Cuddly didn’t cut it for the Broncos.

For all the hugs and good intentions of one-and-done coach Nathaniel Hackett, the Broncos became known as clueless losers during a 5-12 campaign in 2022 that served as a rude welcome to the Walmart moguls who paid a hefty $4.65 billion to take over the Bowlen family business.

“These guys, they want to improve and want to be seen in a different way,” said new coach Sean Payton, after running a practice with a notable sense of urgency, the tempo and tone more serious than a mere ramp-up for training camp, which officially opens Friday.

The madness of the way the Broncos were doing business on the football field had to stop. A long-proud NFL franchise had become a league-wide laughingstock, with a too-easy acceptance of losing slowly ingrained in the culture of the locker room.

Enter the Great and Powerful Payton, an old-school curmudgeon from the Bill Parcells school. As we’ve quickly learned, the new boss does not suffer fools or overpaid field-goal kickers. There hasn’t been a coach with so much power at Broncos headquarters since the heyday of Mike Shanahan, which might not be a bad thing.

“It’s a tough league,” Payton said Wednesday. “Part of the procurement of players is finding those guys that it matters a lot to. That becomes a little contagious, and then we have something.”

Payton is more likely to kick keisters than offer hugs. While the new coach is quick with a quip and happy to spin a yarn when lauding soon-to-be Hall of Famer DeMarcus Ware, his cantankerous approach to football management has more in common with Bill Belichick than Hackett, whose personality is probably better suited to be a quarterback’s buddy than the hard-edged leader of an entire team.

What constitutes a winning culture isn’t such a mystery when you define one of its primary tenets as an obsession that unceremoniously kicks failure out the door. We’re fixing to find out if Russell Wilson can regain his lost mojo and thrive by doing things Payton’s way, because it seems clear that players who don’t probably won’t be around Denver for long.

“The message hits and I just want to win,” said safety Justin Simmons, who has never stepped on the field for a playoff game during his seven seasons in the NFL.

Broncos headquarters is a much more tense and demanding place to work than the building was a year ago, when the Walmart family took over. This isn’t the late Pat Bowlen’s happy little family business any longer. And that’s not criticism. Maybe it was inevitable that some of the warm fuzzies would be replaced with cool corporate efficiencies when the price of a sports franchise became equal to the gross national product of a small country.

While new Broncos CEO Greg Penner has an agreeable personality that makes for lively conversation over lunch, there’s also a sneaking suspicion that one big reason he hired Payton was approval for the no-guff, no-nonsense, players-are-meant-to-be-seen-and-not-heard approach by the new coach.

“I think it’s great he’s got strong convictions and views, and it comes from years of experience,” Penner said. “He’s got a lot of emotion and cares passionately about this team and what we’re building. His heart’s in the right place and his intentions are right. He started with, ‘We’re going to raise the bar.’ And I think that’s what we needed with this team and organization.”

Cuddly didn’t cut it for the Broncos. Payton has already proven he’s comfortable being prickly.

“With the season that we just had and we’re coming off of, it was an important reset for the team,” Penner said. “With a lot of new faces and with what happened last season, it was a good way for us to start and be totally focused on football.”

Losing has been too easy around here for too long.

In his relentless pursuit of winning, the new Broncos coach will inevitably rub people the wrong way and grate on nerves.

So long as two of those people Payton causes discomfort are Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes, nobody in Broncos Country will have any trouble with that.

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