No Plan B

by Mark Kiszla

  At the time, Elway was an aging quarterback who had never won a championship. His legacy was in doubt. Would Elway ever win the big one? But, rather than sulk, the Broncos used the setback against Jacksonville as motivation. And, a season later, Elway was hoisting the Vince Lombardi trophy to celebrate what would become triumphant, back-to-back Super Bowl runs.

  Was this mere coincidence or foreshadowing? The Denver quarterback who hugged Lewis on the field after throwing an interception that set up Baltimore’s winning field goal was 36 years old. Is time running out on Manning? Or can Elway envision a storybook ending for Manning that will echo Old No. 7’s own heroic finish as player in the late 1990s?

  “It’s all how we look at it . . . as people, as players, as coaches, as personnel people,” said Elway, when conducting the postmortem on the 2012 season, determined not to allow one stunning setback be the death of a Super Bowl dream.

  “If we get defensive as individuals and don’t listen to the ideas of what happened and how we can learn from those, then, to me, we don’t get better. But, if we listen to it, evaluate [the shortcomings], and then correct them, we have a chance.”

  Winners of the Super Bowl go to Disney World to hang with Mickey Mouse. Goats in the NFL tournament get thrown to the snarks. At the outset of his first season with the Broncos, the arm strength of Manning was questioned. At the end, in the immediate aftermath of losing a home playoff game, Manning endured something far worse. His strength of character was doubted.

  “Manning chokes.” (Tweeted at 6:48 PM on January 12, 2013, by Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com)

  “Papa Bear just told me he kicked his grill over.” (Tweeted at 7:10 PM on January 12, 2013, by @PeytonsHead)

  “Dear Peyton Manning: You can never be me—Signed, Tim Tebow.” (Tweeted at 7:22 PM on January 12, 2013, by Jemele Hill of ESPN)

  The narrative of an MVP-worthy season had taken a cruel turn: Manning is pure genius during the regular season. In the playoffs, he thinks too much.

  Fair or not, Manning got stuck between the 1 and the 8 of his Broncos jersey with the reputation of a lightweight under pressure, after his three turnovers against Baltimore led to 17 points by the Ravens. His postseason record dropped to a very ordinary 9-11. Worse, from Indianapolis to Denver, a team with Manning as the starting quarterback has been one and done in the playoffs eight times.

  The blitz came hard. Manning got buried with criticism. The allegations stung. His genius shrivels when left out in the cold of winter, when the temperature at kickoff drops below 40 degrees. His performance in the clutch stinks.

  Do these statistics lie? In 224 regular-season games, Manning’s touchdown pass to interception ratio is a phenomenal 2 to 1. In 20 playoff games, however, his touchdown pass to interception ratio drops to a pedestrian 1.5 to 1.

  In the new media, opinions are formed as quickly as the refresh button can be hit. Once a headline is repeated or retweeted a thousand times, it becomes shouted as all-caps absolute truth: MANNING CHOKES!

  There is no denying that Baltimore quarterback Joe Flacco came up big in the clutch, while Manning took a knee. But as Elway stood at the entrance of the Broncos locker room fewer than 48 hours after the abrupt end to Denver’s season, he presented some meaningful context regarding Manning and his hidden anxiety of playing for a new NFL team.

  The truth was: Elway was genuinely surprised Manning performed as spectacularly as he did for the Broncos in 17 games, considering Manning had said good-bye to the Colts and uprooted his family after nearly 14 years in Indianapolis.

  “Knowing Peyton now compared to how I knew him when he first got to Denver, I realize how much tougher this transition really was for him, because of the type of person he is,” Elway said.

  Elway and Manning are both Hall of Fame quarterbacks. But they are a football odd couple. Built for chaos, Elway trusts his impeccable instincts and comes out firing. With a red Sharpie and a checklist, Manning cannot rest until he assigns a place and a task to every atom in his universe.

  “For him,” Elway said of Manning, “the picture of playing quarterback is so much bigger. He looks at so many different things. Everybody’s different, but as I look at Peyton now, I realize the transition to a new team had to be huge for him.

