November 18, 2013

Behind a determined, hobbled quarterback, Broncos hold serve

By Dave Krieger

For the entire 21st century — all thirteen years of it — many folks in Denver with a sense of history have decried the replacement of venerable Mile High Stadium with its thoroughly modern, multi-revenue-streamed, marble-clad successor.

Sure, it allowed the Broncos to remain economically competitive with their peers, all of which were doing the same thing, but the thunder was gone, the shake, rattle and roll, the whole erector set bouncing thing that freaked out novice national broadcasters every time.

Sunday night, it was back. Well, maybe not the erector set bounce, but everything else. The 77,076 who packed the place, many of whom came early and spent the cool, sunny afternoon in sweet anticipation, gave the visiting Kansas City Chiefs a preview of the fourth quarter in the first, roaring and stomping from their very first snap, which, not coincidentally, turned into a penalty for a false start.

In a battle for first place between a highly-admired 8-1 team and a somewhat less admired 9-0 team, the 8-1 team not only won, it also kept its quarterback upright throughout, no small feat against a defense that had sacked opposing quarterbacks more often than any other.

For the Broncos, keeping Peyton Manning upright is the overarching goal because if the 37-year-old quarterback is lost, so is the season. This is the PFM window, and the Broncos have no chance to crawl through it without PFM.

Wearing a brace on the right ankle he re-injured last week in San Diego, Manning and offensive coordinator Adam Gase hobbled a fine line between risking Manning’s health on the one hand and playing it too close to the vest on the other. They ran the ball more than usual and Manning threw fewer touchdown passes than usual. But the Broncos won, 27-17, pulling them into a tie with the Chiefs for now.

“I worked hard all week to get ready to play physically, and certainly, our protection was excellent the entire game,” Manning told KOA afterward.

The Chiefs’ capable duo of edge pass rushers, Tamba Hali and Justin Houston, came into the game with 20 quarterback sacks between them and left with the same number.

“I thought Peyton did a good job getting the ball out fast, and I thought he worked the pocket pretty well,” said Chiefs coach Andy Reid. “There were times where we had pressure and you saw him slide and throw opposite (side), which isn’t an easy thing to do. He’s a pretty good quarterback. He did that and got away with a couple that most guys wouldn’t be able to get away with. But listen, we can do a better job there. We can get more pressure on him, and we’ll work on that.”

For the second consecutive week, the Broncos forced an AFC West opponent to settle for a field goal at a key moment, in this case after a first-and-goal at the Broncos’ 2-yard line. Meanwhile, the Broncos were doing what they’ve done all year — scoring touchdowns.

“I thought our red zone was outstanding,” Manning said after completing 24 of 40 passes for 323 yards and a touchdown. “This team (Kansas City) has been excellent in the red zone. They’ve held a lot of teams to field goals. That has been a big reason why they’ve been winning games. Teams have driven the ball, and they get down there and get three points (or) a turnover down there. The fact we were able to get three touchdowns down in the red zone and the two field goals by Matt (Prater), that was enough to win. That’s something we work on a lot. I thought that was critical. Two weeks in a row, our red zone has been critical.”

One intriguing aspect of the game was the Chiefs’ defensive game plan. In March, they announced they had signed Sean Smith, a big, physical cornerback, to join the accomplished Brandon Flowers in their defensive backfield. This was widely explained as a chess move to defend the Broncos’ Demaryius Thomas, a wide receiver too big and strong and fast to cover with a traditional, small defensive back.

So if it surprised no one else, it surprised me to look up early in the game and see the Chiefs allowing the Broncos to dictate the matchups in their defensive backfield. Rather than have Smith shadow Thomas wherever he went, they had Smith stick to his right cornerback position and cover whoever the Broncos split wide left.

Unsurprisingly, the Broncos sent Eric Decker over there early and deployed Thomas to the opposite side. With Flowers inside covering Wes Welker, rookie Marcus Cooper repeatedly found himself in man-to-man coverage against the most dangerous receiver on the field.

It didn’t take long for Manning to take advantage, hitting DT with a pass down the right sideline that flew almost 50 yards in the air and went for 70 before safety Quintin Demps finally pushed Thomas out of bounds. Two plays later, tight end Julius Thomas caught a short slant for a touchdown and the Broncos had a 10-0 lead.

This was exactly the scenario the low-scoring Chiefs could not abide. Playing catch-up is not their strength.

With the two teams scheduled to meet again in Kansas City in just two weeks, no one was going to disclose anything of even remote strategic significance. But you have to try, so I asked Manning if he expected Smith to shadow Thomas or stick to the right defensive side.

“They’ve done both,” he said. “Certainly, they’ve rotated different guys in the secondary. They’ve had some different guys playing than were playing earlier in the season. Every game you’re never quite sure how their rotation is going to be.”

Cooper, a seventh-round draft choice waived by the 49ers and picked up by the Chiefs just before the season began, has been surprisingly good considering how often he’s been targeted when the Chiefs play man-to-man defense in the secondary. Still, DT made both of his long catches against him and it will be interesting to see if the Chiefs change their strategy for the rematch in K.C.

Besides quarterback sacks, turnovers were the Chiefs’ other strength in building that 9-0 record. They got one early on a fumbled exchange between Manning and rookie running back Montee Ball deep in the Broncos’ territory. But the Denver defense got the ball back on the very next play when linebacker Danny Trevathan separated it from Chiefs fullback Anthony Sherman. So the turnovers canceled out. With neither sacks nor turnovers, the Chiefs couldn’t keep up.

They did manage an 80-yard touchdown drive spanning the end of the first and beginning of the second quarter, and then a 79-yard march on their next possession. That one-yard difference turned out to be pretty important. The Broncos’ much-maligned defense kept the visitors out of the end zone the second time, forcing them to kick a field goal.

“The defense came up big in spurts, and in the end it was enough,” interim head coach Jack Del Rio told KOA.

Turned out, the experts were pretty much on it. Even though the Chiefs came in with a better record, oddsmakers made the Broncos an 8-point favorite, mostly because the Chiefs hadn’t beaten anybody good. The Broncos had the league’s best offense, the Chiefs its best defense.

The Broncos’ 27 points were their lowest output of the season, although just barely, so the Chiefs defense did about as much as it could be expected to do. The offense, managed ably but soporifically by Alex Smith, did the same.

For all the excitement at the replica of the old barn off Federal Boulevard, this thing was little more than a foreword. The next two weekends will offer the Broncos their greatest challenge of the season — consecutive road games against New England and these same Chiefs.

“From a scheduling standpoint, I’m not sure I’ve ever done that before,” Manning told KOA. “There’ll be great familiarity between both teams. Unfortunately, we’ve got a really good team we’ve got to play in between.”

Finishing ahead of the Chiefs is necessary to win the division, a route that offers a slightly smoother road in the postseason, at least in theory. But if the Broncos were to lose these next two, the advantage bestowed by Sunday night’s win would likely disappear.

So this was a necessary but insufficient condition to get where the Broncos want to go.

“We knew when the schedule came out that these were going to be three critical games,” Manning said. “We hoped they were going to be critical. We hoped they were going to matter, because that meant we had taken care of business early in the season. So this was an excellent win. We’ll enjoy it tonight. We’ll be in there tomorrow studying this one and getting a head start on New England.”

As the players and coaches left the field Sunday night, Del Rio circled back to find Gase and congratulate him. Normally, when head coach John Fox is about, these two are peers, coordinating the offensive and defensive game plans. When you consider that they’ve managed these last two division victories in the absence of their head coach, you can understand the joy they felt at keeping the team rolling while Fox recovers from open heart surgery.

“Great, great night of football,” said an enthused Del Rio. “Two very good football teams going at each other. I thought our fans were tremendous. I was told on the way in we only had 74 no-shows, which means that place was full and rocking. It was awesome.”

Imagine how happy he’ll be if they’re still in first place the next time they get to play there.

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November 3, 2013

Sunshine, lollipops and one black cloud

By Dave Krieger

Hang around the Avalanche long enough, especially on a Saturday night when franchise royalty is on hand, and you’re tempted to ignore the one dark cloud and hope it goes away.

That’s what the Avs are doing, and they’re doing it exceptionally well. Barely 48 hours after starting goaltender Semyon Varlamov surrendered to police and spent a night in jail on domestic violence charges, the Avs won both ends of their first set of back-to-back games of the season, with Varlamov in net for the first.

The Avs are now riding their second six-game winning streak of the year and they’ve played just 13 times. The turnaround in the team’s performance since Patrick Roy took over as head coach is something pretty close to miraculous. After surrendering 152 goals in 48 games last season with the same goaltending tandem — Varlamov and veteran J.S. Giguere — the Avs have surrendered just 19 in 13 so far.

