by Mark Kiszla
Chapter 21
The Hungry Heart
Gone, gone, gone. The Super Bowl dream was gone in 12 seconds. The Broncos’ determined, yearlong quest to finish the job was gone in 12 lousy seconds. Has the NFL championship ever been lost in one play?
Seattle beat the Broncos 43–8. Yes, it was ugly. For old Broncomaniacs, it caused flashbacks to Super Bowl indignities suffered early in John Elway’s playing career. You want analysis of what went wrong against the Seahawks? Can you handle the truth?
From their first snap of Super Bowl XLVIII, the Broncos appeared lost, undermanned, and poorly prepared. The first NFL team in league history to score more than 600 points in a season messed up the opening play in the biggest game of the season, and Denver never recovered.
With a raucous Super Bowl crowd of 82,529 fans shaking MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Peyton Manning and the Broncos got rattled by the din. With first down at their own 14-yard line, Manning stood in the shotgun, barked signals for the first play from scrimmage, surveyed the Seattle defense, and did what the best quarterback in the league had done all season. He gesticulated, he orchestrated, and he instructed Denver teammates as the play clock ticked down before the snap.
There was one problem: “Nobody could hear me,” Manning said.
As the quarterback walked toward center Manny Ramirez to fix the communication breakdown, the trusted center snapped the ball, launching it far over Manning’s head.
How did that happen?
“There’s no explanation,” said Ramirez, taking full responsibility. He added that Manning had expected the snap three seconds before it was hiked. Without realizing his quarterback was out of position to catch the football, the 6-foot-3, 320-pound center who had contributed so well all season long to a patchwork Denver offensive line made one regrettable blunder. Ramirez did not even know exactly what went wrong until he trotted to the sideline, and the mistake was explained to him.
“It was a cadence issue. We were using the snap count on the play and, due to the noise, no one could hear me. So, really, I was walking up to the line of scrimmage to make a change and get us on the same page, and the ball was snapped,” Manning said. “Nobody’s fault. Not [Ramirez’s] fault. Just a noise issue that caused the play to happen.”
In a scene as slow and agonizing as your worst sports nightmare, the football bounced into the end zone. Running back Knowshon Moreno turned in hot pursuit, chased down the errant snap, and fell on it in the back of the end zone, conceding a safety to Seattle. The score was 2–0 in favor of the Seahawks before Denver could exhale.
Blame Manning for his failure to be an agent of calm amid the chaos of the opening snap. Blame coach John Fox for underestimating the stadium noise. Blame the Broncos for wilting under the pressure.
“That’s the way the start of any Super Bowl is going to be. It’s going to be loud,” said Denver receiver Wes Welker, who learned the mania that accompanies the craziest sporting event on the American calendar while playing for New England. “Fans are going to be yelling. I don’t think they even 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.”
In fairness, the biggest problem in the game for Denver proved to be far bigger than one botched snap. The Seahawks won with the No. 1 rule of the playground: They were the stronger, faster, and meaner kids. On offense. On defense. On special teams. Seattle dominated every phase of the championship game. Denver never stood a chance. It was depressing.
“We were on a national stage, in the biggest game in America. And to come out and play like that?” said Denver receiver Eric Decker, as shell-shocked and disappointed as any man, woman, or child who bleeds orange in Broncos Country.
But do not suggest to Manning the blowout loss was embarrassing. At the podium during the postgame press conference, with the weight of defeat heavy on his shoulders, Manning was peppered with questions about the meltdown of his team, which finished with a 15-4 record.
“A lot of people will put the blame on Peyton Manning. . . . But this is a team loss. It’s not Peyton Manning’s loss. It shouldn’t be a knock on his legacy,” Broncos defensive tackle Terrance Knighton insisted. But did anybody listen to Knighton’s impeccable logic? In the media world where opinions are formed as fast as any TV personality, newspaper curmudgeon, or New Age blogger can hit the send button on a cell phone, loud, instant outrage is far more common than studied, in-depth analysis.
