Tag Archives: Knowshon Moreno

February 3, 2014

A stunning self-destruction

By Dave Krieger
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A Broncos nightmare in New Jersey ended in a Seahawks celebration

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The Super humbling of the highest-scoring team in NFL history began on the first play from scrimmage and continued pretty much unabated for the remainder of a deceptively warm and beautiful February evening just off Exit 16W of the Jersey Turnpike.

It was shocking in its suddenness and humiliating in its comprehensiveness. The Broncos played like a pickup squad that met for the first time an hour before kickoff.

The first outdoor Super Bowl in a northern climate turned out to be a travesty all right, but the environmental conditions were the one factor the Broncos couldn’t blame. The temperature at kickoff was 49, fully 10 degrees warmer than the coldest Super Bowl on record, back when they used to play outdoors in New Orleans.

If Mother Nature treated the Broncos well, she was alone. The Seattle Seahawks manhandled and dismantled them in every way imaginable on their way to a 43-8 blowout. Give them credit, as the Broncos kept saying afterward, but blame the Broncos, too. Their early wounds, the ones that set the doleful tone, were self-inflicted.

It began on the first play from scrimmage, when the Broncos’ first snap from their own 14-yard line sailed past Peyton Manning into the north end zone of MetLife Stadium. Somehow, the Broncos were lulled by the neutral site into believing they would be able to convey their signals verbally. Had the game been in Seattle, they would undoubtedly have used a silent snap count. Buried deep in their own end, enveloped by the boisterousness that always accompanies the beginning of a Super Bowl, Manning lined up in the shotgun and called for the ball.

Center Manny Ramirez failed to snap it. So Manning walked toward the line to reset the play. Ramirez, suddenly realizing he was late, chose that moment to snap the ball.

“That was on cadence, so it was about what he was saying,” a miserable Ramirez explained afterward. “It was really loud and I (thought) I heard him. Unfortunately, I was three seconds late.”

“A little bit of a cadence issue,” said head coach John Fox.

“I felt terrible for them,” said Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. “We didn’t deserve that. They just gave it to us.”

Running back Knowshon Moreno hustled back to the ball, turning the faux pas into a safety rather than a touchdown. It was a screw-up, but the damage was minimal. Twelve seconds into the game, the score was 2-0. It was the fastest score in Super Bowl history.

“That’s the way the start of any Super Bowl is,” said receiver Wes Welker, a veteran of three. “It’s going to be loud. The fans are going to be yelling. They don’t really know why they’re yelling, it’s just the start of the Super Bowl. We didn’t prepare very well for that, and it showed.”

Imagine that. A team that prided itself on preparation all season was unprepared for something that seemed obvious to a player who had been there before.

Following the required free kick, the Seahawks’ lightly-regarded offense marched 51 yards on its first possession, converting two third downs along the way. The Broncos again managed to minimize the damage, stopping the Seahawks about six inches short of a first down inside the 10-yard line and forcing a field goal. When Manning & Co. got the ball back, it was still only 5-0.

Following a three-yard gain on a running play, Manning completed the first two passes he threw — for two yards to Demaryius Thomas and three yards to Julius Thomas. Two completions, five yards. They had to punt.

The Seahawks began another march, using up most of the remainder of the first quarter. The Broncos’ defense once again limited the damage near the goal line, forcing another field goal when linebacker Nate Irving knocked an apparent touchdown pass out of the hands of wide receiver Jermaine Kearse.

The first quarter wasn’t over yet and the Broncos had already prevented two touchdowns on hustle plays by Moreno and Irving. Despite a disastrous start, the score was a manageable 8-0.

For the third time, Manning took the controls. For the third time, the crowd waited for the precision passing game that produced a record 606 regular-season points. A five-yard completion to Welker. A three-yard run from Moreno.

But wait. When Moreno was stopped, he was still on his feet. Seahawks defensive end Chris Clemons ripped the ball from his grasp. Guard Zane Beadles made the Broncos’ third fortuitous play of the quarter, falling on the loose ball and preventing a turnover. Instead of third-and-2, now it was third-and-7.

Manning tried to convert it by hitting Julius Thomas, his tight end, up the middle, but Seahawks pass rusher Cliff Avril came around right tackle Orlando Franklin on a speed rush and Manning was forced to step up in the pocket to avoid him. He let loose a throw that wasn’t even close to its mark — a duck, as Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman would call it, both too high and behind the intended receiver. It landed gently in the arms of Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor, a room service interception.

“A poor play on my part,” Manning admitted afterward.

When the first quarter ended, the Seahawks had the ball at the Broncos’ 17-yard line on their way to a 15-0 lead. The Broncos had possessed the ball only momentarily, it seemed, mostly because they were in such a hurry to give it away whenever they did.

Yet another self-inflicted wound contributed to that first Seahawks touchdown. The Broncos defense, again playing damage control near its goal line, forced a third-and-4 from their 5-yard line. It was looking to limit Seattle to another field goal when nickel back Tony Carter face-guarded Seahawks receiver Golden Tate in the end zone while gripping his jersey, possibly the most obvious pass interference call of the season. This resulted in a first down at the 1. It still took the Seahawks two running plays to punch it in.

Three minutes into the second quarter, the most prolific offense in NFL history didn’t have a first down. Credit the Seahawks’ hard hitting or pass rush if you like, but if this was tennis, both the bad snap and errant throw would be ruled unforced errors.

Moments later, the Seahawks lived up to their reputation for creating turnovers. Avril again beat Franklin, this time pushing past him and hitting Manning’s arm as he threw. The ball fluttered like . . . well . . . yes . . . a wounded duck, directly into the arms of Seahawks linebacker Malcolm Smith, whose 69-yard return for a touchdown would be the key to his Super Bowl MVP award a couple of hours later.

Now it was 22-0. Slightly more than three minutes remained in the first half. The Broncos desperately needed a score. Slowly, uncertainly, they began to matriculate down the field, in Hank Stram’s famous phrase from another era. They achieved a first down. Then another. Facing a manageable third-and-4 for yet another, Louis Vasquez, their best offensive lineman, was called for a false start. Yet another error. Maybe Seattle’s fearsome foursome made him do it, but still.

Moments later it was fourth-and-2. Fox decided to go for it.

“I’m thinking that three points wasn’t going to make a big difference in the game, and it proved to be true,” he explained.

