Broncos 2004

First, man I’m glad we pulled through against the Eagles, Sunday. We managed to do exactly what I wanted to them for the first 1/3 of the game. Somehow, we fell asleep and almost lost another good lead in the second 1/3 of the game, but managed to recover and get back up to speed by the end.

OK, this is my breakdown of what happened to us last season and what we had/have to do to/not do this season to achieve success. I’m posting about last season so you can see where I’m coming from this year. I will post this season info next.

Last Season (2004)-

Some Pros: As usual, the coaching staff and players pulled together as Broncos to give us another winning record.

Before the season even began, I considered the trade of Clinton Portis (who I did mostly like and still enjoy checking up on him) for Champ Bailey to be a good move. First, because I was sure that our running attack would still be considerable with the talent we had behind Portis. Second, Portis rarely had the stamina/conditioning to finish a game. He spent too much time unable to go. Third, because a “shut down” corner, who plays physical, never hurts. Last, I knew we would need better defense (especially because of our offensive failures) to be a post-season team, and I don’t recall ever thinking we had a good CB crew. (Although O’Neil and James seem to be tearing it up over in Cincinnati this season.)

On my Madden game, I had obtained John Lynch, Champ Bailey, and Courtney Brown. So, it was nice to see them making the same moves that I did with 2 of them, this season, (LOL and then we grabbed Brown for 2005). I like the way Lynch plays. Not the fastest (thus the good corner comes in handy) but a smart, hard-hitting, blitzing, run-stopping safety who is fun to watch (like Atwater).

Solid Line-Backing! Fast, aggressive, and smart. That has been a strong point for several seasons now. The Ian Gold thing was crazy but it’s good to see him back.

Much of our offensive line is a talented unit, who has played together and is good at running the Broncos scheme. Which is to be smaller and faster and more agile in order to spread the field and make sure to give the back that one hole to cut through. This has really been our strongest point over the years with Shanahan (especially with no Elway). This is not an O line that is built to stand and go toe-to-toe with bigger D lines, but one to be fast, aggressive, smart, and crafty. If we get this part right, it almost doesn’t matter which back we run with and it also takes the pressure off Plummer (which is a MUST!).

Rod Smith is there to do, hopefully, his usual quality performance. Ashley Lelie is exciting to me since I’m an ex-receiver and love to see the long-ball. I am hoping that the running game opens the passing game because Plummer has some good targets to hit. I’m not too excited about our Putz choice for tight end. He looks like a gomer to me and I’m hoping he proves me wrong (I’m also an ex tight-end so I watch them closely as well).

Really a lot of positive stuff and the possibility to go far last season, I thought.

Some Cons: Injuries to many players and many were season-ending injuries. Trevor Pryce and Mike Anderson were hard ones to see go down.

We somehow let our old O line coach slip away to Atlanta!

Jake Plummer. The major problem is we have had to waste time trying to retrain him. We brought him over from a 6-year (I think) tradition of losing. He has more career INTs than TDs and a general lack of poise that scares me. They spent too much time in AZ trying to get Elway-like performance out of him (having him try to carry most of the team on his back for years) instead of trying to utilize his strong points and giving him some weapons.

There were many of the games that the only reason we were not blown out was the strong, smart play of our defense. Time after time, I was waiting for the offense to show up and even carry part of their load…

Offensive Play Calling! Now this is what I think is the biggest factor to our failings last season. Somehow, when we ended up with no Anderson, we re-worked the line-up and called Droughns’ number. Now, I don’t have anything against him, he’s a hard runner. It’s just that he’s a little too slow and doesn’t fit our running scheme as well as I’d like (I want a back with Terrell Davis power and down-hill running, and the speed and evasiveness of a Barry Sanders).
With Droughns as our starting back, our offense was almost completely predictable. I would bet that it was at least 75% of the time that the offensive play called was Droughns between the tackles (even between the guards on most of them) or faking that and Plummer rolling out. Now that worked well enough over the first part of the season because Droughns ran hard and our O line was able to open some holes. However, by mid-season, it was obvious to everyone what to expect from our O and opposing teams were able to come prepared to counter it. Especially when running between the guards is something we used more as a trick play, since we normally tried to stretch the field more and use the speed and agility of our O line.

Now, I know people might say, “What are you talking about? Our offense was great. Another 1000 yard rusher, Ashley Lelie with the highest average yards per catch, Plummer passing Elway’s single-season yardage record,” etc. To that I say, yes all those things are true, but game for game we still played like shit. We only moved the ball if it was between the 20’s and a lot of that came in the first half of the season before the opposition tightened down. Plummer threw more INTs again than TDs.
Our red-zone performance was so crappy I wouldn’t even call it a performance as we usually did anything but! Over, and over, and over I begged the coaches to call something other than our only 2 plays, especially in the red-zone. Alas, we did not. So many times, I watched in horror as we tried to stand our little O line up and bull our way to the TD instead of playing with speed, finesse, agility, and some trickery! (The only trickery we really tried consistently was the play-action boot and that doesn’t count since it is one of our 2 plays.) Oh, and screw the reverse and the fade both! Those have never worked for Denver (well the percentages are abysmal). We had nearly as many turnovers as TDs from the red-zone. Also, I’d like to see a stat that shows the correlation between Elam missing a field goal and us losing the game. I would bet we lost the majority of times that Elam missed one.

Summary: So with these negative points, the Broncos tended to beat themselves as often as the opposing team beat them. There’s no way to beat the Colts, (especially at their stadium) when you play like that, and that’s how we got blown out of the post season after scraping to get in. Hopefully the 2005 season goes better!