  “I’m not saying it’s wrong. Everybody’s different. But he likes to know every detail. He doesn’t like the building falling down around him. He wants to know every brick in the building. That’s his personality. He wants to know everything that’s going on. And, if he doesn’t know it, he doesn’t feel as comfortable and he’s not as confident.”

  For Manning, the football unknown is the equivalent of the monster under a kindergartner’s bed. It makes it hard for Manning to sleep at night. A member of the Broncos staff joked with me that Manning will not truly feel at home in Sports Authority Field at Mile High until he memorizes not only the full legal names of all 75,000 fans in the stadium, but also the make, model, and license-plate number of every car, truck, and minivan they all drive to the game.

  Well, here is another theory: It is not fear of the cold that messed with Manning’s ability to play quarterback against the Ravens. After spending the vast majority of his pro career playing home games in a dome, it was the lack of firsthand exposure to freezing weather that prevented Manning from calculating every variable to fine-tune his physical and psychological adjustments to adverse conditions. To the bitter end and in the bitter cold, Manning will always be a mad football scientist on a never-ending quest for data points that can give him an edge.

  Sure, the loss to Baltimore churned in Manning’s gut. But, within hours of the upsetting defeat, his road to recovery began with trying to make sense of it all, learn from it all, and grow from it all. Losing stunk. It also made the NFL’s most unabashed brainiac quarterback even smarter.

  “That was another good hurdle for me. Weather-wise, we had not had anything like it all season. There was some unknown going into that game, and you can’t simulate it. I tried everything from putting my hand in a freezing tank, but you just can’t simulate it,” Manning confided to Denver Post reporter Mike Klis.

  Obsessed with details even while stuck in the funk caused by defeat, Manning had already taken a peek at the 2013 NFL calendar, a season that would end, after the calendar flips to 2014, with a Super Bowl contested in the dead of winter in a stadium across the Hudson River from New York City.

  Does Manning think too much to be clutch in the playoffs? Well, maybe, but it might be easier to halt the world from turning than to stop the mind of Manning from processing info.

  On a day when Broncos Nation was grieving a squandered championship opportunity, the team’s quarterback was already plotting and scheming how to win the next Super Bowl.

  Eli Manning won a ring with the New York Giants to conclude the 2011 NFL season, when the final game was played in Indianapolis, on his big brother’s home turf.

  Have you checked the calendar? On February 2, 2014, the Super Bowl is scheduled for MetLife Stadium, the home field of the Giants and Peyton Manning’s little brother.

  Think maybe the football gods have already connected those karmic dots?

  This loss has such a stench of fix and pay-off and Black Sox, I can’t keep any food down. I call for an audit of both Champ Bailey’s and Rahim Moore’s bank accounts. This is a league fix to have all these inexplicable plays happen, along with the most bush-league refs I have seen since “‘The Replacements.’” The Broncos were told to lay down and not make it look too obvious. (e-mailed at 11:22 AM on January 13, 2013, by Bill Voor, NFL fan in Indiana)

  Is it unreasonable to scream the fix was in after a Broncos loss? Totally.

  Is it unusual to find a dark cloud hanging over one of the sunniest states in America when the Broncos get beat? Not at all.

  Around here, NFL football does have the spooky ability to transform otherwise gainfully employed and mild-mannered people into stark-raving mad snarks. There must be a cable-network executive who can fi
gure out how to profit from this stranger-than-fiction craziness. “Snark Week.” Coming soon to Discovery Channel. Check your local listings.

  In Broncos Country, there were crying baby boys, girls, and puppies named Peyton. In Broncos Country, the tears of this playoff loss to Baltimore were recorded for posterity by video camera–toting family members. In Broncos Country, defeats are bad for productivity and profits, from depressed workers calling in sick with the orange-and-blue flu to empty bar stools at watering holes in the LoDo entertainment district of downtown Denver.

  “Growing up, I always wondered what it be like to be a Boston Red Sox fan and see your city endure a Bill Buckner moment. Or to be a Chicago Cubs fan and live through that Steve Bartman moment. For Denver, this was that moment. The Rahim Moore moment. It is a scar. It is a sports scar on the city,” said Peter Burns, host of The Press Box, a sports talk show simulcast weekday mornings on 93.7 FM and 1510 AM.