At the snap, it looked like an uncovered Julius Thomas signaled to Manning for a simple pitch-and-catch that would move the chains. Instead, Manning looked the other way and threw the ball into the ground at the feet of Demaryius Thomas.

In the press box, in the stands, on social media and in living rooms all over Colorado, people who had watched this offense operate like a jet engine all season watched in astonishment as it sputtered like a lawn mower. Who were these guys?

It wasn’t just that the Broncos had switched hotels the night before the game, they appeared to have switched players, too. The replacements looked a lot like the guys they’d replaced. They even wore the same numbers. But they didn’t play anything like them.

The cherry on top came on the first play of the second half. Matt Prater, the Broncos’ Pro Bowl kicker who led the league with 81 touchbacks, inexplicably pooched the kickoff in an apparent attempt to keep it out of the hands of returner Percy Harvin. Kicking it out of the end zone, which Prater had done more often than any other kicker, would accomplish the same result.

Harvin had rushed twice in the first half for 45 yards. Rather than match strength with strength and let Prater try to boom the kickoff across the Hackensack River, the Broncos got cute. Harvin charged out of the end zone and the pooch bounced directly into his hands. Members of the Broncos’ coverage unit converged and knocked each other down as if playing electric football. Harvin took it all the way for a touchdown, 87 yards in all.

The Seahawks had again scored just 12 seconds into the half. This would converge with the narrative surrounding their 12th man — their fans, who arguably influenced the mistake that led to the first 12-second score — into a sort of mythic sense of numerological destiny.

More to the point, it was now 29-0 and the Broncos had shown themselves to be vulnerable in every phase of the game. No team had overcome a deficit greater than 10 points to win any of the previous 47 Super Bowls. At 2-0, 5-0, 8-0, 15-0, a Broncos comeback still seemed plausible, given their own precedents. Even at 22-0, a miraculous comeback from a team that averaged 37.9 points a game in the regular season seemed possible.

But the Harvin kickoff return dashed whatever hope remained. Not only was a 29-point deficit an insurmountable obstacle against the league’s best defense, the Broncos had shown little sign of even elementary competence. The more pertinent question seemed whether the Seahawks could impose the first shutout in Super Bowl history.

“We just weren’t real sharp executing our offense,” Manning said in perhaps the understatement of the season. “We got ourselves in a hole and we weren’t able to overcome it.”

Once the game was out of hand, the Broncos managed to roll up enough meaningless yards to make the final statistical comparisons look benign. In fact, of the six Super Bowl records set Sunday, four were by the Broncos. Of course, one of them was for most Super Bowl losses (five), which is not a record you want to hold. But Manning’s 34 pass completions were a record, as were Demaryius Thomas’ 13 catches. They were as hollow as any Super Bowl records ever set.

The Seahawks set records for fastest score to start a Super Bowl and most time playing with a lead (59 minutes, 48 seconds).

The cumulative record for losses in the big game might seem fastidious, conflating a 21st century result with games played in the 1970s and ’80s, but this one was eerily reminiscent of those losses in the ’80s, when the Broncos won the AFC in three out of four seasons and were blown out by successively larger margins in the ensuing Super Bowls — 39-20 by the Giants following the ’86 season, 42-10 by the Redskins following the ’87 season and 55-10, the worst blowout in Super Bowl history, by the 49ers following the ’89 season.

In each case, the result was disturbing and dispiriting. The Broncos had gone through a long season and postseason with the look of a champion, only to look utterly overmatched in the most important game of all. It’s hard to know how to react to such a dramatic reversal of fortune.

“I think we were playing a great football team,” Manning said. “I think we needed to play really well in order to win and we just didn’t come anywhere close to that . . . . Give Seattle credit. They’re an excellent football team and they caused a lot of our mistakes. But at the same time, we just didn’t play well tonight.”

Twenty-four hours after winning his record fifth Most Valuable Player award, Manning bristled when asked if the loss was embarrassing.

“It’s not embarrassing at all,” he said. “I would never use that word . . . The word embarrassing is an insulting word, to tell you the truth.”

Welker was not so reticent.

“To get this far and lose like this, it’s embarrassing,” he said.

“They dominated us across the board,” said fellow receiver Eric Decker.

The Seahawks were exuberant, of course, having won so much more powerfully and easily than even they expected. The Broncos needed to credit them to save face, and certainly they kept Manning unsettled in the pocket and hit hard in the secondary, as is their reputation.

Still, the number of self-inflicted wounds made the Broncos look amateurish and unqualified for the game. They finished with four turnovers — two lost fumbles and two interceptions — to Seattle’s none. The third turnover, by Demaryius Thomas following a 23-yard, third-quarter completion deep in Seahawks territory when a comeback was still theoretically possible, verged on slapstick.

Which was a terrible shame, considering how well the Broncos played all season. You could empathize with Manning’s sense of dignity without agreeing with him that this was not an embarrassment.

On any given Sunday, and all that. They just picked the most important game of all to pull out a true stinker.

“We had some chances to get back into it,” said John Elway, the quarterback in those losses of the ’80s and now the team’s executive vice president of football operations. “We just couldn’t get it done.”

“This team used last year’s playoff loss to fuel us; I think it made us a better team,” Manning said. “Hopefully we can use this loss to fuel us and make us better.”

Maybe they will. Elway’s Broncos were unable to bounce back from the Super Bowl blowouts of the ’80s until nearly a decade later, but Manning’s team was so uncharacteristically bad, maybe it can turn this one around much faster.

Asked if the loss reminded him of those blowouts a generation ago, Elway replied: “No. Those are separate.”

Still, for all the praise Manning gets when he’s dominating opponents, it is only fair to point out his mediocre play when opponents dominate him. The Broncos’ oft-maligned defense wasn’t great in this game, but it was required to perform a great deal of damage control for its far more famous offense.

Manning completed 34 of 49 passes for 280 yards, many of them in garbage time, with one touchdown, two interceptions and a passer rating of 73.5. His counterpart, second-year Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, the former Rockies farmhand, was 18 of 25 for 206 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions and a passer rating of 123.1. Wilson was clearly the better quarterback in this championship game.

“Offensively, we were clicking on all cylinders,” Wilson said. “That’s what we wanted to be, especially the last game of the season, to finish that way in that fashion. That’s our mindset. We want to be champions every day and bring it every time.”