The Super Bowl was a rout by halftime, when the Seahawks took a 22–0 lead to the locker room. The Broncos’ quick-strike offense did not register a point on the scoreboard until the final play of the third quarter, when Manning tossed a 14-yard touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas. Against Seattle, the league’s most valuable player suffered through his worst performance of an otherwise remarkable year, completing 34 of 49 attempts for 280 yards, and for the only time in 19 starts during the 2013 season threw more interceptions (two) than touchdowns (one) in a game.
Although teammates came to the defense of Manning, it was the quarterback who got smacked with the toughest question: Was this defeat an embarrassment to a proud team?
“It’s not embarrassing at all. I would never use that word,” replied Manning, keeping his cool and choosing his words carefully as he shot a stern look at the reporter.
“There’s a lot of professional football players in that room, that locker room, that put in a lot of hard work and effort into being here and into playing in that game. The word embarrassing is an insulting word, to tell you the truth.”
On the way out of the Super Bowl press conference, however, Manning quietly shook the hand of more than one Denver journalist and earnestly said: “I’m sorry.” How often does a superstar apologize for a loss? It was an amazing display of how seriously Manning takes his responsibility to the Broncos and Denver fans.
At Tokya, a midtown Manhattan sushi lounge and nightclub where a Denver victory party had been organized, the corks on the bottles of Ace of Spades Champagne were never popped.
Taking his cue from the Broncos, Old Man Winter showed up late for the Super Bowl, then dumped eight inches of snow that began falling shortly after the loss. It made for a mess that added insult to already miserable Denver fans, as more than 1,000 flights from major airports throughout the New York area were delayed or canceled on Monday.
In the aftermath of the 35-point thumping, Denver coach John Fox reviewed the loss and made a vow. What would Fox do differently in game preparation if the Broncos got back to the Super Bowl? “Probably everything,” Fox told Mike Klis of the Denver Post.
All the team’s best-laid plans went wrong. And Fox caught grief for it all, from every direction. On the eve of the championship game, Fox moved players away from family distractions in the Jersey City hotel where they had stayed all week to lodging near the Newark Airport. Fox chuckled through the pain of defeat: “Even my kids were getting on me: ‘Getaway hotel? Dad, that’s 80 percent bad.’”
While a Super Bowl victory would have started a happy discussion about Manning being the greatest quarterback of all time, the loss gave critics new ammunition to fire at a 37-year-old player who finished the 2013 regular season with a QB rating of 115.1, a grade so sterling it was never matched by the legendary Joe Montana during his 14 full seasons as a starter for San Francisco and Kansas City. “For years Manning has dragged around the criticism, like tin cans tied to the back of a high-end car, that he produces more great statistics than great victories, and the noise just got louder,” respected sports columnist Sally Jenkins wrote in the Washington Post.
After losing his second Super Bowl in three appearances as a player, Manning said: “It’s not an easy pill to swallow, but we have to. I don’t know if you ever really get over it. You have to find a way to deal with it and process it.”
Amid the dark clouds of depression after the lopsided defeat, however, the love and appreciation for Manning came shining through like the sun aft
er a Colorado winter storm. NFL fans across the country view Manning fondly, as the quarterback next door. America loves Peyton like a brother.
Sick and tired of hearing football analysts poke sticks in the rubble of this Super Bowl loss to determine how it might affect Manning’s legacy, a college professor in South Carolina wrote a thank-you note to the Broncos quarterback on her blog. Laurie Lattimore-Volkmann is a Colorado native and mother who once named her dog in honor of Broncos linebacker John Mobley. She is now a professor at the College of Charleston. The heartfelt words she sent Manning went viral with football fans from coast to coast.
“I actually understand—on the most basic level—what legacy truly means. Legacy is something handed down that matters. It is something that matters to young players and athletes and kids looking for mentors to help them find their way. You don’t hand down Super Bowl trophies. You don’t hand down NFL MVP titles or franchise records. And you don’t hand down touchdowns, statistics or win-loss records,” Lattimore-Volkmann wrote on a blog post that became an overnight Internet sensation.