  On the afternoon after Flacco launched a desperation pass and the sky fell on the Broncos, the top-rated television station in Denver focused a camera on the team’s empty stadium as the sun hid behind the Rocky Mountains in shame.

  “It looks sad and empty, doesn’t it?” said 9News anchor Mark Koebrich, looking at images of the deserted football venue.

  “Oh, it does. I hate to see that,” replied evening news cohost Cheryl Preheim, with the same empathy a mother uses to soothe an injured child.

  Then, in a tone as somber as Edward R. Murrow reporting from the front, Koebrich declared: “A sad day for Colorado.”

  It could have qualified as parody, except in Denver, where football mourning is deemed absolutely necessary.

  The team conducted its own postmortem, where Elway and Broncos coach John Fox were interrogated in the same theater at the team’s training facility where the signing of Manning had been announced months earlier. The real peek behind the curtain of the Broncos’ anguish, however, was offered after the formal press conference ended.

  Out in the hallway, it was apparent Fox did not want to leave the building, as if he feared the sound of the door closing behind him would rattle his soul. His next assignment was to hop on a jet to Hawaii, coach the AFC all-stars at the Pro Bowl, and hang out for a week by the pool. “You think I’m looking forward to that? Hell no,” Fox confessed. “Hawaii is the last place I want to go right now.”

  The coach’s pain was real and to the bone. Before turning on his heels and getting on with life, Fox gently put a hand on my elbow and said: “I’m sorry. Tell everybody I’m sorry.”

  In Broncos Country, as miserable hours stretch into interminable days after an upsetting loss, there is No Plan B.

  Love hurts.

  Broncos Country needed something to mend broken hearts.

  You can post this where ever . . . Denver broncos will win the Super Bowl 2013 #4UJEREMIAH #IGUARANTEEIT58 if you are with us Retweet (Tweeted at 8:17AM on March 5, 2013, by Broncos linebacker Von Miller)

  The moping ended with a tweet.

  Von Miller, the top defender on the Broncos, guaranteed a Super Bowl victory.

  He could have taken out a full-page newspaper ad. But that would have been so 1998. Instead, Miller shared his bold prediction with 784,711 followers on Twitter and mobilized his army of admirers to spread the word.

  “I fully believe in the Broncos winning the Super Bowl and am fully committed to it,” Miller said from New York City, during a telephone interview in early March. “If you go in the Denver Broncos locker room, I’m sure there are other players who have made the same guarantee to themselves.”

  It was a six-year-old car wreck victim that inspired Miller’s quest.

  When Denver won its first NFL championship by beating Green Bay in January of 1998, Broncos owner Pat Bowlen dedicated the victory to quarterback John Elway.

  Miller vowed the next one will be won in the name of Jeremiah, whose emergence from a coma filled the linebacker with joy he felt compelled to share.

  In late February of 2013, Jeremiah Clark-Martinez and two members of his family were hurt in a car accident near their West Texas home. Jeremiah’s brother suffered a fracture in his back, while his mother broke her collarbone.

  The accident shook Miller to the core. “That was the whole feeling behind this guarantee. It wasn’t because I felt all cocky,” Miller explained. “This is bigger than me. This is all about my little cousin coming back from a serious accident.”

  His spirits lifted by a child who dodged death, Miller stole a page from legendary New York Jets quarterback Joe Willie Namath, the original Super Bowl prognosticator in the house. So what if the early betting line established by Las Vegas oddsmakers had established the New England Patriots as the 5-to-1 favorite to win Super Bowl XLVII?

  When Jeremiah opened his eyes from a coma, it allowed Miller to see the future so clearly it felt like destiny.

  Long before the Broncos were scheduled to open training camp, much less win a game in the 2013 regular season, Miller put pressure on himself and his teammates with a singular goal: Super Bowl or bust.

  “Being a pass rusher in the NFL is all about pressure. I’m no stranger to pressure. I embrace it,” said Miller, plucked by the Broncos out of Texas A&M with the number two overall pick in the 2011 NFL draft. He has met, or exceeded, all expectations, recording 30 sacks and twice being named to the Pro Bowl.