Credit the Seahawks for playing a very sharp game. They deserve congratulations on winning their first NFL championship in very convincing fashion.

“We ran into a buzz saw,” Fox said.

That’s a little too easy. The Seahawks played very well, but the Broncos took themselves out of the game early by playing very badly. From a vantage point high above the action on a beautiful night for football in the New Jersey Meadowlands, it looked like the highest-scoring offense in NFL history mostly self-destructed.

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January 13, 2014

Learning from the past

By Dave Krieger

It may not be obvious whether Peyton Manning or Tom Brady is the best quarterback of their generation, although we’re sure to hear plenty of bloviating on the subject over the next seven days as they get ready to compete for a berth in the Super Bowl.

On the other hand, there’s not much doubt about the superior Saturday Night Live host.

Following the Broncos’ 24-17 playoff victory over San Diego on Sunday, a reporter wanted to pursue an ESPN “exclusive” that Manning’s future in football will be decided by a neck exam in March. Never mind that this was also true last year and the year before that. An exclusive is an exclusive, after all.

So the reporter asked him, immediately following his first playoff victory as a Bronco, if this is weighing on his mind.

“What’s weighing on my mind is how soon I can get a Bud Light in my mouth,” Manning said. “That’s priority number one.”

Somebody at the ad agency representing Budweiser just went to work.

For two weeks, Manning and the Broncos heard about nothing but history. A digital loop replayed the nightmare from last year’s playoff loss, Rahim Moore amazingly still misjudging the ball after all this time. They were reminded that this nightmare was possible only because Manning’s offense played it conservatively at the end of regulation, trying to eat clock rather than get first downs. As a result, it gave the ball back to the Ravens with just enough time for the infamous pratfall.

They also heard about more recent history, this season’s games against the Chargers, their playoff opponent. San Diego dominated the time of possession in both games by running the ball and stopping the run.

Once this train of reminding got going, nobody could find the brake. The web site Pro Football Talk tweeted more grim numbers just before kickoff Sunday:

“Philip Rivers is 6-2 all-time in Denver. Peyton Manning was 1-5 with the Colts in his last six games against Chargers.”

The fact that Manning went into the game 3-1 against the Chargers as the Broncos’ quarterback, which would seem more recent and more relevant, considering it was the Broncos and not the Colts playing in this game, did not merit mention.

What the Broncos did with all this history was basically what the computer does in WarGames. They learned.

This time, when they got the ball with a chance to run out the clock at the end of regulation, they played more aggressively, passing on third down to maintain possession rather than running to keep the clock ticking.

They also designed an offensive game plan that allowed them to run the ball better, often running out of passing formations that spread the defense. They designed a defensive plan that allowed them to stop the run better, playing more linebackers and fewer defensive backs on more snaps. Between the two, they reversed the Chargers’ time of possession advantage in the first two games.

After rushing for a pathetic 18 net yards in their loss to the Chargers in December, the Broncos racked up 133 this time — 82 from Knowshon Moreno and 52 from rookie Montee Ball. After giving up 177 rushing yards in that loss, they surrendered only 65 this time. It didn’t hurt that the Chargers’ best running back, Ryan Mathews, was hobbled by an ankle sprain. After rushing for 127 yards in the Chargers victory, he managed only five carries for 26 yards in this one.

All of this added up to domination of the game for the first three quarters. Clad in orange on a crisp, windy day, Mile High rumbled with enthusiasm when the Chargers had the ball and turned into a library when Manning was engineering the no-huddle. The Broncos didn’t score as much as they usually do, in part because of their long, patient drives and in part because one of them ended when Manning threw a pass off Eric Decker’s chest that turned into an interception in the end zone.

Still, they led 17-0 after three quarters and their defense looked dominant.

Then cornerback Chris Harris went out of the game and, just like that, the defensive dominance disappeared. We’ll come back to that in a minute. But that’s why, just like last year, the Broncos found themselves protecting a seven-point lead in the waning minutes.

Last year, up 35-28 on the Ravens with two minutes to play, the Broncos faced a third-and-7. Rather than attempt to throw for the first down to maintain possession, they called a running play to burn precious seconds off the clock. They were forced to punt and everybody knows what happened after that.

This year, leading the Chargers 24-17 with three minutes to play, they faced a third-and-17 from their own 20-yard line. Offensive coordinator Adam Gase ordered what Manning would call “a wheel-type route” for tight end Julius Thomas. With the pocket collapsing around him, Manning waited patiently for the route to develop down the field. Then he hit a wide-open Thomas down the right sideline for 21 yards and a first down.

“Third-and-17, you know you’re going to have to hold the ball a little bit longer just to give guys a chance to get down the field,” Manning said. “It was the perfect call against the perfect coverage, which you may get one or two of those a game. It certainly came at a good time. Adam dialed it up. It was something we worked on, and it was nice we were able to execute.”

Moments later, the Broncos were presented with a virtual replay of last year’s call. With 2:12 showing, they faced a third-and-6 from their 45. Again, Gase called for a pass. Again, Manning found his big tight end, this time for nine yards and another first down.

It seemed vaguely Shakespearean that Mike McCoy, the offensive coordinator who ordered the running plays that led to defeat a year ago, was on the opposite sideline Sunday, coaching the Chargers and watching his successor correct his mistake.

“Certainly two huge third-down conversions, which were the difference in the ball game,” Manning said.

The successive first downs exhausted the Chargers’ timeouts. From there, the Broncos were able to run out the clock. The Chargers never got the ball back and never had an opportunity to pull off the miracle finish the Ravens managed a year ago.

“I think there’s been a lot of changes since last year,” Manning said. “We are much more experienced. We’ve been through a lot and have been in different situations. Those were two huge plays. I really loved Adam’s aggressive calls. Julius and I have spent a lot of time working on those particular routes — after practice, in practice. To me, that is one of the most rewarding parts of football. When you put that work in off to the side or after practice and it pays off in a game, it really makes it feel like it was worth it. Those two plays specifically were certainly worth the hard work.”

So if the Broncos continue to be such good students of the past, perhaps they can come up with a way to beat Brady and the Patriots next week and advance to the Super Bowl in New Jersey. But first, they’ll have to look carefully at what happened in the fourth quarter Sunday.