Giguere, who got the win Saturday night and has given up three goals in four games, said all three stars of the game could have been Avalanche defensemen, quite an endorsement of a group much maligned just a year ago. Roy always makes sure to credit the back-checking and tracking work of his forwards, a key part of his strategic approach.

Hockey is a game prone at times to mythic themes, and Saturday night was one of those times. When Roy’s first game as an NHL coach against his original team, the Canadiens, is a secondary story, there’s a lot going on.

The Avs are very fond of tribute ceremonies and enormous paintings. The decision to raise defenseman Adam Foote’s jersey to the rafters gave them an opportunity to conduct one of the former and commission two of the latter. It also served as a reminder of the vision Roy and executive vice president Joe Sakic are trying to translate into trophies for a second time. With Peter Forsberg, Ray Bourque and Alexei Gusarov in the house, there were plenty of role models around.

This year’s entire squad was out early for the ceremony. They were reminded that they aren’t the only young team to suffer through trying times before finding their stride. Foote caught the end of the lean years in Quebec before moving with the organization to Denver in 1995 and winning Stanley Cup championships in 1996 and 2001. He’s now working as a defensive consultant with the Avs, so I asked if he saw parallels.

“Yeah, for sure there are,” he said. “I think the leadership with Roy and Joe is huge, very calming for them, just like they were as leaders for us. They believe in what they’re going to do and this confidence just floats out into the room. The players, I think, can sense it.

“When Roy came to our team, traded from Montreal, he brought accountability to the locker room. It doesn’t matter what the professional sport is. You can’t win, the coach, the GM, the owner, they can’t hold you accountable. It’s got to come within the locker room, and he taught us that. That was probably one thing we were missing. Him and Mike Keane. Mike Keane was an unreal leader.

“But I do see this young group, they went through some tough times like we did in Quebec. I know Joe wouldn’t do it, or Patrick, if they didn’t have a goal in mind, and that’s to bring a Cup back.”

They’re a long way from that, of course, but they’re playing sensational hockey right now. “For us, we haven’t done anything yet,” said Gabriel Landeskog, the talented Swedish power forward who scored one goal Saturday night, set up another and is still three weeks from his 21st birthday. “We’re just getting going.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the 36-year-old Giguere, a Conn Smythe trophy winner and Stanley Cup champion himself in his younger days. When your starting goaltender spends a night in jail, attention naturally turns to his backup. Giguere is the best interview in the room, a smart, thoughtful player willing to speak his mind, as he did last spring when he ripped unnamed teammates for thinking more about summer vacation than finishing the season strong.

But questions about Varlamov make him uncomfortable, as they do his teammates and club officials. What are they going to say? They support their teammate. These are only allegations at this point. Let the process play out.

We won’t even know how serious that process is likely to be until the Denver district attorney decides what if any formal charges to file. The charges on the arrest warrant were pretty serious — a felony kidnapping count and a misdemeanor assault charge — but there’s no way to know if the DA’s charges will follow suit.

If charges are filed, it’s hard to imagine the legal process working quickly enough to endanger Varlamov’s availability to the Avalanche this season, so long as the club continues to stand by him. And so far, there doesn’t appear to be much public relations risk of standing by him. So when a national reporter asked Giguere if he could understand some fans being happy he was in goal Saturday night rather than Varlamov, he declined comment.

Still, there’s a legitimate hockey question about Giguere’s playing time simply because he’s been nearly perfect so far. As good as Varlamov has been, Giguere has been even better. The lone goal he gave up in Saturday’s 4-1 victory over Montreal was just the third he’s surrendered this season in four starts.

The year Roy turned 36, he started 63 games for the Avs and put up a goals-against average of 1.94, the only time in his career he was below 2. He also had a career-best nine shutouts. I’d been meaning to ask Giguere if he thought he was in good enough shape to play more, but asking him Saturday gave the question Varlamov overtones and he handled it like a live grenade.

“I’m satisfied with my role right now,” he said. “It’s a role that fits my body well right now, at my age. I’m 100 percent behind Varly and 100 percent happy with the ice time I have. If need be, if I need to play more, I’ll be ready for that, but I told Patrick, ‘I’ll be happy with whatever you give me.’ This is what it is to be a backup and you’ve just got to take it a day at a time.”

The team has generally taken the approach of not commenting on the Varlamov legal matter, but Roy did answer one question after Saturday’s game. He was asked whether his response to the Varlamov allegations — to put him back in net immediately, about 36 hours after he got out of jail — was informed by his own experience, back in 2000, when he was arrested for domestic violence after police responded to a 911 hangup call from his wife at the time. They found physical damage to the house and took Roy into custody. There was never any evidence of injury to his wife, just to a door in the house, so charges were dismissed.

“I was hoping never to have to answer that question again, but the answer is yes,” Roy said. “And I guess Varly is like me, I mean, appreciates that nobody is making a judgment. The best article I think was written by Terry Frei and he said let’s not make a judgment before the process is done and I thought that was something I appreciated at the time. And I’m sure Varly appreciates seeing that support from our fans and a lot of people around him.”

In this case, the police report confirmed bruises on Varlamov’s girlfriend, Evgenia Vavinyuk, consistent with a physical encounter. So this might be more complicated than Roy’s case, but we’ll know soon enough how Denver DA Mitch Morrissey sees it.

Until then, the goaltending rotation will remain what it has been. Varlamov, 25, has started nine games and has a record of 8-1 with a goals-against average of 1.78. Giguere is 4-0 with a GAA of 0.75.

“He looks like a 25-year-old,” Roy said of Giguere. “I saw him this summer and he was working so hard. Honestly, when you work that hard, eventually it’s going to pay off. That’s what our team does. Our team works hard night after night and we’ve been consistent in our effort which is, I think, one of the reasons why we have the results that we have. And our goaltenders are a big part of it as well. But Jiggy’s been working so hard. He certainly deserves a lot of credit for what’s going on for him right now. It’s fun to see it.”

The renaissance of the Avalanche under Roy is the NHL’s best early-season story. Except for that black cloud, the Sakic-Roy management era couldn’t be off to a better start.

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November 2, 2013

A rough start for Brian Shaw

By Dave Krieger

I first met Brian Shaw 24 years ago, in October 1989, at a banquet in Rome honoring the Nuggets, that year’s NBA entry in the McDonald’s Open, a four-team bracket during the preseason that passed for international competition at the time.

Longtime Nuggets fans may remember that international road trip — coach Doug Moe stood for most of the trans-Atlantic flight because he hadn’t yet discovered Valium for his flying anxiety — as coinciding with former owner Sidney Shlenker’s increasingly desperate attempts to sell the franchise.

A couple of young American players had taken Italy by storm, choosing the Italian pro league over the NBA. Danny Ferry, the second overall pick in the NBA draft that year, and Shaw, a first-round pick the previous year who spurned the Boston Celtics’ qualifying offer, were instant celebrities. They were validating European basketball.

I got an opportunity to speak with them for only a few minutes at that banquet. Like John Elway six years earlier, Ferry didn’t want to play for the flaky owner who had drafted him, in this case Donald Sterling of the Los Angeles Clippers. Shaw, then 23, had a more complicated tale. Only one quote from our conversation made the Rocky Mountain News on Oct. 22, 1989:

“The chance for security for me and my family was really important. I want to eventually go back.”

Nearly a quarter-century later, Shaw offered more detail on the radio show last summer, just after being hired to replace George Karl as the Nuggets’ head coach:

“When I got drafted by the Celtics the year before that, in ’88, they were over the salary cap and I was only able to make the minimum for a first-round pick. So what I did was I only signed a one-year deal, which everybody kind of said was crazy, but I felt confident in my ability that I’d have a good showing my rookie year and so it made me immediately a restricted free agent my second year.

“So basically the Celtics came back and they just gave me a qualifying offer and they was playing hardball. Fortunately for me, Danny Ferry had just gotten drafted by the Clippers. He didn’t want to go play for them. Our owner over in Italy, a very wealthy man, offered Danny $2 million to come over there and play for a season, which was unheard of over there. I think at the time Bob McAdoo was the highest-paid player in Europe and he was making about $400,000.

“So I was making $150,000, that’s what I made my rookie season. So this owner, he said he wanted to make a splash. At that time, most NBA players only went over there at the end of their NBA careers. He wanted to get some young, first-round picks to come over and kind of change things up. So he offered Danny Ferry $2 million and he offered me a million dollars to come over, which took me over all the guys who were drafted in front of me.” Shaw was the 24th overall pick in ’88, out of UC-Santa Barbara.

“So, 35-game season, as opposed to 82 here, and Boston still was playing hardball with me, so I said, hey, basketball is basketball, and I went over and played a year there as a teammate with Danny Ferry and had a great, great experience. No regrets, learned a lot, and it made Boston, in my mind, come to their senses, and they came back with a fair offer. So I came back the next season.”