  His love for Jeremiah is too big to shrink from high expectations.

  As Miller told the story, his six-year-old cousin lapsed into a coma that was medically monitored. Young Jeremiah was transferred from the site of the accident in the Midland-Odessa area to a hospital in Lubbock, then to another healthcare facility in metropolitan Dallas.

  When Jeremiah finally awoke during the first weekend in March, medical personnel asked the young boy questions to test his brain functions.

  Do you have a cousin who plays football?

  “Yes,” Jeremiah said.

  Do you know his name?

  “Von,” Jeremiah said. “Von Miller. He’s a linebacker for the Broncos.”

  Miller was touched. And fired up. The Denver linebacker who wears number 58 hopped on his Twitter account and declared his mission to nearly 800,000 followers.

  Yes, the incredible comeback story of Manning jumped the snark. It was a sad turn of events.

  Miller was the first member of the Broncos to fight back against that sad fate. The story of this team was not done, Miller insisted. It had only just begun.

  Of course, Miller understood as well as anybody: Words do not count in the NFL. Touchdowns do. But pressed to reconsider, Miller refused to back down one inch from his pledge. “You’re not going to have success in football or any other endeavor in life if you don’t embrace pressure,” Miller said.

  On the night when all of Denver struggled to deal with the double-overtime loss to Baltimore, long after his teammates had departed the stadium, Miller slumped in a chair in front of his locker stall, still wearing his white uniform pants long after all his teammates had left the building. “Devastating,” Miller repeated, as reporter after reporter sought his opinion of the loss.

  Healing requires time. But inspired by a six-year-old cousin who relentlessly battled back from a serious injury, Miller sent a message to Denver:

  The crying game was over.

  Chapter 17

  Doom ’n’ Boom

  This is how a dream frames NFL stardom: The handsome young millionaire emerges from a Bentley with a brunette supermodel on his arm, then slips effortlessly past the velvet rope for bottle service at a club where the rhymes of Jay-Z thump deep into a sweet summer night.

  The life seems almost too good to be true.

  But know the trouble with dreams? Dreams are short. Reality bites. It bites long. It bites hard. It leaves a mark.

  Ask Elvis Dumervil. During six seasons working for the Broncos, he sacked the quarterback more than 60 times. Despite coming up short in his quest to reach six feet tall, Dumervil earned Pro Bowl accolade
s in 2009, 2011, and 2012. His lucrative contract, richly deserved, paid Dumervil $61.5 million over the course of its six-year term.

  Being Doom was better than a dream.

  Then, he got kicked to the curb by the Broncos.

  Dumervil loved the NFL team that made him a star. His identity was tied to the Broncos, with the same deep-rooted pride that Peyton Manning believed he would be the Colts quarterback for life.

  The question is: Would you take a 35 percent pay cut to keep a job you loved?

  It is an unfair question. But it is the question the Broncos asked of Dumervil.

  Whether you drive a bus or rush the quarterback for a living, the question can challenge the core value of any man. In America, many of us keep score through our paycheck stubs.

  In the NFL, the toughest part of taking a pay cut is never the reduction in dollars. The real pain for any athlete is in choking down his pride.

  Dumervil did good work for the Broncos. Then, he was told by the boss that his labor was no longer good enough to merit his $12 million annual salary.

  “It’s not all about the dollars. But when it’s way out of whack? Then it’s so out of whack you’ve got to say: That [salary] can’t be it, especially when you look at the market and what’s out there now,” said Broncos executive John Elway. He had a dilemma with a salary for Dumervil that the team had carefully analyzed and deemed extravagant.

  “It’s so far out of whack,” Elway concluded. “Hopefully, he realizes that.”

  As a quarterback, Elway wrote his legend on save-the-day comebacks, as the scoreboard clock ticked toward disaster that could be averted only if he delivered a big play. Elway feasts on adrenaline. His heart beats slowly when chaos swirls around him. But even a football hero can have a soft underbelly. When Elway needs to make a tough call, his tummy growls.