“We got it going pretty good, and they knew it,” said Rivers, the Chargers’ quarterback. “If we got it one more time, I believe deep down that we would’ve tied that thing up. But we didn’t. Those are all a bunch of what-ifs.”

Through three quarters, the Chargers had five first downs and 25 net passing yards. In the fourth, they had eight and 169.

Did the Broncos lay back in a somewhat softer defense with a three-score lead to start the quarter? Sure, there were a couple of zones in there. But the most obvious difference in their defense was the substitution of veteran Quentin Jammer for Harris late in the third quarter, when Harris went out with what the club reported as a knee or ankle issue. Coach John Fox said he had no update afterward, making Harris’ health the biggest question of the coming week.

For three quarters, the Broncos’ defensive success was based on their ability to leave their cornerbacks in man-to-man coverage on San Diego’s wide receivers while everybody else played the run first. With Harris and Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie on the outside and Champ Bailey playing nickel back covering the slot, it worked well. Once Harris went out, it didn’t.

Suddenly, the Chargers were reeling off big plays in the passing game. Jammer, the longtime Charger, always seemed to be at the scene of the crime. On San Diego’s first scoring drive, he lined up opposite former Bronco Eddie Royal, who ran a crossing route. Somewhere about the middle of the field, Jammer suddenly turned and looked back to the side he had vacated, as if unsure of the scheme. Royal ran away from him to the other side of the field. Rivers hit him and Royal turned upfield, gaining 30 yards. Moments later, Rivers went after Jammer again, throwing a 16-yard touchdown pass over him to Keenan Allen.

Manning responded by marching the Broncos down the field for another touchdown to make it 24-7 with 8:12 left. Again, a three-score lead looked comfortable. In fact, when Rivers made the mistake of going after Rodgers-Cromartie twice in a row on San Diego’s next possession, the Chargers faced a fourth-and-5 at their own 25-yard line. If the Broncos had stopped them there, they might have coasted home.

Instead, Rivers, who had ignored the Allen-Jammer matchup on third down, went deep for Allen on fourth. Jammer stumbled turning to follow Allen’s out move and the Chargers’ rookie star was wide open when Rivers hit him for a 49-yard gain. A minute later, it was 24-14, and two minutes after that, following a successful onside kick, 24-17.

This is what set up the Broncos’ final possession and the aggressive play-calling and execution that allowed them to protect a one-touchdown lead and close out the win.

Perhaps blaming this sudden change in the dynamic on Jammer is too simplistic. No doubt there were others who made mistakes as well. But if Harris is not ready to resume his role for next week’s AFC championship game at Mile High, the Broncos will have a decision to make.

Sunday, they had basically three options. They could have subbed in rookie Kayvon Webster, but it was Webster that Rivers victimized in the Chargers’ December victory. Just as Manning targeted Chiefs rookie cornerback Marcus Cooper a few weeks before, Rivers pretty much threw at whoever Webster was covering until Webster was removed from the game.

They could have moved Champ Bailey to the outside. Bailey missed much of the season with a foot injury. Broncos coaches have been easing him back in as a nickel back, limiting his snaps. Still, I was a little surprised they didn’t move him outside for the final 15 minutes of Sunday’s game when Harris went down. After all, he’s been to 12 Pro Bowls, most recently last year.

Jammer was the third option, and the one they chose, perhaps because he played for the Chargers all those years and perhaps because he’s the guy who replaced Webster after Rivers toasted the rookie in December.

A fourth option would be Tony Carter, but he was inactive for Sunday’s game. That will probably change next week if Harris is unavailable.

Against the Patriots next week, the Broncos will need a game plan similar to the one they executed Sunday. The Patriots rushed for 234 yards Saturday in beating the Colts, 43-22. They scored all six of their touchdowns on the ground. But if the Broncos are going to leave their corners on islands against Brady, those corners will have to play as well as Rodgers-Cromartie and Harris did Sunday.

The Broncos will also have to learn what they can from their loss at New England just before Thanksgiving. In a game shaped by cold, windy conditions, the Patriots fumbled six times, losing three, before intermission. Von Miller returned one of them 60 yards for a touchdown and the Broncos led 24-0 at halftime.

The second half was pretty much a mirror image. It was the Broncos who turned it over three times and the Patriots who came back to take a 31-24 lead. The Broncos regrouped, driving for a tying touchdown near the end of the fourth quarter, but a freak play in overtime — a punt bouncing off Carter, who was on the coverage unit — handed New England a three-point win.

Offensively, the Broncos should be at full strength against the Patriots. Wes Welker, the former Patriot, returned to action following a concussion wearing a helmet nearly as big as he is.

“I’ve been practicing with it the last few weeks, so I got used to it, but it is kind of looking like The Jetsons out there,” Welker said.

“It was the first time since November that we’ve had Decker and (Demaryius) Thomas and Julius and Welker on the field together,” Manning said. “We’ve battled through some injuries.”

This was Manning’s theme going into the game. He told his teammates to be proud of what many outsiders seemed to take for granted.

“I talked to the team last night,” he reported. “I said, ‘You need to be commended for getting back to this point.’ We’ve been through more this year — it’s hard to explain all the stuff we’ve been through, offseason and in-season. To get to this point was really hard work, and to win this game was really hard work. We are proud and happy to be at this point, and we certainly want to keep it going.”

The Broncos exorcised one demon Sunday. Another awaits. In between, at least one of them had a Bud Light.

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December 29, 2013

The engineer as artist: Peyton Manning sets a new standard

By Dave Krieger

For those who weren’t in or around Denver at the time, it may be hard to believe that there was a vigorous debate, at least on sports talk radio, about the relative merits of Tim Tebow and Peyton Manning as the Broncos’ quarterback for 2012 and beyond.

One of the arguments advanced by the Tebow backers was there wouldn’t be much “beyond” with Manning. He was not, as they say, a quarterback of the future. At 36, he was a veteran of 13 NFL seasons coming off multiple neck surgeries and a full season of inactivity.

To jettison Tebow, who had just led the Broncos to an improbable postseason berth and first-round playoff victory in 2011, and replace him with what might turn out to be a relic, must be an act of desperation. The final acts of John Unitas, in San Diego, and Joe Namath, in Los Angeles, were referenced. John Elway, now pulling the strings in the Broncos’ front office, must be jealous of Tebow’s celebrity, some said. With many Tebow backers animated by imperatives beyond the world of football, it got pretty silly.

