here we sit with no wins, no sacks, no turnovers, and no real direction after just 16 wins in the last 47 games.
From where I sit, the team has two real options. Continue to operate as they have in recent weeks and push the idea of hope and patience with no real action. Or sacrifice a season already in dire straits to rebuild a shallow roster with more young talent at a truly minimal cost in the grand scheme of things.
I’m hopeful the decision makers at Dove Valley will put pride aside and do what needs to be done to improve the team by subtracting expiring contracts and adding valuable draft commodities. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but let’s all embrace the tank.
It’ll be worth it in the end.