“You hand down an example of work ethic, or courage to come back after a career-threatening injury, of humility in victory and graciousness in defeat, and of perspective in one’s own accomplishments. That legacy matters, and that’s why yours is untarnished even—and especially—after last Sunday’s Super Bowl XLVIII loss.”
In defeat, Manning received a beautiful sympathy card.
In defeat, 12-time Pro Bowler Champ Bailey got cut.
In case anybody has forgotten: NFL = Not For Long.
At the conclusion of a season-recap press conference, Elway fixed the reporters gathered at the team’s Dove Valley headquarters with eyes that stung from defeat but burned with passion.
“I want to say one thing. I kind of get the sense that these questions are ‘How the hell are we going to overcome this?’ Right? . . . But I will tell you this: Right now the focus is on what happened, instead of how we got there, and what we did this year and what we went through as a team. And the farther you get away from this, the less you concentrate on just that one game, and the more you look at the full season and really what we did as a football team and as an organization. And I tell you what: I’m very proud of that,” said Elway, the Broncos vice president of football operations.
“There are some changes we’ve got to make and we’ll make those. But the thing is, we can use that game as a game that, OK, we now know what it’s like to be there. Now we’re going to use that as the experience of we’ve been there, but we’ve got to start with step 1 again.”
Get back to the championship? The Broncos’ mission is not impossible, but the team would be advised to avoid reading NFL history. Among 47 previous losers of the Super Bowl, the teams that failed to make the playoffs the following season outnumber the teams that returned to the championship game by a 2:1 margin.
Even more daunting: It has been more than four decades since the last Super Bowl loser recovered and won the Super Bowl within 12 months. The Miami Dolphins last pulled off the feat in 1972. “One of the reasons it’s so hard is what makes our league so great. You have teams going from the outhouse to the penthouse and the penthouse to the outhouse every year,” Fox said. “In football, you don’t have a team that’s a dynasty because it spends 30 times more than everybody else.”
After getting their clock cleaned by Seattle, the Broncos cleaned house. The Super Bowl loss left a lot of emotional scar tissue in the Denver locker room. Elway purged it. Before the Broncos could begin at step 1 on the long climb back to the championship game, the team needed to reshape its locker room and put new boots on the ground.
Moreno, who led the Broncos with 1,038 yards rushing, was allowed to walk out of town and sign as a free agent with the Miami Dolphins. Linebacker Wesley Woodyard, a captain made a scapegoat for the team’s defensive struggles, departed for the Tennessee Titans, where he was joined by defensive end Shaun Phillips, deemed expendable despite the 10 sacks he recorded during his lone season in Denver.
Although Zane Beadles had made the Pro Bowl as a guard for the Broncos, he found a $30 million contract with Jacksonville too rich to ignore. Popular wide receiver Eric Decker? Gone to the Jets, where he and country music singer Jessie James could give their reality TV marriage a sexy new locale and provide the New York City tabloids sensatinal new headline material. When Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie hesitated for a hiccup at the team’s contract offer, Elway instead showed the steady cornerback the door.
The point amid the flurry of activity was clear. The Broncos do not let players they deem essential to success get away. To move forward, Denver had to move on without popular players who had done the uniform proud.
The change in personnel that cut deepest was the release of Bailey. The Broncos gave up on the 35-year-old cornerback, believing his best football was behind him. “It sucks, but at the same time, I have to move on,” Bailey told Lindsay H. Jones of USA Today. “I have to move on. I can’t dwell on it. I know they’re not dwelling on it.”
On a sunny morning in March 2014, Fox sat in his office, reflecting on all the good players and good people that the Broncos were forced to tell goodbye. On his head, the 59-year-old coach wore a ball cap stitched with the words: “It is what it is.” In his heart, Fox knew Bailey was correct on one point: The harsh financial realities of the NFL really do suck.
“If you lose your last game, it’s always devastating. . . . The loss of the Super Bowl sticks with you, but when you make decisions in personnel, you do it only to improve your football team,” Fox said. “It’s the business side of football. For most of us, it’s not the most enjoyable part. But it’s a necessary evil, and you make hard decisions.”