I remember one contending on the radio show that a Manning signing could only be justified by another championship parade in downtown Denver.

It did look that way. Manning was Elway’s attempt to go for greatness right away, just one year into his tenure as owner Pat Bowlen’s chief football executive. If the Broncos didn’t win a championship during whatever time Manning had left on the field, they would have to start over with his understudy, Brock Osweiler, which would make them just another team banking on potential.

Sometime between then and now, Manning changed all that. He recovered his brilliance so quickly, and made such an impact on the Broncos’ culture, and covered so ably for those physical abilities slowest to return, that he presented an opportunity we never imagined. He reached a skill level never before seen in football, a combination of intellectual and athletic rigor that took the game to another level. The quarterback was no longer a gunslinger. He was an engineer.

The Broncos have finished with a won-loss record of 13-3 in each of Manning’s two seasons in Denver. Before his arrival, they won that many games four times in 34 years of 16-game schedules. This year, at 37, Manning put up the best statistical season by a passer in NFL history.

Football fans had the sublime pleasure today of watching him finish the regular season with near perfection. He established league records for passing yards in a season (5,477, exactly one more than Drew Brees in 2011) and passing touchdowns (55, five more than Tom Brady in 2007). His largesse extended broadly, allowing the Broncos to set an NFL record for most players scoring ten touchdowns or more (five: Demaryius Thomas, Julius Thomas, Knowshon Moreno, Eric Decker and Wes Welker).

When Manning took back the passing touchdown record from Brady in the Broncos’ fifteenth game last week, he reached 51, one more than the previous mark. He predicted this record, like its predecessors in the category, would prove temporary. Manning began this stair-step escalation by exceeding Dan Marino’s 20-year-old mark of 48 by one in 2004. Brady slipped past, again by one, in 2007. Busting Brady’s six-year-old record by five may mean Manning’s mark stands a bit longer.

He made today’s regular-season finale at Oakland look like a Broncos practice and the Raiders’ defense like the Broncos’ scout team. Actually, that’s probably unfair to the Broncos’ scout team. In former Broncos defensive coordinator Dennis Allen’s second season as a head coach, the Raiders finished as though they deserved their 4-12 record.

As long as Manning was on the field, the matchup seemed unfair. The Broncos had five possessions. Four ended in touchdown passes, the fifth in a Matt Prater field goal. Manning failed to complete only three of 28 passes, spread the 25 completions among nine receivers and passed for those four touchdowns, one of them a gorgeous 63-yard bomb to Demaryius Thomas that made even Manning smile. It did not help the Raiders that their offense, directed by Terrelle Pryor, kept giving the ball back, once at its own 21-yard line on a bad snap. By halftime, it was 31-0.

“Obviously, not our best effort in the first half of the football game,” Allen said. “We got beat by a better team today. Offensively, we weren’t able to really get anything going. Defensively, obviously, that quarterback is really good. I thought there was a couple times where we had some opportunities to potentially get off the field. I thought they put the throw in there when they needed to and they were able to convert and that’s the difference between getting off the field and saving points and giving up points.”

Following the intermission, Broncos coach John Fox chose discretion, replacing Manning with Osweiler. This was, as the ever-competitive Manning pointed out afterward, “a coach’s decision.”

“Our goal was to play as good as we have to date this season,” Fox said. “And the way it worked out, I thought the first half was about as good in all three phases as we’ve been all year. It allowed us to get some guys out of the game and rest them, not to risk injury, and still take care of business on the field.”

By taking care of business, Fox meant winning the game and earning the top postseason seed in the AFC, meaning any and all Broncos playoff games prior to the Super Bowl will be in Denver. Of course, that was the situation last year, too, but we’ll get to that in a minute. As is his custom, Manning explained a memorable regular season by talking about the team’s accomplishments and not his own.

“I think it’s been really good focus on the players’ part,” he said. “We’ve had a number of distractions — injuries, off-field situations, on-field situations — but I think the one constant has been the players’ focus. They have remained focused on the task at hand, on trying to improve everybody’s individual play, which hopefully would result in better team play. But it’s a season unlike any other for me as far as having your head coach ill and missing for a while. We’ve had some injuries. We had the offseason. Those things are well documented. But the players have kind of kept their focus on trying to do players’ jobs. I think that’s been constant, and I think that’s served us well.”

This is the Manning mantra: Do the little things, do your job, take care of every detail. If every individual does that, it can add up to something quite remarkable. Particularly if the signal-caller, the quarterback, is the most maniacal of all about this preparation.

The 34-14 final score against Oakland gave the Broncos a season total of 606 points, another league record. For the benefit of trivia buffs and those already preparing for Mardi Gras, the 2011 New Orleans Saints retained the record for most yards gained in a season with 7,474. This year’s Broncos managed 7,317 for second place.

Manning’s surgical accuracy prompted analyst Solomon Wilcots to extol him on the CBS telecast as the greatest quarterback in the 94-year history of the NFL. Watching him against the Raiders, it was hard to argue. If he doesn’t win his fifth most valuable player trophy — extending another record — there should be an investigation. His relentless drive, combined with the Broncos’ seemingly endless supply of capable receivers, made Denver’s merciless offensive efficiency seem inevitable. Compared to the hope-and-prayer offenses of so many teams, it represented the NFL’s version of fine art.

On the flip side, there was this, from CBS play-by-play man Kevin Harlan: “The Raiders’ performance in the first half was about as bad as we’ve seen.”

Manning has made a lot of teams look that way this year. Three that didn’t, the Indianapolis Colts, New England Patriots and San Diego Chargers, made the postseason tournament as well, so now we get a week or two of reminiscing about last year, when the Broncos had the same record and the same playoff seed and still lost their first playoff game, to the Baltimore Ravens.

So we’ll see. Tony Dungy, Manning’s coach for seven years in Indianapolis, likes his chances to get through the AFC side of the bracket this year because none of the other playoff teams have great defenses to stop him. Where the 2012 edition was riding an 11-game winning streak and feeling pretty good about itself, this year’s version lost just three weeks ago and remembers it quite clearly.

