I was through about 20 minutes with new Broncos coach Nathaniel Hackett, and that’s where he stopped me in my tracks. It was Saturday afternoon—he was fresh out of draft meetings, less than 72 hours away from the start of his first offseason program in Denver—and he might as well have been shot out of a cannon as he digested the point I’d been waiting to make with him.
Specifically, I asked if the challenge he’s facing is a little different than it is for most first-year coaches, since the great majority come into situations broken by definition—the job wouldn’t have been open otherwise—and, as such, might be afforded some semblance of a honeymoon phase.
“First and foremost I want to clarify something when you talk about from the ground up,” he said. “I don’t think that exists anymore. I think in this profession, because of the way that society is, everybody wants to win now. Look at what happened in Jacksonville [where he coached from 2015 to ’18]. We jumped in, we win, the next year we’re supposed to win the Super Bowl and I’m losing my job. So it’s like wherever you enter in, you gotta win, or you at least have to show signs of getting better and showing improvement to be able to win.
