Editor’s note: This begins a two-part series featuring Broncos general manager John Elway. Here we share his reflections on his first five years running the team.
Read Part 2: Elway discusses the 2016 team and his expectations.
John Elway is running out of room. His office suite on the top floor of Broncos headquarters at Dove Valley is brimming with memories of his playing years and executive years and the few years that fell between them.
Broncos and Stanford helmets are strewn throughout, adorning a conference table and a coffee table and the large cherry bookshelf that extends from his desk and consumes the entire back wall. There is Frank Tripucka’s brown 18 helmet from the Broncos of the early 1960s. There is Elway’s blue helmet with the orange D and huffing Bronco. And there is the shiniest of the bunch, a gold Super Bowl 50 helmet he received only six months ago.
Framed Sports Illustrated covers and snapshots from his Super Bowl victories as a quarterback hang above, along with photos of him and longtime Broncos owneallr Pat Bowlen. Stacked on the shelves below are binders of 2010 end-of-season player evaluations, 2011 coaching-search notes and 2016 draft evaluations, carefully grouped between and behind family photos. The most recent notebooks, of course, rest on his desk, ready for review — again.
In Elway’s 21-year tenure as a Hall of Fame quarterback turned executive, the Broncos have undergone multiple identity shifts, most of which decorate his museum of an office. He is the only Super Bowl-winning quarterback and Super Bowl-winning executive of the same franchise, and his success on the field has, in part, helped him achieve success off the field.
This summer, after crossing the five-year mark in office, Elway begins another Broncos transition and another quest for a repeat. But he still makes it a habit to look back.
“I try to learn in every situation,” he says. “Once I quit learning, I feel like it’s time to move on. But I like the challenge of continuing to try to be good.”
The Challenge
Feb. 7, 2016, Elway stood at midfield at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., to repay the respect his owner and influencer offered him 18 years earlier. “This one’s for Pat!” he shouted while hoisting the Vince Lombardi Trophy, after the Broncos won Super Bowl 50.
Championship No. 3 was sweet, no doubt. But this one — the one that eluded him two years prior — had a different feel.
“You know,” Elway says, leaning back in his leather chair to review his seven Super Bowls and three victories, “it’s different as a GM. As a player it’s a huge accomplishment, because that’s what your goal is your whole career and you work so hard to be able to get there. When we beat Green Bay (in the Super Bowl that ended the 1997 season), there was not a better feeling than knowing I had finally reached the goal. You talk about a kind of freeing feeling. As a GM, it’s very satisfying. It’s very satisfying knowing that we got the right people in the right spots with the right mind-set to be able to manage that and let them do their jobs.”
To Elway, the game always has been a puzzle that is constantly being redesigned and reassembled. The pieces change. The final picture changes. And he must change with it.
“I always used to say, when I was playing I could control most everything inside the lines, and really nothing outside the lines,” he says. “I could say things, but I really had no control. I just worked with who they put next to me. Now I really don’t have any control inside the lines, but I got a lot of control outside.”
The biggest decisions, he says, rarely have clear answers. The toughest ones never get easier.
How do you transform a losing team into a Super Bowl contender? How do you design a championship team and maintain it for years to come? How do you develop Pro Bowl players, then bid them farewell?
“When I came in here, we were coming off a 4-12 year, so there was a lot of stuff we had to do,” Elway says. “It’s hard to stay on top. It’s easier to get there than it is to stay there. It’s difficult, and you have to make a lot of tough decisions on guys on who’s staying, who’s going, also looking in the future and trying to blend all those things. The hardest decisions are on who can we pay, who can’t we pay, who can we keep, who can’t we keep.”
This offseason, the lost ones included defensive end Malik Jackson and inside linebacker Danny Trevathan — starters who played key roles on the NFL-leading defense Elway started to build in 2011 and all but overhauled in 2014. In the span of 24 hours that March, he signed DeMarcus Ware off the street and Aqib Talib and T.J. Ward in unrestricted free agency. It was a response to Denver’s Super Bowl XLVIII loss to Seattle a month earlier, but it was the defining moment of his management.
The irony of a Hall of Fame quarterback building one of the most feared defenses in NFL history is not lost on Elway. But he knew what he saw and he believed in what could be, long before the pieces began to fit together under new coach Gary Kubiak last summer.