Another advantage is the still-raw memory of that bitterly cold day last January when the Broncos surrendered a seven-point lead in the final minute of regulation by blowing the coverage on a hope and a prayer by Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco. Elway likens it to 1996, when the Broncos team he quarterbacked to a 13-3 record was upset in its first home playoff game by the Jacksonville Jaguars. That memory helped propel those Broncos to Super Bowl championships after each of the next two seasons.

Are these Broncos ready to do the same? They certainly looked like it in the regular season finale, although allowances must be made for the quality of the opposition. The regular-season losses to Indianapolis, New England and San Diego made it clear they are not invincible. Environmental conditions can turn any outdoor mid-winter game into a crap shoot, including the Super Bowl this year in New Jersey. So can ball control that keeps the football away from Manning, as the Chargers demonstrated.

Whatever happens in the new year, it no longer seems even remotely true that the Broncos need to win a Super Bowl to justify the Manning signing. It has already brought the Broncos two of the best seasons in their history. Manning’s remarkable comeback and relentless work ethic have set a standard we’ve never seen before.

He was asked, of course, whether the Broncos need to confirm the regular season this year in the playoffs.

“Well, sure,” he said. “We’ve had our goals all along. And this is why you work hard in the offseason. This is why you lift weights and have the offseason program, is to give yourself an opportunity to play in the postseason. But I’ll tell you, it’s a fun group of guys to play with. Offensively, it’s been a fun unit to meet with, practice with, watch tape with, work after practice with. And I’ve really enjoyed the coaches and the players on offense. It’s been a fun group.”

This is Manning acknowledging the obvious, but also sharing what he can about how he and his teammates got to this point. He loves the process, from offseason workouts to training camp and every week of practice through the long season. Only someone who loves it that much could so utterly master it. But he won’t entertain any of the big-picture questions — the records, the legacy — at least until the postseason is over.

“It’s not easy to go back-to-back 13-and-3s,” Fox said. “It’s not easy to go back-to-back 1-seeds. Obviously, everybody in our building, in our city, probably in our region, maybe in the country, was disappointed in how we finished a year ago. So hopefully that’s been a fire in the bellies of everyone in our building since that last January.”

The Broncos and many fans will be bitterly disappointed at any outcome other than a Super Bowl this year. Manning will most certainly be among them. That doesn’t change the fact that his 2013 regular season is already immortal, a story we’ll be telling a generation from now, no matter what happens next.

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November 25, 2013

Peyton Manning’s kryptonite

By Dave Krieger

Call it some kind of weird, backwards karma. Rahim Moore was the apparent goat the last time the Broncos played in a freezer, at home in the playoffs last season, even though Tony Carter was at least as responsible for the catastrophic play.

Almost a year later, Carter was the apparent goat in another blisteringly cold game, even though Wes Welker was probably more responsible for the catastrophic play.

“I’ve got to get to him earlier and tell him and get those guys out of the way if I’m not going to make the catch,” Welker acknowledged, referring to the Marx Bros. routine that handed the game to the New England Patriots. “I was a little bit in between and you can’t be that way.”

Welker was back there to receive the final punt in overtime at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, where the Patriots play, because Trindon Holliday, the Broncos’ usual punt returner, had already muffed one at the end of the first half. That became the first of the Broncos’ four turnovers, but only five seconds remained before intermission, so it didn’t seem to matter.

After all, the Broncos had turned three New England turnovers into scores and led 24-0 at halftime. As if satisfying a cosmic need for symmetry, the Patriots did the same to the Broncos after halftime, catching up and taking the lead with 31 consecutive points, then giving up a late touchdown to set up overtime.

With a little more than three minutes remaining in the extra period, the Broncos forced the Patriots to punt for the sixth time in the game and the second in overtime. Because of the wind, Welker decided at the last minute not to risk trying to catch the ball. He tried to wave his teammates off, but it was too late for Carter to find the ball in the air. As the backup defensive back tried to flee the scene, the ball landed right next to him and bounced off his leg. The Patriots recovered at the Broncos’ 13-yard line. Two plays later, Stephen Gostkowski kicked the winning field goal in a 34-31 victory.

“It’s just one of those freakish things that happens in football,” Carter said. “The ball took a bad bounce and obviously, you know, we were all trying to get out of the way. It just so happened to hit me and they recovered and it set them up for a field goal, so it was a big play in the game and just one of those things you wish you could take back.”

The ball gets hard and slick in frigid conditions. Both teams had trouble holding on. The Broncos fumbled five times, losing three. The Patriots fumbled six times, also losing three. All New England’s giveaways came in the first half. Except for the Holliday muff, all of Denver’s — two more lost fumbles and a Peyton Manning interception deep in his own territory — came after intermission.

“Really good first half for us, really good second half for them, and back and forth in the overtime,” said Broncos interim coach Jack Del Rio, offering the CliffsNotes. “I thought we had a shot, really felt confident we were going to pull it out. They ended up making a play there at the end and getting a field goal up and won the game, so it was really a tale of two halves for us.”

Patriots coach Bill Belichick told a similar story with a different ending:

“I thought we were moving the ball pretty well in the first half, but we turned it over. We couldn’t finish the drives. And they ended up not only with the ball, but one time they ended up with a touchdown. You can’t move the ball when you’re losing it. We’ve got to hang on to it. So, once we started doing that and converting a few third downs, we had some plays in the red area.”

This makes the Broncos 0-for-2 in spectacularly cold games during the Peyton Manning Era. The veteran quarterback has been sub-par in both.

Well, you might say, that’s only natural. It’s harder to play quarterback in conditions more commonly found on Jupiter. Just one problem with this narrative: They didn’t affect Manning’s counterpart nearly as much in either case. Baltimore’s Joe Flacco had a passer rating of 116.2 in that playoff game last season; Manning’s was 88.3.

Sunday, Tom Brady threw for 344 yards, three touchdowns and a passer rating of 107.4. Manning threw for 150 yards, by far his lowest total of the season, two touchdowns, that interception, and a rating of 70.4, also his lowest of the season.

Manning has long had a reputation for struggling in adverse weather conditions, in part because he was stereotyped as an “indoor” quarterback during the 14 seasons he played all his home games inside a dome in Indianapolis. I didn’t cover him back then, so I don’t really know if that reputation was justified.

I do know the Ravens were convinced Manning couldn’t throw the ball down the field in the frigid playoff game last January because former Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo told us so on the radio not long ago. At the time, Manning explained that the Ravens’ two-deep zone defense forced him to throw shorter routes to his backs and tight ends, even though the stat sheet showed he threw to his wideouts more often than to his backs and tight ends combined.