It did not take long for Elway to decide: Denver will not win a championship with a defense that allowed 24.9 points per game, as it did in 2013. “When you need a push, you hear somebody say ‘35,’” said defensive end Malik Jackson, whose teammates embraced the ugly point differential in the Super Bowl as an inspirational tool. In free agency, the Broncos spent aggressively, allocating more than $32 million for the 2014 season on highly decorated Dallas Cowboys defensive end DeMarcus Ware; cornerback Aqib Talib, stolen from the roster of AFC rival New England; and young, hard-hitting Cleveland Browns safety T.J. Ward.
“We want to hoist the Lombardi Trophy. That’s our ultimate goal. That’s our goal this year,” said Fox, given a strong vote of confidence by Elway in the wake of the Super Bowl rout when the Broncos empowered their coach with a new, three-year contract worth a reported $16.5 million.
At 6:30 on an April morning, Manning strolled through the Pepsi Center, dressed in a suit and orange tie, as caterers filled plates for the 38th annual sports breakfast benefiting the Boy Scouts of Denver. Speaking publicly for the first time since the night of the Super Bowl loss, Manning looked out at the faces of businessmen and scouts huddled around tables on the arena floor and earnestly said: “Before anyone can become a game-changer, they first have to thrive on discomfort.”
The magic of 2013, when Manning joined Brett Favre and Dan Marino as the only players in NFL history to throw for 60,000 career yards, cannot be re-created. The challenge for the Broncos will be to establish a new identity and never waver in their commitment to winning the franchise’s first Super Bowl since the 1998 NFL season.
“Just because you were there last year in the game, it doesn’t guarantee you anything,” Manning said. “It does take a lot of hard work and sacrifice. I think forming that chemistry takes time.”
Manning is guaranteed a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He has won a championship ring with the Indianapolis Colts and been awarded too many trophies to count. He could retire from football today and go be governor of Tennessee or sit on the beach. After hanging up his cleats, he could tackle a brave new world or relax and count his money. So I asked Manning: Are you hungrier than ever to win the Super Bowl?
“Yeah, absolutely I am. That’s what I want to do. That’s w
hat the Denver Broncos want to do,” said Manning, looking me square in the eye. “I’m glad to be a part of a team where that’s what they want to do. I want to try to do my best to do my part.”
Although Ware, whose NFL resume includes 117 career sacks and seven selections to the Pro Bowl, was signed to lead the defense, and Fox takes most of the heat when the team loses, everyone knows that there is one man who makes Denver a championship contender. This is Elway’s town. But the Broncos are Manning’s team.
“I feel that I have a responsibility to the team to be on top of my game. And that’s what I think about every day when I go over there to work and lift weights and throw with my receivers: Doing my job to help the Denver Broncos. That’s what I’ve tried to do since I’ve been here [in Denver], and that’s what I’ll keep doing until . . .”
Manning paused for a heartbeat, searching for the precisely the right words to complete the thought, stopping just long enough so a listener could hear the NFL’s most beautiful mind at work.
According to rankings compiled by ESPN, Manning is the 16th best-paid athlete in the world, at a salary of $25 million. What makes Manning so much like any one of us who has ever stared at the ceiling at night, wrestling with doubt and regret, is that he has known the pain of getting fired. He will keep playing football until somebody takes away his playbook and tells him to go sit on the porch.
In his moment of hesitation, a heartfelt emotion flashed in Manning’s eyes. His right arm is not the magnificent carving tool that it once was. Every year, doctors will examine his neck and offer advice on the risks football presents a father of twins. There’s nothing sweeter than NFL Sunday for a 38-year-old quarterback, but the other six days ache a little louder with every passing week.
What Denver has given Manning might not be as shiny as a Super Bowl ring, but it is far more valuable. The Broncos kept what Manning loves alive. In one essential way, a five-time league MVP is no different than a kid catching a pass in the backyard with the sun sinking behind the Rocky Mountains in the fading light of an October afternoon. Manning will keep playing football until somebody calls him home for dinner.