“Yeah, it was kind of funny,” Elway says. “I think it was the third or fourth day of training camp last year and I just walked by Kube and said, ‘Kube, I think we’re going to be pretty darn good on defense.’ “People talk about us trying to buy a defense and this and that, but all those guys we brought in fit in great. The overall philosophy I’m proud of — play great defense and continue to try to get better on the offensive side.”
The defensive shift certainly wasn’t the only transition, and it won’t be the last in Elway’s reign.
In 2012, after a whirlwind courtship of Peyton Manning, the Tim Tebow-led Broncos were placed in the hands of the future Hall of Famer, who arrived eager to prove he wasn’t damaged goods after having four neck surgeries.
“Because Tebow had such a fan base behind him — there was probably only one guy that we could have replaced him with that people would understand,” Elway says. “And that was Peyton Manning.”
In 2015, it was the arrival of Kubiak, Elway’s former roommate, backup quarterback and offensive coordinator who helped Elway and the Broncos win back-to-back Super Bowls in the late 1990s and whose previous head coaching stint ended with a health scare and a 2-11 record.
“There’s no question when we decided to part ways with John (Fox) that Gary was the first guy I thought of,” Elway says. “My dad always said it’s 80 percent players and 20 percent coaching. I have a tendency to believe it’s a little bit more than that, because you can’t do one without the other. I don’t think you can win a championship without great players and I don’t think you can win a championship without great coaching too.”
And in 2016, it’s the quarterback exodus and open competition that awaits a clear victor. New year, new puzzle.
The Evaluation
The sliding glass door that leads to the balcony in Elway’s office is almost always open, ushering in a gentle breeze and the occasional roar from the fans watching the Broncos practice on the fields below. The action steals Elway’s attention every few minutes as he turns to catch one of his quarterbacks in midprogression or Von Miller bending under and around a helpless offensive lineman.
“It’s like Groundhog Day,” Elway says. “Every day’s the same.”
His sly, toothy grin belies his words.
Elway’s routine and his ways have become predictable to those around him. The weekend before training camp opened, Elway arrived at Broncos headquarters when it was still a ghost town to watch tape. In the days leading up to the draft, he arrived at 7 a.m. to put in five hours of evaluation before taking a lunch break and putting in seven more. Sundays in the offseason often include him, in his chair, watching film, while a NASCAR race or golf tournament air from the big-screen television mounted on the wall. With camp underway, his mornings typically begin in the weight room, where he challenges some of his most trusted staffers to competitions over body-fat percentages.
A game is always on. But rarely is it the same, and for Elway, that’s part of the allure.
Elway watches more film as a general manager than he did as a player, in part because it’s year-round but mostly because he likes it. The players are constantly evaluated. The overlooked selections are revisited. The risks are constantly weighed. And the process is continually questioned and tweaked.
“As a player you watch tape to get better,” he says. “That’s why I think a lot of times I like to take the time to go back and look at different guys and say, ‘What did we see, what didn’t we see, what did we miss on this guy, or why did we hit this guy and no one else liked him?’ That to me is the challenging part, and that to me is how you continue to get better.”
In five years, Elway has built a legacy in office much the way he did on the field. His knowledge and experience is complemented by an unquenchable thirst to beat everyone in everything.
And then find a way to do it all over again.
In Elway they trust
Some of John Elway’s accomplishments as general manager of the Broncos:
— First general manager to win Super Bowl (2015 season) after leading same franchise to a Super Bowl victory as a quarterback (1997, 1998).
— Named executive of the year by several publications in 2015.
— Architect of the highest-scoring team in NFL history (606 points) in 2013 and the league’s No. 1 defense (283.1 yards allowed per game) in 2015.
— Only GM in past five years to acquire future Pro Bowlers through the draft, street free agency, unrestricted free agency and college free agency.
— Since 2011, Denver has tied the Patriots for most division titles (five), playoff berths (five), Super Bowl appearances (two) and Super Bowl titles (one).
— Past five years, the Broncos (64-26, .711) and Patriots (69-23, .750) are the only teams to win at least 70 percent of their games.
— Only one of the 35 unrestricted free agents lost during Elway’s time in the front office has made the Pro Bowl within the next three seasons — safety Mike Adams, and he was replaced with Pro Bowl safety T.J. Ward.
— Elway and coach Gary Kubiak have had only one losing season together (5-11 in 1990), when they were Denver quarterbacks.
— Elway, Kubiak or both have been with the Broncos for 28 of the past 33 seasons. Denver failed to make the playoffs in each of the five seasons without them.
