Broncos Country, let’s slide. Steve Huffman hopped on the rebuild train 4,676 miles ago. You seriously think he’s giving up his seat now?

“The reality hit me when I’m on the Tube in London two years ago,” Huffman, president-elect of the Broncos Quarterback Club, told me recently. “And I’m talking to people and they’re all excited, there are all these different jerseys from NFL teams. And we’re thinking, ‘We’re the Broncos, we won three different Super Bowls, most recently in 2016.’

“So I was talking to an 11-year-old. He was just excited because he had on a Russell Wilson jersey. And he goes, ‘You guys won a Super Bowl?’”

A Mile High heart sank straight into the Thames.

“It’s almost like, you look at yourself and you like to remember yourself fondly, when you’re 20 and ripped,” Huffman laughed. “You’re like, ‘In my mind, I’m still 155 pounds of muscle.’”

The Broncos are rocking a dad bod now, and divorcing Big Russ just put them on a $53 million dead-cap diet. You know what? After eight straight years of punching a ticket to nowhere, Huffman is fine with riding backward for a season or two if it gets this train moving again.

“The whole concept of rebuilding as, ‘Oooh, that’s a bad thing,’” he continued. “Well, what’s even worse than rebuilding is seven losing seasons in a row.”

Exactly. For years, I’ve heard the same song. John Elway would sooner crowd surf with the yokels in Oakland’s Black Hole than tank a season. Look at Baltimore! Great franchises reload, they don’t rebuild. Denverites would freak out if you willingly put a 4-13 product on the field.

Sorry. Don’t buy it. When I posited that last scenario to Kyle Allen as we sat on the hill at training camp recently, he gave a smart qualifier befitting a smart fan base.

It depends on what kind of 4-13.

“I can live through a rebuild, speaking just for myself,” said Allen, who showed his Broncos bona fides by wearing a 1960 mustard throwback jersey with Tom Nalen’s “66” on the back.

“As long as (the Broncos are) putting in an effort, if you’re a couple pieces short but you can see big picture coming to fruition? I can live with that, yes. Now if we were to go 4-13 with, like, Russell Wilson (at QB)? Well, then that would be really frustrating again.”

“You trust GM George Paton with a rebuild?” I asked.

A pause. Elephant, meet room.

“I don’t have the most confidence in him,” Allen replied. “Boy, that Russell Wilson deal was — that was rough. I mean, a lot of us were wondering how he was still around after that.

“But at the same time. I mean, people need chances, too. I know what he was trying to do there. And I’m sure there was a lot of pressure on him.

“Like you said, we (didn’t) want to deal with a rebuild. We want it now. But I think he learned something from it. And, yeah, now I think they’re a little more reserved. Maybe they’re not swinging for the fences as much. Just trying to make contact.”

Broncos faithful? They get it.

Look, nobody kicks off a season trying to stink up the joint. But you’ve also got to be able to read a room here. In Sean Payton, you’ve got a proven coach, a lifetime QB fixer, on a long-term deal with long-term trust from ownership. You’re breaking in a rookie quarterback in Bo Nix, and an older rookie, a first-round pick who needs to take his lumps as quickly as possible. As long as Patrick Mahomes and Justin Herbert are under 30 and on the fight card, you’ve got time.

“It’s been Band-Aid, Band-Aid, Band-Aid for seven years, right?” Dain Mangnall, a football coach himself, told me as we watched Nix drop another practice dime.

“At some point, you either rip it off or you cut off the leg. I mean, how many different head coaches have we had? At some point, the stopgap type of deal is maybe not working.”

For too long, a franchise that needed a new engine kept changing tires. That historic 11,000-foot drop from two Super Bowls to eight straight non-playoff seasons was the work of many hands. And most are still wiping the blood off those mitts with $500 bills.

“It was leadership by committee and there wasn’t leadership,” Huffman said of the Bowlen Trust. “It was all in Elway’s lap. Of course, I’ve talked to (ex-CEO) Joe Ellis several times, he’s a nice guy … but when you have three leaders, you have none. It was a crisis of leadership (with no one to say), ‘Hey, it’s my money.’ It was like, they’re trying to keep the patient alive until we get someone to buy this thing.”

Which would explain, at least in part, the decision to ship out three players and five draft picks (!) for a used, rundown DangeRuss in return. Hindsight burns the eyes like a hot poker.

“You know the adage about doing the same thing,” Huffman laughed, “and expecting different results?”

Sure do. It’s football insanity. NFL malpractice. Broncos purgatory.

“Rebuilding?” Huffman said. “I don’t know if this is semantics or marketing. (But) this should have happened a long time ago.”

There’s no shame in a two-year plan. Sure, the transition from Joe Flacco to Lamar Jackson looked seamless in Baltimore. The part we forget?

The Ravens had to go 5-11 in 2007 to draft old Joe in the first place.

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Originally Published: September 1, 2024 at 5:45 a.m.