Shaw returned to a four-year, $5.5 million contract and played in the association until he was 36.

The point of the story is that Shaw has always been a bright and independent sort, which are excellent qualities in a head coach. It’s beginning to look like he will need all of that and more. His hiring was only one part of owner Josh Kroenke’s deconstruction of a 57-win team.

“I think I called it stupid,” Karl told me after the June meeting with Kroenke at which he was fired. He concluded that the young Kroenke, Stan’s son and the man in charge, thought winning was easy and had come to take for granted the Nuggets’ regular-season excellence. After all, Karl had been the coach throughout the younger Kroenke’s tenure as an executive with the team.

The fact that I disagreed with the decision to fire Karl doesn’t mean I want Shaw to fail. Quite the opposite. There are few people on Earth more willing to engage in conversation about basketball, besides Moe and Karl, of course, especially Moe when trapped on an airplane back in the days before they made you evacuate the galley and sit down.

But the decision to fire Karl was paired with a misread of free agent Andre Iguodala, who Kroenke thought would accept an offer to stay until the day he signed with Golden State. General manager Masai Ujiri’s departure for Toronto just before Karl’s firing left the Nuggets scrambling to adjust to Iguodala’s defection with a front office in flux.

New GM Tim Connelly collected a random sample of the available journeymen free agents, from Nate Robinson and Randy Foye in the backcourt to J.J. Hickson and Darrell Arthur up front, the latter in trade for Kosta Koufos, the center dispatched to make room in the starting lineup for JaVale McGee, who had averaged 18 minutes off the bench for Karl.

It’s been only two games. Last year’s team was not only 0-2 but also 0-3. With a road-loaded front end of the schedule, Karl’s last Nuggets team was 11-12 in mid December before taking off. So, yeah, it’s very early.

Still, a year ago’s 0-2 was a little different. Except for LeBron James and the Heat, the Nuggets won all their early home games. They just didn’t have many of them.

When they lost to Portland 113-98 Friday night, it was their first loss of a home opener in five years and broke a 23-game home regular-season winning streak. It was their first regular-season loss at the Pepsi Center since last January. At 38-3, they were the NBA’s best home team last season.

Like Moe before him, Karl took advantage of the environmental advantage provided by the mile-high elevation, not to mention the time change for visiting teams on back-to-backs from the west coast. So it was strange to see the Nuggets looking exhausted and the visiting Trail Blazers looking invigorated Friday night.

“Our team looked very tired, just to be honest with you, from the jump, especially our bigs,” Shaw said. “They just looked winded. (The Blazers) looked like they’re the team that play in the altitude and we were the team that was coming in on the second night of a back-to-back, the way we came out tonight.”

The rationale for firing the coach of a 57-win team was the history of first-round playoff exits. So Shaw came in with a mandate to coach a style more conducive to postseason success, meaning slower and more half-court oriented, to better suit the style characteristic of the postseason.

The irony is that Karl’s final first-round exit, the one that broke the camel’s back, was to a team that didn’t attempt to slow down the Nuggets at all. The Warriors beat the Nuggets at their own game, mainly because they shot the ball better — .494 from the floor, .404 from three and .785 from the line, compared to the Nuggets’ .438, .311 and .730.

This defeat might have been interpreted as reflecting an overemphasis on athleticism and underemphasis on skills in assembling the roster. Or it might have been interpreted as the consequence of an unfortunate late-season knee injury to forward Danilo Gallinari, one of the Nuggets’ best shooters and a big forward whose ability to shoot from long distance spreads the defense and creates lanes for athletes who want to get to the rim. Or it might have been interpreted as bad luck, running into a hot team.

It wasn’t. It was interpreted as further proof that Karl was not a coach for the postseason. But the question remained: Did the Nuggets overachieve in the regular season or underachieve in the postseason?

When Shaw arrived, he talked about playing inside-out — a more traditional half-court game in which the point guard’s first and preferred option is to toss the ball inside to a big man in or around the low post. He can shoot it or pass to an open man, depending on how the defense reacts. Shaw also talked about making defense the team’s signature.

After leading the association in scoring a year ago at 106 points per game, the Nuggets under Shaw are 22nd through two games at 93 per, consistent with their scoring average during the preseason. They have lost to a pair of teams in Sacramento and Portland that are not expected to make the playoffs this year. And they seem to have lost the high-flying athleticism that made them so entertaining under Karl.

More to the point, a large part of the basis both for firing Karl and Shaw’s new offense — the talented, enigmatic McGee — has so far been pretty much the guy Karl thought he was — not ready for prime time.

Starting at center, he played 10 minutes in the opener, getting in early foul trouble, and 13 on Friday night, finishing with six points, three rebounds and one blocked shot. All six players who came off the bench, in addition to the other four starters, played more minutes than he did.

Why?

“His physicality,” Shaw said. “And part of that is his wind as well. He was one of the guys that at the beginning of the game just looked gassed out there on the floor. We talked about, when the shots go up, he can’t just turn around and go follow the flight of the ball. He’s got to put a body on somebody. The guys that he plays at the center position usually outweigh him. He thinks that with his length he can just go and get the ball, but they just kind of wedge him underneath the basket. We’ll look at film and show him and just keep working with him on it, but his stamina has to get better and his physicality has to raise up a few notches.”

As Karl often pointed out, deploying McGee and power forward Kenneth Faried at the same time is a prescription for defensive chaos, and not necessarily in a good way. So Shaw began the season with Faried coming off the bench as he recovered from a strained hamstring.

“He played with the kind of energy that people around here are accustomed to him playing with,” Shaw said after Faried collected 11 rebounds in 24 minutes off the bench against the Blazers. “He always plays with a lot of heart. That’s what I wanted to see out of him. I talked about before the game, if it looked like he was getting that bounce back into game shape that I would take a look at putting him back in the starting lineup.”

The Nuggets abandoned the inside-out thing early Friday night, in part because McGee was seldom available — although he did hit a sweet left-handed baseline hook shot in one of those flashes that make you yearn for more — and in part because they were behind early. In the fourth quarter, as part of a spirited but futile comeback attempt, Shaw did what Karl did so often: He went small. With guards Ty Lawson, Nate Robinson and Randy Foye on the floor together, his team made a run. Suffice it to say that’s not a lineup that’s going to make defense your team signature.

“You can’t even blame the system, because he’s stepping away from it,” Lawson said afterward. “We’re not going into the post as much as he’s talking about or doing the elbow catch. So it’s all on us. Today we played like we did last year — pick-and-rolls, drags, into the basket. We weren’t hitting shots. It was a tough night for us.”

“We knew this was going to be a process,” Shaw said. “The way we’re playing isn’t the problem, I don’t think. Tonight, defense was the problem. Sixty-four points in the first half. They finished 14 for 22 from the three-point line and I would say probably 16 or 18 of those three-point shots were uncontested. So it’s more a problem of that than I think the style of play that we’re trying to play.”

In fairness, Iguodala, Gallinari and Wilson Chandler were important pieces of last year’s success. Iguodala is gone and neither Gallo nor Chandler has played yet.

“I’m searching for answers,” Shaw said. “I’m trying to patch, mix and match and patch lineups together to try to see who’s going to bring it for us. . . . But together as a team we’ve just got to find a way. We’ve just got to keep plugging away at it. It’s not the way we wanted to start out the season at 0-2, but it’s where we are right now. We’ve just got to continue to work.”

Implementing a new system with four new players would take some time under the best of circumstances. But the impression the Nuggets have left through their first two games is their talent level isn’t particularly high and their style isn’t particularly interesting — at least until they fall way behind.

This is pretty much the worst of both worlds — becoming less competitive and less entertaining at the same time. Fans don’t seem thrilled with the off-season changes. Although the opener was announced as a sellout, there were plenty of empty seats.

The returns of Gallo and Chandler should help, but it will take all of Shaw’s considerable resourcefulness to get this bunch into the playoffs.

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October 31, 2013

The five greatest Broncos ever*

By Dave Krieger

*according to a thoroughly unscientific survey of listeners to the Broncos’ flagship radio station for four hours on a chilly, wet autumn afternoon in Denver.

It started with a Twitter post — a “tweet” — by Roy S. Johnson, one of the better sportswriters of our time. Acknowledging Allen Iverson’s formal retirement the previous evening, Johnson offered his list of the “five greatest 76ers ever.”

His list: Dr. J, Moses Malone, Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson, Wilt Chamberlain.

We substituted “Broncos” for “76ers” and took calls, emails, tweets, whatever, for parts of four hours on 850 KOA.