Sunday, his explanation for the first pedestrian stat line of his season was that the running game was going so well. Certainly, that was true. Knowshon Moreno carried 37 times for 224 yards, the third-highest total in Broncos history (behind Mike Anderson, who had 251 at New Orleans in 2000, and Clinton Portis, who posted 228 against Arizona in 2002).

When Manning was asked Sunday night about the effect of the conditions on his passing, this was his reply:

“Like I said, our running game was working, so that’s what we were going with. When you’re running the ball well, that’s a good thing for the offense. Just, when you turn it over and give them two short fields, that’s disappointing. That’s not good execution. So that’s kind of the way that worked out.”

It’s not altogether clear which short fields he was talking about because the Broncos gave the Patriots two in the second half — on a Montee Ball fumble and the Manning interception — and a third at the end of overtime. What he didn’t mention were the five Broncos possessions after intermission that ended in punts. There must have been a few moments in there where a nicely-thrown pass could have kept a drive alive, no matter how well the running game was working.

Manning won’t go there. He just frowns and deflects questions about the conditions. Everybody else acknowledged the effects, particularly that of the wind, which caused Belichick to give the Broncos the ball to begin overtime so that the Patriots might have the wind at their backs.

“It was a strong wind,” Belichick explained. “I just felt like the wind would be an advantage if we could keep them out of the end zone on that first drive. So, we were able to do that. The wind was significant in the game.”

Manning’s performance in these cold-weather games increases speculation that in the two years since he underwent spinal fusion surgery, the nerve regeneration in his arm and hand is adequate for routine conditions but still inadequate for extremely cold weather. This may or may not be true, but the speculation will continue until he dominates a cold-weather game the way he has dominated so many warm-weather games over the past two seasons.

For all the drama of Sunday night’s clash — Brady is now 10-4 against Manning all time, for those keeping score, which is pretty much everybody — it didn’t change the Broncos’ landscape much at all. Obligingly, the Chiefs also lost, to San Diego, so the Broncos remain in a nominal tie with their AFC West rivals going into their rematch this Sunday in Kansas City. They are still one game better than New England — 9-2 versus 8-3 — and this loss will come into play in postseason seeding only if they end up with the same record.

It is true, of course, as Manning pointed out, that even after all the mistakes by both teams, if the Broncos don’t screw up that final Patriots punt, they have the ball with about three minutes left and an opportunity to win the game or, at least, prevent Brady from doing so by running out the clock.

“Still felt like we had a chance, getting the ball there at the very end,” Manning said. “I thought we were going to have the ball last and we were going to score and win the game or I guess it could have ended in a tie. So I hated the way that ended and not getting a chance there to get our hands on the ball.”

The Broncos had two decent drives in overtime. One was undermined by an offensive pass interference call against Eric Decker that Manning called “very disappointing,” and the other ended in a decision to punt with the ball at the New England 37-yard line and not quite five minutes remaining.

“We just were probably five yards short of where we needed to get to to have a realistic shot of making a field goal,” Del Rio said. Had the wind been at the Broncos’ backs, Del Rio said he might have sent Matt Prater out to attempt a game-winning field goal. Against the wind, he said special teams coordinator Jeff Rodgers told him a 53-yard attempt was too far.

The game had enough subplots for a Russian novel, including a first-half cameo by a brilliant Broncos defense that left for intermission and never came back. In the end, all anyone is likely to remember is that the Broncos could not hold a 24-point lead and that Manning, the four-time most valuable player and certain Hall-of-Famer, was reduced to an ordinary quarterback in the blustery conditions.

More than ever, the Broncos’ Super Bowl hopes seem to hinge not only on all the things that must normally go right to be the last team standing, but also on environmental conditions that don’t rob their superstar of his powers.

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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 7, 2013

History loves the Broncos

By Dave Krieger

Two melodramas played out in the aftermath of one of the great shootouts in NFL history Sunday. They were pretty different.

The Broncos, on the road, stomped in muddy boots across the open record book again, setting or tying or threatening a slew of franchise and league records as they rolled to 51 points, which would have been the highest score in their history if they hadn’t scored 52 last week.

The Cowboys, at home, saw the quarterback they want to believe in deliver the best performance of his career, keeping them in the game the whole way — and then give it away with a characteristic mistake at the end. Linebacker Danny Trevathan’s interception deep in Dallas territory with the score tied at 48 and two minutes remaining turned a dramatic tossup into a filibuster by the best offense in football.

Despite throwing for 506 yards and five touchdowns, Tony Romo carried the hangdog look that has become his post-game trademark when he met the inquiring minds afterward. He explained that the Cowboys had looked at tape of the Broncos in the two-minute drill and decided they were prone to leave the seams open. He had completed a similar seam route earlier.

“They did a good job,” he said. “The kid made a good play. I didn’t get as much on it, just with the people around me, as I wanted to. I wanted to put it another foot or two out in front and the ball, I didn’t put it exactly where I needed to to complete the pass. It’s frustrating and disappointing.”

Replays showed his front foot landed on another shoe in the pass protection traffic around him as he stepped into the throw.

This is Romo’s rep, of course — the best quarterback around until it’s time to win.

“When I was in New England or even in San Diego, the scouting report was the same — that he was a talented guy, he made a lot of plays and he had what we call a ‘wow’ factor,” former safety Rodney Harrison said on Sunday Night Football. “When you watch him on film, he makes some incredible plays.

“But we also knew in the fourth quarter that he was going to make one or two mistakes in those critical moments. He was going to either turn the ball over, fumble, interception, he was going to make that key mistake.”

It’s all very Shakespearean, this fatally flawed hero.

The Broncos got wheels up out of Dallas and left the Cowboys’ drama behind. They have a happier one of their own. They are challenging offensive records by the boatload, entertaining a growing slice of America in the process. They may have to hire someone just to rewrite their record book.

History loves them. They continue to make people look up things that happened 40 or 50 years ago. Various quarterbacks of the past get unexpected moments in the sun as Peyton Manning challenges or surpasses some long-ago achievement.

