They say you only really learn through trial and error, so Monday was an important step in the ownership tenure of the Penner group.
After a 51–14 blowout loss to the Rams Sunday that dropped Denver to 4–11, it fired coach Nathaniel Hackett and declared publicly that general manager George Paton would be swooped into the fold to help find his replacement. This was a move so expected, so painfully by the book when it comes to standard NFL operating procedure, that we barely batted an eye. The people closest to power, the ones who have the ability to shape the narrative, survive. Of course, that’s the problem. How long will it take before the Broncos figure that out?
Make any worn cliché of an analogy you want. The Broncos fired the head chef and not the guy who bought the lettuce with its own entourage and unwillingness to run the offense(s). The Broncos fired the construction worker and not the architect who drew up plans for a modern building crafted from crumbling sandstone. The Broncos fired the astronaut and not the guy in mission control who built the rocket and pointed it straight at the sun instead of whatever distant planet they were supposed to be exploring.
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There was plenty of blame to go around for this wildly disappointing Broncos season. Hackett wasn’t blameless. But to make one person wear it on his heart like a scarlet letter is a symbol of why bad teams stay bad and mediocre teams stay mediocre.
This is the truly stunning part about the Hackett news on Monday, not that Hackett was dismissed, but that there was a complete lack of accountability for the one G.M. in the NFL who went out and traded the franchise’s future for an aging quarterback whom very few smart offensive minds would have signed up to coach. To say that there is a surplus of information, or at least reported speculation, on what Russell Wilson can do to a franchise is putting it lightly.
But the Penner group didn’t even need Google. It needed to open its eyes once or twice during the season and see open wide receivers jumping up and down, throwing tantrums like toddlers during a Christmas present fake-out, when Wilson decided to continue freelancing in the backfield and ultimately chuck some directionless deep ball into the outer reaches of Denver’s thin atmosphere.
What was the difference between what Russell Wilson did this year and what Zach Wilson did in New York? Play the film side-by-side and watch two quarterbacks unwilling or unable to play in rhythm and on schedule. One franchise is almost certainly cutting ties with the player. Another is blaming the person who tried unsuccessfully to fix it.
As we wrote recently, who is going to take this job now? Who is going to take what may be their one and only chance at an NFL head coaching job with an inherited general manager and a quarterback who will only dance to one song? In the coming weeks we’re likely to hear some real pie-in-the-sky scenarios, but only the truly naive, or the truly assured that they can cut Wilson and force ownership to swallow a Thanksgiving-sized portion of dead-cap space, will step into this situation confident they can fix it. As a reminder, Wilson signed a $245 million extension before the season that included $124 million guaranteed. The dead cap amount could be as high as $107 million, depending on the timing of any move away from Wilson.
Seriously, how hard is it for someone to pull up all-22 footage and look at an offense? (My typical complaints about the usability of the NFL’s Game Pass product aside.) Sure, there were some design flaws in what Hackett was putting on the field, but how much of that was in a herculean effort to put something sensible forward so Wilson would hit the intended targets? How many game plans were nuked before they even had a chance to get going? How many receivers, God bless them, may have just thrown up their hands on a few routes because they knew the ball wasn’t coming to them in the middle of the field?
Are we really willing to bet that Vic Fangio, the godfather of the modern NFL defense, who was also let go under Paton’s watch, and Hackett, who got Blake Bortles, of all people, to a conference championship game, are complete hacks and Paton, who is in his first swing at this general manager gig, has all the answers? We’re not saying Paton should be fired, but a good practice would include total and complete accountability, and not the same old message from NFL owners that the most vulnerable will be fired, anonymously smeared and forced to take the gut punch all alone.
So, this is Day 1 of a hard lesson, one which the team’s new ownership group will start to really feel sometime in mid-October of 2023, when the Wilson contract, alongside some of the other megadeals thrown at aging Band-Aid talent on this roster, start to really let out air. We are what we choose to believe. And today, the Broncos professed their belief in Wilson, or at the very least, the thought processes that brought him here in the first place.