A margin of error should certainly be built into the results. It’s a small sample size, its demographics unknown, etc. Still . . . here are the five greatest Broncos ever, according to this admittedly approximate methodology:

John Elway

Terrell Davis

Floyd Little

Randy Gradishar

Shannon Sharpe

The results (votes in parentheses):

  • John Elway (47)
  • Terrell Davis (31)
  • Floyd Little (24)
  • Randy Gradishar (20)
  • Shannon Sharpe (18)
  • Steve Atwater (14)
  • Tom Jackson (12)
  • Ed McCaffrey (11)
  • Rod Smith (10)
  • Jason Elam (8)
  • Karl Mecklenburg (7)
  • Louis Wright (7)
  • Steve Watson (6)
  • Otis Armstrong (4)
  • Rich Jackson (4)
  • Dennis Smith (4)
  • Lyle Alzado (3)
  • Haven Moses (3)
  • Lionel Taylor (3)
  • Billy Thompson (3)
  • Al Wilson (3)
  • Gary Zimmerman (3)
  • Champ Bailey (2)
  • Keith Bishop (2)
  • Pat Bowlen (2)
  • Rubin Carter (2)
  • Simon Fletcher (2)
  • Rulon Jones (2)
  • Rich Karlis (2)
  • Gary Kubiak (2)
  • John Lynch (2)
  • Peyton Manning (2)
  • Craig Morton (2)
  • Tom Nalen (2)
  • Matt Prater (2)
  • Tim Tebow (2)
  • Billy Van Heusen (2)
  • Steve Antonopulos (1)
  • Marlin Briscoe (1)
  • Tyrone Braxton (1)
  • Willie Brown (1)
  • Barney Chavous (1)
  • Dave Costa (1)
  • Ken Criter (1)
  • Bucky Dilts (1)
  • Steve Foley (1)
  • Alex Gibbs (1)
  • Tom Graham (1)
  • Bobby Humphrey (1)
  • Mark Jackson (1)
  • Charley Johnson (1)
  • Vance Johnson (1)
  • Dave Logan (1)
  • Tim McKernan (Barrel Man) (1)
  • Red Miller (1)
  • Riley Odoms (1)
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  • Neil Smith (1)
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  • Honorable mention: Darrent Williams

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October 28, 2013

Mike Shanahan’s lead lasted about as long as his tribute video

By Dave Krieger

It’s beginning to look like these tributes to homecoming out-of-towners are a scam, like the email congratulating you for winning the Etruscan lottery. In Indianapolis, they honored Peyton Manning, then beat him. In Denver, they honored Mike Shanahan, then slapped him around for 38 consecutive points, like a barber’s razor on a strop.

I guarantee that somewhere, someone will write this proves Thomas Wolfe right; you can’t go home again. What this will actually prove is that almost no one alive has read this longwinded novel.

In truth, the Broncos did something to Shanahan and his current team from Washington that about half of them have been waiting to do for a long time. Last year’s top-five defense suddenly emerged from behind the curtain and replaced the impostors who ranked 32nd out of 32 teams against the pass coming in. In the process, they gave the Broncos more hope for a happy ending this season than all of Manning’s heroics combined.

“I know they haven’t done some of the things that they would like to do defensively, but I think we all know they were one of the top defenses in the league last year,” Shanahan said afterward. “And this is not the end of the season. This is not even the mid-way point. So you can judge Denver’s defense at the end of the season.”

Actually, it is the mid-way point for the Broncos, who are 7-1 and now get a week off before slogging through their remaining eight games. Shanahan’s team had its week off already, so it is one game shy of the halfway point. But his point is well taken. He used to say you wanted to be in the top five on both sides of the ball to be a true championship contender. There are always exceptions, of course, but it’s as good a way as any to deploy the ruler.

Shanahan’s return made me a little nostalgic, so I retrieved my yellowed Rocky Mountain News clips from 1984, when I was covering the Broncos as a beat writer and head coach Dan Reeves hired Shanahan, then a college assistant, to be his wide receivers coach. Attached to one of my training camp reports from Greeley that summer is a photo by my former colleague George Kochaniec Jr. of Shanahan and the quarterback trio of the day — John Elway, Scott Brunner and Gary Kubiak. They’re all very young and wearing athletic shorts they would find embarrassing today.

Youthful and cool and ready to gamble on Elway in a way Reeves never would, Shanahan is talking about offensive concepts. The three quarterbacks are listening, all eyes on him. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Shanahan and Elway formed an alliance that ultimately cost Reeves his job and set the stage for the Super Bowl championships of the late 1990s.

After Elway’s playing career ended, the relationship frayed. Elway was interested in a meaningful role of some kind with the Broncos. Shanahan had them all and wasn’t surrendering any of them. Elway did not get his current job as executive vice president, running the football operation, until after Shanahan was dismissed. So while everyone said all the right things about the pre-game Shanahan tribute, it was, in fact, about as perfunctory as it could have been. The tribute video lasted 20 seconds. The Manning tribute video in Indy ran 90.

In the 29 years since that first summer in Greeley, Shanahan has lost his reputation for being on the cutting edge. Since Elway retired, following the 1998 season, Shanahan is 114-101 in the regular season and 1-5 in the playoffs.

In Washington, he’s 23-36 over three seasons and seven-sixteenths of a fourth, but the venerable franchise in the nation’s capital has been such a freak show under owner Daniel Snyder that anybody who even vaguely knows what he’s doing gets a long leash. Still, a record of 2-5 in his fourth season, with Robert Griffin III widely considered a franchise quarterback, isn’t a great sign. At 61, Shanahan applies a sharp football mind and deep competitive desire to concepts others are advancing. He’s trying to adapt, but it’s not like the old days, when he knew he knew stuff most other coaches didn’t know.

One minute, the Broncos were behind by two touchdowns and seats on the bandwagon were being auctioned off for beer. The next, they’d rolled up 38 consecutive points without a peep from Shanahan’s team and won going away, 45-21. The bandwagon was full again and it was Washington fans wondering why he didn’t use that famous zone running scheme to keep the ball out of Manning’s hands.

Cornerback DeAngelo Hall put Washington up 21-7 when he intercepted a Manning pass intended for Demaryius Thomas, who fell down, and returned it 26 yards for a touchdown early in the third quarter. Manning responded with a 75-yard drive that ended with rookie running back Montee Ball’s first pro touchdown to cut the lead to 21-14. Shanahan’s offense never actually took the field trying to protect a 14-point lead.

To get that responding touchdown, Broncos coach John Fox had to authorize going for it on fourth-and-2 from the Washington 20-yard line rather than kicking a gimme field goal. Knowshon Moreno gained five yards on the fourth-down play and three plays later, Ball was in the end zone.

“Certainly as an offense we like it,” Manning said of Fox’s gamble. “But we feel determined to make him pleased with his call. He’s kind of — he’s giving you that go-ahead because he expects you to do it. So I think there is some real motivation to please him and make it successful so you can do it again.”

Shanahan’s offense got the ball back with a seven-point lead. Of the five plays it ran before punting, three were runs by Alfred Morris, who gained 93 yards on the day, 66 of them in the first half. On those three running plays when Washington was trying to control the ball and protect a lead, Morris gained three, one and two yards, respectively. Washington punted and the Broncos drove for the tying touchdown. They went for it on fourth down again, this time at the 1-yard line. Manning converted it again, this time on a pass to tight end Joel Dreessen.

Now Shanahan didn’t have a lead anymore. Falling further and further behind, his team ran the ball only twice in the fourth quarter. Which should have worked out well, considering the Broncos entered the game ranked last in the league against the pass. But it didn’t. Griffin held the ball too long, missed open receivers and saw the ball dropped when he hit them.

The second pick of the 2012 draft, right behind Andrew Luck, RG III completed 15 of 30 pass attempts for a meager 132 yards, one touchdown, two interceptions and a passer rating of 45.4. He was no factor as a runner, rushing five times for seven yards. Jack Del Rio’s defense took away the read option without compromising the pass defense. Shanahan’s offense looked nowhere near as accomplished as it did a week ago, when it put up 45 points on Chicago.

The Broncos sacked Griffin three times — one each by Derek Wolfe, Terrance Knighton and Von Miller (a sack fumble recovered by Wolfe) — and harassed him countless other times. The sack by Knighton, listed at 335 pounds, frightened Griffin right out of the game, although he said afterward he was fine.

“I’m not sure which D-tackle it was, I think it was Knighton, came in and landed all 300-plus pounds of hisself on my leg, and I think it really just scared me,” Griffin said. “After I got up and the docs checked me, I was fine, ready to go back in the game. Talked with Mike and just the way the game had gone and Kirk (Cousins) was already out there, it was just smart to keep me off the field and be ready to go next week.”

I asked Griffin about his difficulties in the passing game against an apparently vulnerable pass defense.

