Siemians Pro Bowl alternate selection last year
—as practically a ROOKIE—preserved Kubiaks unbroken streak of MAKING EVERY SINGLE STARTING QB HE'S EVER HAD A PRO BOWLER. Sure, two were Steve Young and John Elway, but the rest? Brian Griese, Plummer, Schaub, Flacco and Siemian? Only way any of those guys enter the HoF is if they buy a ticket. Despite his 7th round status and his sole previous NFL snap being a kneeldown, he EARNED the starting job by outperforming Elways handpicked successors to Manning. Supposedly that was just because Kubiak has a hardon for fellow late round QBs, in turn supposedly why Elway "forced him out," but what happened under Joseph and McCoy? Siemian outperformed Lynch AND Oz. That doesn't prove he's elite
: Just demonstrably better than Elways picks.
I'm not knocking Elway (really) but he was a sui generis natural. If finding franchise QBs were as easy as saying "go out and get another Elway" he wouldn't have been the once-in-a-lifetime legend he remains. So if he's just looking for guys with the same qualities he had, that's not going to work, if only because few of them will have been raised from the cradle by a successful coach of a top tier college program. It's easy to spot guys with cannon arms and quick feet, but most of Kubiaks Pro Bowl QBs succeeded, not because of those things but DESPITE lacking them. Some of that's teaching, but some of it's finding guys both willing and able to receive that teaching.
Otherwise, you end up with the another of the endless stream of elite athletes who made a name for themselves by simply dominating the strictly average competition on small town HS squads and most of the 130 (!) teams in the FBS alone, without ever having to develop any actual SKILLS to complement and augment their talent. That is, guys who take the world by storm right up until a first round pick makes them just another rookie in a league where even third stringers are elite talents: So their awesome inborn physical ability goes from a rarity to a necessary but no longer sufficient prerequisite.
Again, nothing against Elway, but he was such an athletic freak in so many ways that he COULD continue dominating nearly all the competition even in the NFL. That's what instantly and enduringly put him at odds with Reeves, who'd learned the hard way that even a well-coached HoF roster like the Cowboys dynasty could still lose to ANOTHER well-coached HoF roster like Packers and Steelers dynasties. We've seen countless times that a group of great athletes can and will just flat overwhelm most regular season competition to secure a playoff berth only to get shredded once the postseason confronts them with nothing BUT groups of great athletes; that was the AFCs hallmark for thirty solid years until Elways first SB win.
I daresay the Elway who won back-to-back SBs was as different mentally as physically from the one who blown out of three in four years a decade earlier. His public comments on Reeves in recent years certainly suggest that, as does the championship team he led as GM. For all the talk of borrowing the Seahawks model that destroyed our 2013 team, the Seahawks don't run a 3-4: Elway's channeling Reeves' SB teams as surely as Reeves was channeling Landrys; sadly, none of those Broncos teams had a Rayfield Wright
—but just look what they did with a Gary Zimmerman.
Also: Brevity is for troglodytes.
Kubiak in talks to become Broncos Executive
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Originally Posted by Sting
#7 - JOHN - #44 - FLOYD - #80 - ROD
