Denver Broncos Arrogance Level Goes Off The Charts

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Broncos, Denver Broncos, NFL, NFL Draft, Denver Broncos 2009 NFL Draft, Josh McDaniels, Pat Bowlen, Jay Cutler, Brain Sanders, Chicago Bears, Draft Pick Value Chart, Mike Leach, Lonnie Paxton, Brandon Marshall, Ryan Clady.

The first day of the Denver Bronco’s 2009 draft has provided us with incontrovertible evidence that Josh McDaniels and Pat Bowlen have lost any semblance of control over their egos and imagine themselves to be more intelligent, more capable, and more insightful than any leadership combination in the league, now or at any time in its history.

The best evidence for this is not even the extremely strange assortment of personnel moves McDaniels has made since taking over the team, but comes instead from the incredible trade the Broncos made of their 2010 first round pick for the 37th pick in this year’s draft.

First some background. When Bowlen shocked Broncos fans by firing Mike Shanahan, the only Broncos head coach to ever win a Super Bowl, most objective observers believed that the only thing that needed to be fixed on the team was its defense.

In 2008 the Broncos gave up an average of 375 yards per game, 29th worst in a 32 team league. At the same time they gained 396 yards per game, second only to the league leader New Orleans. This seemed to indicate pretty clearly that the reason the Broncos finished the season 8-8 was that they had only half a team, an offense. And that if they wanted to advance to the playoffs it was the defense that needed to be rebuilt.

The fact that the offense was third in yards gained passing per game and 12th in rushing ypg suggested that the offense was being carried by its passing. Indeed it seemed to many observers that the combination of outstanding young players Jay Cutler at quarterback, Brandon Marshall at wide receiver, and Ryan Clady at left tackle had given the Broncos a passing game that was already the envy of the league and which would only get better for many years to come.

Meanwhile, on the defensive side, the facts that the Broncos were 27th worst in the league in rushing yards given up, and 26th worst in number of sacks made, indicated that the major problem was the defensive line and that it was there that the Broncos had the most pressing need for improved personnel of any area of the team.

It was a shock, then, to most Broncos fans when Bowlen fired his head coach, since the offense, which had always been Shanahan's area of expertise, seemed to be in good shape. But it was even more shocking when, after hiring McDaniels, Bowlen supported McD while he ran off almost all of Shanahan’s assistants, both defensive and offensive. Indeed, at times it seemed that McD intended to eradicate any trace of the team that the Broncos had been. He went so far as to replace the long snapper, Mike Leach, with Lonnie Paxton, the long snapper Mickey D had worked with in New England. There had never been any complaints about Leach’s performance, he was considered one of the best in the league. Moreover, he was one of the emotional leaders of the Broncos team. Leach’s release sent a message that to be on the new Broncos you not only had to be good, you needed to have personal loyalty to Josh McDaniels.

Its shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone then that McD’s next step was to try and trade the keystone of the excellent passing game, quarterback Jay Cutler, for Matt Cassell. I don’t think anyone, including Cassell, believes that Cassell is as talented as Cutler. What Cassell had to recommended him was the required personal loyalty to McD. When the trade failed Cutler decided he wouldn’t play for Mickey D and demanded a trade to another team. Both McD and Bowlen were at pains to represent this as an act of unbridled ego on the part of Cutler.

McDaniels first moves to rebuild the now completely disassembled team came in free agency, even before the Cutler disaster. Here McD signed three running backs and three defensive backs. There was absolutely no sign of an attempt to rebuild the defensive line.

This meant that the Broncos brain trust entered draft day in desperate need of help on the defensive line, at linebacker, since McD had announced a conversion to a 3-4 defense, and, after the loss of Cutler, at quarterback. Faced with this situation Mickey D promptly drafted another running back, that’s four now, passing on Brian Orakpo who in my opinion (full disclosure, Hook ‘em Horns!) is an incredible end/linebacker; a defensive tackle, that’s one; two more defensive backs, that's a total of five; and a tight end, when the Broncos already have an excellent, team leader, tight end in Tony Scheffler. (Note to Tony. Look for a job. You don’t have enough loyalty to McD to be a Bronco.)

Most analysts would be content to make their case for arrogance on the part of McDaniels and his owner on the foregoing, but there is a better and absolutely conclusive piece of evidence. This comes from the trade that McD made in order to draft his fourth defensive back. In this trade McDaniels received the 37th pick in this year’s draft and gave up the Broncos first round pick next year. Note that after the Cutler trade Mickey D had two first round picks, the Bronco's and the Bears', and since he was drastically over paying, he could undoubtedly have traded either one of them for pick 37. But he deliberately chose to give up the pick based on the Broncos record.