“We knew that they were going to rely on their back four, the two safeties and the corners, to take away the passing game and really dedicate the rest of the guys to the run,” he said.

“We just had times when we had guys open and we couldn’t make plays. And then there were times when you had to have those tough catches, those tough throws, and we didn’t make those, either . . . . Regardless of what the Denver secondary is ranked in the pass or their defense is ranked in the pass, they have good players back there. That’s what guys have to realize. Every week you step on the field there’s good players on every team. And you have to be better than them.”

Manning had his worst game of the season, committing all four of the Broncos’ turnovers with three interceptions and a sack-fumble, but he still threw for 354 yards and four touchdowns. His passer rating was more than twice Griffin’s (94.3) and he deftly conducted one of the most oxygen-sucking comebacks in NFL history. When I asked Shanahan whether his defense was gassed in the fourth quarter during the 38-point onslaught, which seemed obvious just watching his players gasping and taking turns delaying the game with alleged injuries, he blamed his anemic offense.

“I think what hurt our defense was keeping them on the field as long as we did,” he said. “Offensively, we didn’t get much going, so we gave them a lot of opportunities. You don’t give Peyton that many opportunities because he’s going to take advantage of it. Normally he’s going to figure out what you’re doing and come up with some big plays. That’s what they were able to do today.”

Griffin kept giving the ball back to Manning because of Del Rio’s defense, of course. It may be coming around right on time.

“I think without a doubt that was our best defensive outing,” Fox said.

So the homecoming tour is over for a while. Well, three weeks. The Broncos get a week off, then play division rivals San Diego and Kansas City. It resumes Nov. 24, when they visit New England. That will be Wes Welker’s homecoming. Think Bill Belichick will authorize a tribute video?

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October 26, 2013

Mike MacIntyre avoids a meltdown as CU loses again

By Dave Krieger

BOULDER — Until Saturday night, we’d never seen Mike MacIntyre like this.

He hasn’t been here that long, so we were bound to see the less sociable side at some point, but when he rushed into the CU defensive meeting room for his post-game session with the inquiring minds Saturday night, he started out as if determined to insert himself into the ESPN coaching meltdown highlight reel.

You know the one. It includes Mike Gundy (“Come after me! I’m a man! I’m 40!”), Steve Spurrier on multiple occasions, even former CU coach Dan Hawkins (“It’s Division I football! It’s the Big 12! It ain’t intramurals!”).

Here’s how MacIntyre began his post-game presser after Arizona beat Colorado 44-20 Saturday night at Folsom Field, effectively ending CU’s chance to become bowl eligible in MacIntyre’s first season, barring some truly incomprehensible outcomes the rest of the way.

MacIntyre, sitting down as reporters approach to deposit their recorders on the table: “All right, ready? Start shooting away, let’s go. I’ll take three questions, I’m outta here.”

Q: You were down 14 points . . . 

A: Yeah . . . 

Q: . . . with 18 minutes to go . . . 

A: Take a chance. See us try to play defense? Next question. Let’s go.

Q: Uh, problem stopping Denker . . .

A: Yeah, we had a problem stopping him. Next one?

Q: You gave up 670 in total offense.

A: Yeah, we did. Exactly. Next one?

You get the idea. Perhaps sensing he was about to create a video clip that could haunt him for years, he calmed down a bit and answered well more than three questions. The entire transcript is below.

MacIntyre had targeted Arizona as a Pac-12 opponent his Colorado team could beat. He said it publicly and he presented it to his team as a challenge. Beat the Wildcats, he said, and the Buffaloes could play meaningful games in November, meaning bowl eligibility would be at stake. With three non-conference wins and a Cal team winless in the Pac-12 coming to Boulder in November, a win over Arizona would leave CU needing just one upset to get to six.

Perhaps MacIntyre put too much stock in his own challenge. When push came to shove, it was the first-year coach, hungry for success his team is not yet ready to deliver, who salted the game away for the visitors from Tucson.

Even without MacIntyre’s premature desperation, CU almost certainly would have lost, and for the same reasons that drove MacIntyre’s desperation: The Buffs couldn’t stop the Wildcats, who put up 670 yards of offense — second-most under coach Rich Rodriguez and third most in school history — 405 of them on the ground.

But that didn’t make MacIntyre’s tactical decisions helpful. The Buffs trailed 24-13 at halftime. Not great, but not nearly as bad as two weeks ago in Tempe, when Arizona State led 47-6 at intermission. The Wildcats came out in the third quarter and drove 66 yards, but the Buffs held them to a field goal. CU responded with a 75-yard touchdown drive to cut the deficit to 27-20. Arizona roared back with a 70-yard drive to extend the lead to 34-20.

CU drove 47 yards to a first-and-goal at the Arizona 7-yard line. After two rushes for three yards and an incomplete pass, the Buffs faced fourth-and-goal at the 4. MacIntyre eschewed the field goal and went for it. Freshman quarterback Sefo Liufau rolled right and threw incomplete into the end zone.

The Buffs stopped the Cats, then found themselves deep in their own territory as the third quarter expired.

On the first play of the fourth quarter, down 14 points with 15 minutes to play, the Buffs ran a fake punt on fourth-and-5 from their own 17. Punter Darragh O’Neill tried to run for the first down. He gained one yard.

Arizona took over on the CU 18. Two plays later, the Buffs’ deficit was 21. And that was that.

“If you see us playing defense, we couldn’t stop ’em,” MacIntyre explained. “Thought it was a good place to try it. He was supposed to read it. We’ve had five on this year and he’s punted all five. We thought we had a chance and he thought he had a chance and didn’t get it.”

The Buffs’ defensive game plan was so focused on Arizona running back Ka’Deem Carey that their defenders repeatedly allowed quarterback B.J. Denker to run free. Denker finished with 192 rushing yards, 73 more than Carey.

“We couldn’t tackle the quarterback,” MacIntyre said. “We must have missed him seven times. Probably 200 yards of offense off of missed tackles on the quarterback. We gotta work on tackling better.”

Like a lot of folks in Boulder, MacIntyre wants the Buffs to improve more quickly than they are. It’s understandable. It’s hard not to feel for his players as they try to answer questions, honestly mystified as to their helplessness against Pac-12 opponents. It’s just a play here or there, they keep saying. Even MacIntyre fell back on this canard.

It’s not just a play here or there. MacIntyre is at the start of a major rebuilding project. He took over one of the worst teams in Division I history. It plays in a conference with some of the best offenses in the nation.

A fake punt on your own 17 does not help. Down 14 with a full quarter to play, it sends a signal of desperation to your players. When I asked MacIntyre if he regretted that decision in hindsight, his answer was firm and immediate: “No. Do not.”

The mirage of bowl eligibility should now fade and the Buffs will go back to focusing on the details, trying to get better each week. To achieve competitiveness in the Pac-12 is going to take a while. That’s not the fault of anybody now involved with the program. But trying to rush the process by getting desperate will not help.

Here’s a full transcript of MacIntyre’s post-game presser:

MacIntyre: All right, ready? Start shooting away, let’s go. I’ll take three questions, I’m outta here.

Q: You were down 14 points . . . 

A: Yeah . . . 

Q: . . . with 18 minutes to go . . . 

A: Take a chance. See us try to play defense? Next question. Let’s go.

Q: Uh, problem stopping Denker . . .

A: Yeah, we had a problem stopping him. Next one?

Q: You gave up 670 in total offense.

A: Yeah, we did. Exactly. Next one?

Q: Why are you in such a hurry?

A: Because I’m ready to get out of here. We played our hearts out. We gotta play better.

Q: How do you feel Sefo played?

A: I thought he did good. Missed a couple guys he coulda hit. And we had a couple out there he could have made, but I thought he did some good things. He’ll keep improving.

Q: Why’d you fake the punt?

A: Because if you see us playing defense, we couldn’t stop ’em. Thought it was a good place to try it. He was supposed to read it. We’ve had five on this year and he’s punted all five. We thought we had a chance and he thought he had a chance and didn’t get it.

Q: How concerned are you about your defense?

A: Very concerned. Playing as hard as they can play.

Q: Jered (Bell, the junior free safety) said they have the talent, they’re just not executing. Do you feel that’s true?

A: There’s part of that, yes. We gotta do a better job of coaching ’em and just keep fighting. There’s great offenses in this league.

Q: Does this one hurt you a little bit more than some of the others?

A: Oh, definitely. 100 percent.

Q: Seemed like there was a lot of pressure on Sefo tonight . . . 

A: Yeah, there’s been pressure on him every time he’s stepped back there.

Q: Why does it hurt more than the others?

A: Cause we can beat that team.

Q: Why do you feel like you didn’t?

A: We didn’t tackle ’em. We couldn’t tackle the quarterback. We must have missed him seven times. Probably 200 yards of offense off of missed tackles on the quarterback. We gotta work on tackling better.

