Article: Josh McDaniels watches over Broncos’ collapse
"On Sunday, Denver offered the most spectacularly awful performance in team history."
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Josh McDaniels watches over Broncos’ collapse
By David Ramsey / The Gazette
Monday, October 25, 2010 - Added 9 hours ago
DENVER — The bottom.
In life, and in sports, there’s something soothing about arriving in the gutter. This means you have fallen as far as you can. This means you have lost the ability to shock yourself, or others.
The Broncos have completed their journey to the bottom of the NFL. On Sunday, Denver offered the most spectacularly awful performance in team history.
This is a day that will live in Colorado football infamy. In a decade, we will still remember how much we suffered during this criminally boring game.
Oakland delivered a smackdown of historic proportions in front of an enraged, depressed crowd at Invesco Stadium.
The Raiders won, 59-14, but maybe there’s a touch of good news. The Broncos may try, but they will never top this game. They can’t sink any lower. They can’t be any more inept.
Maybe coach Josh McDaniels can use this afternoon to his advantage. Maybe he can use this surrender to inspire his humiliated players, who have lost 13 of 17 games.
Remember, these are the Raiders, who have served as a comic relief of the NFL since a 2003 trip to the Super Bowl. Oakland fans enjoy bragging about the sinister ways of their favorite franchise, but the truth is the Raiders are one of the longest-running jokes in pro sports.
The Raiders are no longer completely helpless and clueless. It’s only mostly helpless and clueless.
And yet this edition of the Raiders tied the record for the most points ever scored against the Broncos. The Kansas City Chiefs scored 59 against the Broncos in the 1963 season opener at the University of Denver’s Hilltop Stadium.
These Raiders arrived at 59 points with 27 seconds left in the third quarter. If coach Tom Cable had been greedy, the Raiders could have scored 80.
By this time, 50,000 wise fans had fled the madness, and in a quiet, sad stadium McDaniels stood alone. He was, as usual, imitating the fashion sense of his hero, Bill Belichick. He wore blue sweats, a gray hoodie and a frown.
All across Colorado’s Front Range, Broncos supporters were in shock, and McDaniels was no different. He looked dazed. He looked overwhelmed.
Mostly, he looked unprepared.
"We get one chance a week to put our name on something," McDaniels said, "and our name will be put forever on this game."
McDaniels arrived in Colorado less than two years ago as the Boy Genius, the 32-year-old who would revive a lagging franchise. The Broncos had fallen into a habit of fading in the final weeks of the season, and this habit inspired owner Pat Bowlen to fire Mike Shanahan.
The Broncos needed a few changes to return to the playoffs. A tweak here, a tweak there, and Denver could again tangle with the NFL’s elite.
McDaniels took a radical approach. He shredded a powerful, promising offense. He collected New England rejects. He banished eccentric souls, resulting in a bland, faceless team.
He embraced demolition. Yes, there were plenty of reasons, football and otherwise, to dump Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall, but tearing down always is the easy part.
Can this man build anything?
We now see the result of all his dumping and banishing and tearing down. These Broncos are McDaniels’ creation.
And his creation bumbled to the worst performance ever by a once-proud franchise.
http://www.bostonherald.com/sports/c...co#articleFull
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(c) 2010, The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.). Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
Originally Posted by GEM
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