The NFL has a draft-pick value chart which gives what are considered to be average, relative, long term values of the various draft-picks. League general managers usually consult this chart before trading picks to make sure they are getting close to the same value they are giving. According to this chart the 37th overall pick the Broncos received has a value of 530 points. In contrast the Broncos first round pick this year, 12th overall, has a value of 1200 points. That is, based on this year’s draft position, they over paid for their fourth defensive back by a factor of 2.26.

This can only mean one of two things. Either Mickey D has been driven out of his senses by the rush of pure ego that came with being made an NFL head coach at 32, or he believes that the Broncos pick next year will be much lower than this year’s. If, for example, the Bronco’s were to win the Super Bowl the point value of their 2010 pick would be 590 points and they would only have overpaid by a factor of 1.11. That is they would have paid a reasonable ten per cent premium to have the pick now instead of next year.

This offers a crucial insight into the minds of the Bronco’s leadership. For this trade to make any sense at all McDaniels, his General Manager Brian Sanders (Sanders has trouble spelling his own name so I have helped him out and corrected the spelling here) and owner Pat Bowlen, must all believe that McD can take an 8-8 team, trade its best player, and in one year, through free agency and the draft, make it a Super Bowl contender. No other explanation makes the pick 37 trade even conceivably reasonable. The Broncos must believe that they are not involved in a rebuilding program that will take years, but that they have already built a Super Bowl champion and that their first round pick next year will be so low as to effectively be a second rounder.

There have been cases like this before of course. The Miami Dolphins went from 1-15 in 2007 to 11-5 last year. (But of course the Dolphins first round pick was still worth 720 points this year.) So maybe the Broncos know what they are doing. Maybe we should just wait and see? The answer to that, of course, is no.

While it is possible that the Broncos now have the best team in football, this eventuality is so unlikely that none of the other general managers would believe it. They, being reasonable people, would still treat the Broncos first round pick next year as being worth a thousand points or more. The fact that the Broncos would let this pick go for far less than the value the market would set for it represents a serious lack of judgment on their part.

We are then asked to believe that people who are unable to understand the actual value of draft picks are at the same time the shrewdest evaluators of football talent ever to live. This simply isn’t reasonable. It is much more likely that the same people who destroyed a team that didn’t need destroying, and who drove off one of the three or four most talented quarterbacks in the league, have also vastly over rated the team they have assembled and vastly undervalued the draft-pick they have so lightly traded away. The only explanation for this is that the Broncos leadership, all of them, are suffering from a rush of egotism that is Mussoliniesque in its proportions. This also settles once and for all the question of whose ego caused Cutler to leave the team. It is the ego problems of McD and Bowlen that are to blame and no one else’s.

I would now like to make a prediction for the Broncos future. I do not think you can take an 8-8 team, get rid of its best player, add four running backs and five defensive backs when your greatest need is on the defensive line, and have a winning team. I believe that the Broncos record next year is likely to be somewhere between 7-9 and 3-13, with a single point of 5-11. The consolation for this will be that the Broncos 2010 draft pick will be in the top ten. With a 5-11 record it will be the seventh or eigth pick, and they will be able to draft another franchise player, maybe even a quarterback who can eventually develop the same skills as Cutler, to help with their long term rebuilding program. The problem with that of course is that the Broncos have already traded this pick away and the lower they go next year the more absurd their egotistical folly will become.

On the other hand they could have had the same 2009 37th pick for the Bears’ first choice next year. But the Broncos clearly feel that since they have a Super Bowl team the Bears’ pick will be higher than theirs. I believe, on the other hand, that Jay Cutler will be the missing piece for the 9-7 Bears team which already has a strong defense and that the Bears will go 10-6 and challenge for the division championship. This will make the Bear’s draft choice 22nd or 23rd overall, and so only worth only one and a half times the 37th pick the Broncos received. While the seventh or eigth pick they traded away will be worth three times what they received for it.

But the bottom line, as I said above, is that we don’t have to wait until next year to see if the Broncos are wrong. The Broncos are wrong now. They traded a first round draft choice for at best half, if not a third, of what they could have gotten for it, now. This coupled with the loss of Cutler and the failure to sign more than one defensive lineman constitutes a series of mistakes that the Broncos are making, now. There are only two possible explanations for this. First, McDaniels, Sanders, and Bowlen are stupid. This can’t be, however, since they could not have risen to the positions they hold if this were true. Therefore the only possible explanation is the second. That McDaniels, Sanders, and Bowlen are so enamored of their own egos that they are blinded to the facts of their situation.