Q: Obviously it hurts to lose, but this game was a step in the right direction in conference play. Do you feel that way?

A: No. We shoulda won the game.

Q: Did you do anything special to stop Carey and that made it harder to stop Denker?

A: Yeah, we stopped Carey pretty good. We had one he bounced outside and we didn’t play our . . . we shoulda stayed outside, he wouldn’t have gained that yard, and then he ran over us a few times, and he’s going to do that. He does that against everybody. Just very disappointed we didn’t do a better job against Denker. He did a good job, B.J., he threw the ball better than I’ve ever seen him throw in every game I’ve ever watched him play. So he came through, he really did. He did a great job. Their quarterback did a great job.

Q: You said they played as hard as they can play, yet you seem disappointed in the effort or outcome or . . .

A: Yeah, I’m very disappointed in the outcome.

Q: When the offense got in Arizona territory, why were there so many struggles of getting seven as opposed to just three?

A: We just couldn’t get it in. I’ll have to go back and look at it. We left a few out there we had chances at.

Q: How happy have you been with the tackling so far this year?

A: I mean, I think we’ve improved from the film I watched last year and from spring practice and early in fall. We just didn’t . . . he made us miss tonight and I’ve seen him make people miss before, it was just very frustrating for our kids.

Q: In hindsight, do you regret not kicking the field goal . . . 

A: No. The guy was open. We had a chance. We just couldn’t get it to him.

Q: In hindsight, do you regret the fake punt?

A: No. Do not.

Q: Did you see the same thing you saw against Oregon from the defense when you ran that trick play to (junior receiver Paul) Richardson?

A: Yeah, but we did it different than that one. It was a different formation. And they lined up differently than they had been, too. That kind of threw us off. But PRich did a good job. We had worked on if that happened, throw it out of bounds.

Q: How is he?

A: I think he’s fine. He said he was fine. Hopefully it doesn’t swell up or something tonight.

Q: How disconcerting is it, just the lack of success against . . . 

A: Very disconcerting. Very disconcerting. We keep improving, we’ve just got to do it. Very disconcerting. We’ve just got to keep fighting and keep moving forward. It’s just disheartening for the kids, you know? We’re battling right there and just . . . a few plays here or there.

Q: Is that similar to your first year at San Jose State?

A: I don’t know. So long ago.

Q: You sparked the offense with some personnel changes. How do you spark the defense?

A: We just keep working at it. We’ve made personnel changes there too. Just got to keep working, keep fighting and keep pushing. Find ways to keep trying to help ’em. I thought we did a few things tonight to help ’em and they just made some more plays than we did.

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October 21, 2013

Back to the drawing board

By Dave Krieger

The Broncos’ franchise-record winning streak ended Sunday night at 17 in particularly violent fashion, with their star quarterback feted before the game and treated like a wedding crasher the rest of the night.

The patina of perfection fell away early. For all their Star Wars numbers on offense, to borrow a Jim Irsay phrase, the Broncos’ championship aspirations are as tenuous as anybody’s, especially if they keep letting pass rushers blast Peyton Manning from his blind side.

Before their 39-33 loss to the Indianapolis Colts, they had gone the equivalent of a full season plus a game since losing in the regular season, although even the streak felt less than perfect given the rather important playoff loss that came between the 11 wins that closed last season and the six that began this one.

For much of the streak, especially recently, the Broncos were so dominant that big themes seem necessary to explain the fact that they finally lost. The talk will be all about the soap opera, Manning’s return to Indianapolis and how he wasn’t quite himself while Andrew Luck, his successor, was.

Maybe it was the oddity of a 90-second tribute video to the opposing quarterback just before kickoff, which Manning felt obliged to acknowledge with emotional, heartfelt gestures.

Maybe it was the Colts’ decision — presumably owner Jim Irsay’s — to open the roof and the windows at one end, creating a chillier, windier environment than Lucas Oil Stadium normally provides for a visiting quarterback generally thought to be at his best when conditions are pristine.

Maybe it was the sack-fumble-safety when Colts defensive end Robert Mathis, a former teammate, crushed Manning from behind in the second quarter after leaving Broncos backup left tackle Chris Clark grasping at air.

“It was a good hit,” Manning said. “A healthy one, as I would call it.”

When a post-game questioner suggested his passes wobbled more after that, Manning grinned wryly.

“I throw a lot of wobbly passes,” he said. “Throw a lot of wobbly touchdowns, too.”

For all the echoes of ancient myths in the prodigal son’s return to the place his pro career started and the temptation to manufacture a moral from the outcome, the prosaic truth is the Broncos played well enough to win if it weren’t for a couple of critical mistakes.

Missing both of their starting offensive tackles, they struggled to protect Manning from the Colts’ pass rush. Manning was sacked four times, twice by Mathis. Two of Denver’s four turnovers — one fumble and one interception — came when edge rushers got to Manning before he could get rid of the ball.

Even so, they still had every opportunity to win if Ronnie Hillman hadn’t fumbled the ball at the Colts’ 2-yard line with three minutes to play and the Broncos down nine.

“I’d like to have seen it go to a two-point game down there toward the end and seen what would have happened,” Manning said. “It never quite got to that point, but you can go back to different parts of the game, and we got behind, and (made) mistakes there, but we still had a chance there at the end. So we did fight and hung in there. I think we can learn from it. We certainly have to improve from this game because we weren’t as sharp execution-wise as we’d like to be.”

On this point — the requirement to score twice there at the end — I’d like to highlight a fact likely to be overlooked. Call it a pet peeve if you like, but the arithmetic is indisputable:

If the Broncos don’t try a two-point conversion when they could have had a one-point conversion for free with a little more than 12 minutes left in the game, the difference later is eight points, not nine, and only one possession is required to tie, not two.

Teams are constantly making comebacks more difficult by going for two way too early. The index card that tells coaches when to go for two should be incinerated in a public ceremony and replaced with a much simpler one bearing these words: If there’s any question at all, take the free point.

The score was 36-23 at the time, following Manning’s 35-yard touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas. The tortured logic of the two-point try is this: Two points cut the deficit to 11, meaning a touchdown, another two-point conversion and a field goal would be enough to tie. Take the one, you trail by 12 and need two touchdowns.

In the meritocracy of NFL play-calling, this line of reasoning is inane. With that much time left, you never know what’s going to happen. For example, Colts running back Trent Richardson might fumble deep in his own territory less than a minute later. The Broncos might recover and score another touchdown with nearly nine minutes still to play.

This, of course, is what happened. When the Broncos took the standard one-point conversion on the second score, they trailed 36-30. Had they taken the standard one-point conversion on the previous score as well, it would have been 36-31.

So the Colts’ field goal with six minutes left would have put them up eight, not nine. So, at the very end, the Broncos would have needed just one score and a two-point conversion, not two scores, as they did.

In short, going for two too early had exactly the opposite effect of what was intended, which is often the case.

Of course, even needing two scores, they had a chance, and a pretty good one, if Hillman hadn’t fumbled on a head-scratching running play at the Colts’ 2-yard line with three minutes left. Manning drove the Broncos offense 90 yards in six plays after being sacked to start the series, half of them sensational catches by Wes Welker. Needing two scores, there was no time to waste with a running play, and Hillman is not their best between-the-tackles option anyway.

In any case, if the Broncos score there, they’re within two, and Matt Prater’s field goal in the final minute wins it.

The Colts’ strategy in between probably changes, so who knows, but the bottom line is this defeat was largely self-inflicted. So much will be made of the soap opera that it will seem unsatisfying to suggest the outcome was mainly about three fumbles and one interception, but the outcome was mainly about three fumbles and one interception. Also a bad index card.

For all their mistakes, the Broncos had more first downs than the Colts (23-19) and more total offense (429 yards to 334). They gave up a likely touchdown on Hillman’s fumble, provided the Colts with a safety and set up an ensuing touchdown on the Mathis sack-fumble, set up another Colts touchdown when kick returner Trindon Holliday fumbled on his own 11, and set up a Colts field goal when outside linebacker Erik Walden hit Manning’s arm in the fourth quarter, producing an interception by inside linebacker Pat Angerer.

That’s 19 points for the Colts and minus seven for the Broncos as a result of their four turnovers. Without them, the Broncos win going away.

On the other hand, they weren’t just bad luck. Both Holliday and Hillman have had issues holding on to the ball before. I don’t know when Hillman next gets the call near the goal line, but I’m guessing it might be a while.

The other two are more problematic. On the sack-fumble-safety, Mathis beat Clark, who replaced the injured Ryan Clady, who is out for the year. Against capable pass rushers such as Mathis, the Broncos may have little choice but to routinely reinforce Manning’s blind side protection with a blocking tight end. That may limit some offensive options.