On the other hand, the Broncos surrendered 48 points to the Cowboys, their worst defensive performance since Jack Del Rio took over the defense before last season. They lost starting linebacker Wesley Woodyard (neck) and starting cornerback Chris Harris (concussion) during the course of the game. Combined with linebacker Von Miller (suspended) and cornerback Champ Bailey (out with a foot injury since the beginning of the season), that’s four of 11 starters on defense who were not on the field for much of Romo’s assault.

Nevertheless, the Broncos were a top-five defense last season and they’re nowhere near that this year. They have surrendered 139 points in five games, an average of nearly 28 per, or about 10 more than the 18.1 they gave up last season, when they ranked fourth in scoring defense.

Of course, they’ve scored 230 of their own, an NFL record through five games, so the defense is still doing enough to win, although just barely this week.

“Was it perfect?” Broncos coach John Fox asked. “No. Are any of them perfect? No. But, we made some adjustments there at the end. We weren’t matching up very well. We (gave up) some explosive plays at some inopportune times. At the end, we were able to hang on.”

The pattern of the game doesn’t seem to matter. In this one, the Broncos fell behind 14-0 early thanks to an Eric Decker fumble and Romo’s fast start. They roared back with 21 second-quarter points to take a 28-20 lead into the locker room at halftime. Manning was 11 of 14 for 163 yards, three touchdowns and a passer rating of 154.8 at that point.

“He’s fantastic,” said Cowboys linebacker Sean Lee. “There is no doubt. He’s playing unbelievable. He’s playing like a Hall of Famer and one of the best players of all time. I give him all the credit in the world.”

Among the records trembling or falling:

— The 99 total points in Dallas tied for the fourth-most in NFL history and second-most since the 1970 NFL/AFL merger.

— The Broncos’ 51 points was second-highest in franchise history.

— The Broncos broke the record for most points in the first five games of a season, surpassing the 2000 St. Louis Rams, who scored 217.

— Manning set a league record for touchdown passes in the first five games (20), breaking Daunte Culpepper’s mark of 18 in 2004.

— Manning set a league record for touchdown passes without an interception to start a season (20), breaking Milt Plum’s mark of 16 in 1960.

— Manning moved into second place on the career passing yardage list (61,371), passing Dan Marino (61, 361). The leader is Brett Favre (71,838).

— The Broncos extended their franchise record for consecutive regular-season wins to 16, breaking the mark of 15 they set last week. They extended their franchise record road winning streak to eight.

— Wes Welker became the first player in 31 years to have at least one touchdown catch in each of his first five games with a team.

And so on. The Broncos offense continues to wow the world, now averaging 46 points a game.

“He’s a brilliant, brilliant football player,” Cowboys coach Jason Garrett said of Manning. “He has been for a long, long time, and I think much of his brilliance comes from his ability to find the weakness of the defense. Any defense you play, since the beginning of time, has a weakness to it. He’s unbelievable before the snap and after the snap finding what that weakness is and getting to it. He did it consistently throughout the ballgame.”

At a time in NFL history when young, athletic quarterbacks such as Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick are making plays with their legs as well as their arms, the 37-year-old Manning picked Sunday’s game to show off his own wheels, scoring his first rushing touchdown since 2008 on a naked bootleg at the goal line.

“I’ve run it actually a couple of times, believe it or not, but the key is you want to do it about every five years or so,” Manning said. “Naked bootlegs only work – the ones that I’ve done – when you don’t tell anybody. You call the run play and it’s a run play and you just kind of make a decision there as you get to the line of scrimmage based on the right look. You think they’re going to maybe slant one way.  As soon as we brought Julius (Thomas) in motion, the guy covered him, went with him. I kind of said, well, that’s a good look for it.  I’ll be retired by the time I’m able to do it again.”

Counting Todd Helton’s play against the St. Louis Cardinals in the Rockies’ final homestand of the baseball season, it was the second hidden ball trick by a former Tennessee quarterback playing for a Denver pro team in less than a month.

Manning finally threw his first interception of the season, but for most of the day, he did what he’s done throughout the early going — diagnose the defensive weakness at each snap and take advantage of it. Against man-to-man defenses, he found favorable matchups with linebackers or safeties trying to cover Julius Thomas, the tight end, who led the Broncos with nine catches for 122 yards and two touchdowns. When the Cowboys tried to play zone, Manning found his big three wide receivers — Demaryius Thomas, Decker and Welker.

After all the offensive fireworks, Trevathan’s interception in Dallas territory with two minutes remaining changed everything. The Broncos found themselves in the uncharacteristic position of trying to milk the clock rather than score.

“I’ve never been in a situation quite like that at the end, where we needed to get the first down but we didn’t need to score, and that difference was about half a yard,” Manning said. “Knowshon (Moreno) and I were arguing at the end.  He basically was asking, ‘How am I supposed to do that?  How can I get half a yard but not get a yard and a half?’ And I just said, ‘You can’t score.  You can’t do it. We’ve got to get the first down and kick a field goal and get out of this place.'”

“I was confused on how to do it,” said Moreno, who carried 19 times for 93 yards and a touchdown. “Peyton said ‘Just do it.’ Whatever he says, do . . . You always talk about a ‘first down, fall down’ mentality. I’ve never been a part of that before.”

With the Broncos facing a third-and-one on the Dallas 2-yard line and 1:40 showing, Garrett had to decide whether to try for the goal line stand or let the Broncos score in order to get the ball back.

“The consideration there is on the third-and-short,” Garrett said. “You’re balancing the idea of getting a stop there. If you get a stop there, they kick the field goal and you give yourself a much better chance to tie the football game coming back. If you give them the opportunity to go score a touchdown right there, and kind of give up, you do give yourself a chance to go back and score a touchdown. But you have no timeouts and all that, so you weigh those out. We decided to try to make the stop on third down and they made it by about an inch.”

So the Broncos gave up 48 points and still won. Three teams remain unbeaten after five games and the Broncos are one of them. The other two — the Saints and Chiefs — have been less prolific on offense and stingier on defense. The Broncos continue to combine intelligence, discipline and playmaking in a way few offenses ever have. The early line on next week’s game against Jacksonville, which is 0-5, is the biggest in league history at about 28 points.

Two of the Broncos’ first five games were instant classics — Manning’s record-tying seven touchdown passes in the opener and Sunday’s shootout, which saw more than 1,000 yards of offense.

They’re the best show in the NFL, and that’s saying something.

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