On the interception, Walden bull-rushed right through tight end Julius Thomas. NBC analyst Cris Collinsworth acknowledged Thomas’s ability as a receiver, but gave him low marks as a blocker.

Think of it as a cold shower for a team that’s heard hardly a discouraging word for the first six weeks of the season. The defense needs to get stouter and the ball security needs to get better. Mostly, the pass protection needs to improve if they want to keep Manning upright for the holidays.

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October 19, 2013

CU hands its offense over to 18-year-olds

By Dave Krieger

BOULDER — It’s not something you see every day, a major college football program starting true freshmen at quarterback and tailback. In fact, at the University of Colorado, the number of times it happened before today was zero.

You might say CU does not have a major college football program, especially if you’re on Twitter, but coach Mike MacIntyre’s resort to quarterback Sefo Liufau, who turns 19 in ten days, and tailback Michael Adkins II, who won’t turn 19 until next spring, at least gave the oft-trampled Buffaloes a sense of direction.

Against a school called Charleston Southern University, shoehorned into the schedule to replace the Fresno State game canceled in September because of flooding in Boulder, Liufau and Adkins got to gather confidence during a 43-10 victory against a slightly lower level of competition (what used to be called Division I-AA and is now identified by the acronym for a euphemism).

Gather they did. Liufau didn’t blow the doors off — 14 completions in 20 pass attempts for 198 yards and a touchdown — but he showed beguiling maturity and flashes of intriguing talent. Adkins blew the doors off — 13 carries for 137 yards and four touchdowns.

“I think he’s a very good player,” MacIntyre said of the tailback from San Diego. “He has power, he has speed, he has vision, and he’s very bright. That one run he made today over on the sidelines when it looked like it was all clogged up and he just crept in there, broke two tackles and then outran everybody to me was a really impressive run and I was excited to see that.”

Liufau’s play was less dominant, but almost as promising. Once, in the second quarter, a Buccaneers pass rusher was approximately 2.1 milliseconds from sending Liufau into another dimension when he dumped the ball just over the line of scrimmage to junior receiver Paul Richardson, the Buffs’ best player. He took care of the remaining real estate on what went down as a 60-yard touchdown pass.

“They try to keep everything pretty simple for him to build his confidence, and then we threw some things in there to challenge his IQ and he responded well,” Richardson said of the freshman quarterback.

Another time, in the fourth, the pass rush was coming straight up the gut and Liufau was back-pedaling in retreat. Somehow, with all his momentum going the wrong way, he managed to get enough on a long out to Nelson Spruce to gain 10 yards and a first down.

“He’s able to move in the pocket and still be accurate,” MacIntyre said. “He did a good job of throwing the ball away a few times today, and didn’t really force the ball. He did some good things; he just needs to keep improving with the rest of the guys.”

The reality remains that the Buffs have yet to be competitive in a Pac-12 Conference game, having lost the three they’ve played by a combined score of 155-46. And now that the interlude of the makeup game is over, it’s back to the conference schedule. With three non-conference victories, they have to win three of their six remaining Pac-12 games to become eligible for a postseason bowl game.

MacIntyre referred to a more modest goal, pointing out that if CU manages to beat Arizona in Boulder next week,  it would play meaningful games in November, suggesting that even having a shot at bowl eligibility would be better than playing out the string again. This is true, of course, but an indication of how far the program has fallen.

Playing a succession of upper-classmen transfers at quarterback over the past couple of seasons has given the program a directionless feel and made you wonder why CU couldn’t recruit a quarterback of its own. Watching Marcus Mariota lead the No. 2-ranked Oregon Ducks into Boulder a couple of weeks ago made you appreciate what it’s like to have a talented underclassman at quarterback.

The Buffs have plenty of other issues, including keeping Pac-12 opponents below their current average of 51.7 points a game against them. Beating Charleston Southern doesn’t mean much more for a Pac-12 team than beating Central Arkansas, or Colorado State, for that matter. Those are the Buffs’ three victories. For the record, MacIntyre said Charleston Southern was better than Central Arkansas.

Adkins won’t take over all the rushing duties, mainly because they’d wear him out. Christian Powell, last year’s freshman tailback, offers a bigger, less elusive but more powerful change up, and junior Tony Jones, demoted behind successive freshmen, made the most of his four carries late in today’s game, turning them into 37 yards.

But MacIntyre, in his first season at CU, is making it clear that Adkins and Liufau, along with freshman linebacker Addison Gillam, are the beginnings of a new core going forward. They have talent and higher ceilings than their predecessors. In other words, they offer hope that better times are coming.

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October 16, 2013

Of Jim Irsay, Peyton Manning and playoff football

By Dave Krieger

Kevin Vaughan is an investigative reporter for Fox Sports and a former colleague at the Rocky Mountain News. He’s also a lifelong Broncos fan who has done some number-crunching on the subject of Peyton Manning and the playoffs. We’ll get to that in a minute.

First, though, let’s stop and gawk at the roadside wreck that resulted when Colts owner Jim Irsay tried to pat himself on the back while pointing to his Super Bowl ring while giving an interview to USA Today while driving his team toward Sunday night’s game against Manning and the Broncos.

The son of one of the most reviled owners in the history of American sport, Irsay is perhaps best known for tweeting random song lyrics and his endearing, adolescent way of substituting numerals for like-sounding words.

Last night he tweeted this indignant response to those who thought the effort to pat himself on the back for newfound wisdom in that USA Today interview had the effect of throwing other, more accomplished people under the bus:

Those expressing negatIvity about the concept of building well rounded teams around great QBs 2 achieve Championships have negative agendas

Those expressing negativity would include John Fox, coach of the Broncos, who responded to Irsay’s comments yesterday. Fox is not normally thought of as a nabob of negativity. To see him and other critics of Irsay’s remarks that way, you must put yourself in Jim Irsay’s world, where Jim Irsay is the North Star.

This is the guy who mused during the NFL lockout that his old pal Gene Upshaw wouldn’t have approved of NFL Players Association president DeMaurice Smith’s handling of the dispute. Upshaw was Smith’s predecessor at the NFLPA. He was also dead. So that was classy.

Here’s a passage from the USA Today interview:

“We’ve changed our model a little bit, because we wanted more than one of these,” Irsay says, flicking up his right hand to show his Super Bowl XLI championship ring.

“(Tom) Brady never had consistent numbers, but he has three of these,” Irsay adds. “Pittsburgh had two, the Giants had two, Baltimore had two and we had one. That leaves you frustrated.

“You make the playoffs 11 times, and you’re out in the first round seven out of 11 times. You love to have the Star Wars numbers from Peyton and Marvin (Harrison) and Reggie (Wayne). Mostly, you love this.”

Then Irsay flicks up his right hand again.

Here’s how Fox responded on SiriusXM NFL radio:

“I saw the comments. And to be honest with you, I thought it was a bit of a cheap shot. To me, in my opinion, they were disappointing and inappropriate. Peyton would never say anything. He’s too classy to do that. They sounded a little ungrateful and unappreciative to me. For a guy who has set a standard, won a Super Bowl, won four MVP awards … be thankful of that one Super Bowl ring, because a lot of people don’t have one.”

Irsay’s apologists in the Indianapolis media insist he was actually throwing former general manager Bill Polian under the bus. Everybody seems to agree he left tire tracks on somebody.

Former Colts coach Tony Dungy, formerly considered a paragon of positivity,  apparently has a negative agenda, too, because he not only thinks Irsay’s remarks were directed at Manning, he thinks they were part of an effort to make him angry and distract him from the task at hand.

“Jim is making this personal,” Dungy said in a text message to ESPN. “I’m surprised . . . Without Peyton, there would be no Lucas Oil Stadium. This team would be playing in L.A. right now. I don’t understand Jim saying this.”

Dungy’s attempt to cast Irsay as Machiavelli relies on a rather higher opinion of Irsay’s intellect than is commonly held, but it seems to be the only one he can think of.

“I think that’s what he’s trying to do,” Dungy said. “Have him make it such a big game he doesn’t perform well. I can’t figure any other reason to go this way.”

I am inclined to believe that Irsay was so busy extolling his current, sublime level of football understanding that he was oblivious to other implications. In any case, by this morning, he was in full Twitter back-pedal:

My comments meant if we gave Peyton better SP Teams n Def,we would have won more than 1 Sup/Bowl,instead of asking Peyton 2do too much

Give him this: There is no 54-year-old on Earth who tweets more like a teenager.

So the Colts winning one Super Bowl during Manning’s 14 seasons and 11 playoff appearances was somebody’s fault, he’s not saying whose, but Irsay and his new pals, GM Ryan Grigson and quarterback Andrew Luck, won’t make the same mistake. So good for them, Godspeed, whatever.

As I mentioned, Vaughan did some research on Manning’s postseason numbers, how they came about, and what they could still be by the time he’s finished:

A few random thoughts that I thought you might find interesting.

First, John Elway’s playoff record was 14-7. I’m guessing most people would say that a quarterback who wins twice as many as he loses in the playoffs is pretty special. And yet . . . how many people remember that following the Jacksonville loss at the end of the ’96 season that record was 7-7? It took those two playoff runs to put it where it ended up.

Manning is 9-11 right now, I believe. Let’s say he puts together two Super Bowl wins the next couple years (not a given, certainly, but not out of the realm of possibility, either). That would give him at least 6 postseason wins and as many as 8. So let’s say it’s 7 (he said dreamily), and he retires with a playoff record of 16-11; I’m guessing that, like Elway, no one really remembers the early struggles.

In ’99 (a year in which Manning took the Colts to 13-3 following two seasons of 3-13 and two playoff wins in the previous 28 years), the Colts got beat by the Titans, who, if memory serves, came within a yard of tying the Super Bowl and sending it into overtime.

In ’03, ’04 and ’05, the Colts got beat by the eventual Super Bowl champs (New England, New England, Pittsburgh).

In 2009, he lost in the Super Bowl.

In 2012, the Broncos got beat by the eventual Super Bowl champs (Baltimore).

That means 6 of his 11 playoff losses were to the team that eventually represented his conference in the Super Bowl or won the Super Bowl. Maybe the truth is that in those six years he lost to better teams.

While it is critical to have a very good or great quarterback to win a Super Bowl, it’s equally true that you need a lot more than that. How did John Elway do in the playoffs before Terrell Davis arrived? (Answer: .500.)

So, some “ifs” that could have changed everything for Manning.

What if Mike Vanderjagt doesn’t miss a 46-yard field goal by about 30 yards that would have tied the game at the end against the Steelers in 2005?

What if the Broncos defense doesn’t give up a conversion to Baltimore last year on a third-and-13 from its own 3-yard line in overtime?

What if the Colts had been a more balanced team all those years (rushing yardage in Manning’s 11 losses — 78, 99, 52, 98, 46, 58, 44, 64, 99, 93, 152; rushing yardage in Manning’s 9 wins — 85, 142, 76, 188, 100, 125, 191, 101, 42)?

What if Tony Dungy’s son hadn’t taken his own life near the end of the 2005 season? I can’t imagine how that affected Dungy, and how that, in turn, affected the team.

What if the Colts’ special teams aren’t asleep when the Saints open the second half of the Super Bowl with an onside kick — and recover, and go on to score a touchdown (swinging the momentum, in my humble opinion)?

And, finally, I looked at some stats from those 11 losses. Did Manning have some bad games? Yes — three stinkers where his completion percentage was in the mid- and high-40s. But also eight games in which the lowest completion percentage was 53 percent — and the others were 69, 69, 60, 69, 58, 64 and 65. I’d take those numbers all day long.

Overall in the playoffs, in games he lost — 257 of 436 (59 percent) for 2,833 yards, 12 TDs and 12 interceptions. If there’s a knock there, I’d say it’s the TD-to-INT ratio, though 10 of his 12 interceptions came in four of the games.

Total playoff numbers: 481 of 761 (63 percent) for 5,679 yards, 32 touchdowns, 21 picks.

John Elway’s total playoff numbers (22 games, including mop-up in Seattle in 1983): 355 of 651 (55 percent) for 4,964 yards, 27 touchdowns, 21 picks.

OK, that’s lots of stats, and, in the end, there’s only one stat that matters — the numbers up on the scoreboard. The current debate seems to me lacking in nuance and understanding of the fact that the quarterback is just one player and little things that have nothing to do with him change games.

Even without Vaughan’s research, Broncos fans old enough to use words rather than numbers to express words remember the long-time indictment of Elway: Can’t win the big one. Years later, Elway would grin and reflect on the fact that after the back-to-back championships to close his career, memories were seemingly wiped clean of the earlier stuff, as if zapped by Will Smith’s Neuralizer.

Manning has the same opportunity. In the end, it will depend upon the Broncos’ ability to do a better job than the Colts did building a team around him. But give Irsay credit: He may have given Manning more motivation as a Bronco than he ever did as a Colt.

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October 14, 2013

Four goalies share credit for Avs’ fast start

By Dave Krieger

It’s hard to know which goalie deserves the most credit for the Avalanche’s surprising 5-0 start.

There’s starter Semyon Varlamov, of course, who is 4-0 with a 1.0 goals-against average. In his case, it’s not just an average. He’s given up one goal in each of his starts, including a win at Washington against his former team.

There’s J.S. Giguere, the veteran backup, who pitched a brilliant shutout in Boston against the Bruins in his only start so far. He and Varlamov were named the second star of the week jointly by the NHL after leading the Avs to a 3-0 road trip.

There’s Francois Allaire, the goaltending coach brought in by head coach Patrick Roy after mentoring Roy and Giguere earlier in their careers.

“Francois Allaire help us a lot,” Varlamov said this morning after the Avs worked out at Family Sports Center. “He give us confidence. We work about two hours on the ice when Francois is here. We work with him always about 45 minutes extra. That’s why we stay a little longer. I think the last time I worked like that was five years ago when I had a Finnish goalie coach working with my coach back in Russia.”

And then, of course, there’s Roy himself, the legendary former goaltender and new head coach.

“I think Patrick has been a huge part of it,” said captain Gabriel Landeskog. “Just communicating with us players and talking with us, how we feel and if we need a day off. He’s open for discussion.”

Roy also gets credit from his players for bringing a system that allows for creativity and improvisation on the offensive end alongside accountability on the defensive end. No longer is it only the center expected to get back in transition.

Between the speed of the forwards and the renewed emphasis on pursuit and back-checking, opposing forwards don’t have the time to set up Colorado’s defensemen that they enjoyed too often last year.

“It’s good to be back home with three wins, that’s for sure,” Roy said this morning. “It was a fun trip for our team. Toronto, Boston and Washington, not easy buildings to win hockey games in. I thought we did really well.”

I asked him what he thought the keys to the undefeated road swing were.

“Well, first of all, the goaltending was key. When you’re on the road, you need your goaltenders to be your best player and I thought that was the case in those three road games.

“Toronto, we had more shots on net, I thought we had better chances than they had, especially the start of the game. We missed a few good chances. It could have been a 2-0 game for us right away. And I thought we respond well the rest of the game, we played really well defensively.

“The tracking, in my opinion, has been really solid throughout all those games. Only the second period in Boston, I’d say, and Washington, where we’ve been dominated by the other team. Boston had a strong second period, but we have to expect that. They’re at home, we had a great start, we took a 1-0 lead after one, (more) shots on goal, and then they had to come back. We expect that and that’s what they did.

“Washington was the opposite. I mean, they were 1-3 before the game. I expected them to play a strong game, especially at home. They’re in a five-game home stand. We had a great start. We took a 2-0 lead. And then the second is probably the period we’ve been most dominated — 19 shots and there were a lot of good chances and Varly was extremely good in that.

“Obviously, in that game we were sharp offensively. We scored power play goals and we capitalized on our chances.”

Through the 5-0 start, the Avs’ leading scorer is 18-year Nathan MacKinnon, the first overall pick in this year’s draft. MacKinnon has shown great speed and puck handling along with remarkable maturity in putting up one goal and five assists. His first NHL goal also represented veteran Paul Stastny’s 400th career point, creating a bit of a dilemma as to who should get the puck.

“I tweeted that question myself,” Landeskog said. “That was my first question when I came on the bench. I don’t know. Paulie, I’m sure he’ll get to 500, so I’m sure he’ll get that one. Maybe we’ll give this one to Nate, just to be nice.”

The young Swedish captain also offered a word of warning, however:

“I think we’ve just come together as a group and we’ve realized it’s go time and we need to send a message and we need to start off on the right foot. But saying that, 5-0 is nothing. That can change quickly. I remember my first year, we were 5-1 after six games. Knowing that, we’ve got to stay humble and get ready for the next game.”

That’s been Roy’s message as well.

“Why not, eh?” the first-year coach said. “That’s what we’ve been saying: Why not?

“Let’s play hard. Every day I see our guys come in and practice hard. It makes me think that we’re still in the right direction. There’s nothing else you can ask as a coach. If the guys are focused and doing what you’re asking in practice and then they’re doing the exact same thing (in the games). . . I honestly think tomorrow’s a good test. It’s a four-point game with Dallas. It’s an opportunity for us to win another game.”

Varlamov is scheduled to start the home games Tuesday against Dallas and Thursday against Detroit, the Red Wings’ only visit of the season to the Pepsi Center now that they are in the Eastern Conference. Giguere will start Saturday night at Buffalo.

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