ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — There are still major questions to be answered at Broncos headquarters in the coming weeks and months — particularly regarding quarterback and ownership. And Nathaniel Hackett’s staff, which is long on energy but short on high-level experience, will largely be learning on the job as it attempts to revive the Broncos from their five-season slumber.
Some of what happens will be beyond the control of Hackett and his staff, led by first-time NFL coordinators Justin Outten, Ejiro Evero and Dwayne Stukes, who will guide the offense, defense and special teams, respectively.
But what is within their control is the efficiency with which they will operate and the cohesion they can develop.
When Hackett introduced his first Broncos coaching staff Wednesday, he spoke of the characteristics he sought in his lieutenants. Character. Teaching ability. Humility — “because coaches will tell you they know everything — but we don’t,” as he said.
And then there’s efficiency.
“That’s something that’s very important to me,” Hackett said. “I just talked about that time. We spend a lot of time together — a whole lot of time. To be able to be efficient, be great at what you do and to be able to accomplish as much as you can in a short period of time is critical. I think all these guys that are here really possess that.”
Maximizing time. Keeping clutter — literal and metaphorical – to a minimum.
It starts with Hackett, who over the years has weaned himself off of as much use of paper as possible, preferring to organize everything on his laptop and tablet.
“First of all, he’s a master organizer,” Outten said. “I’ve never seen somebody more organized than him.
“He takes pride in it, and the efficiency that comes out of it is unbelievable. There’s no wasted work. There’s a purpose to everything that he does. I tried to replicate that after I saw that. It just made me better and the guys around us better by seeing the organizational factors that come into it and the production that comes out of it.”
Hackett sees something similar in Outten.
“His organization and his efficiency have been absolutely incredible for me,” Hackett said, “and I’m so excited to continue to work with him.”
It wasn’t always that way — at least not until Hackett and Outten began working together in Green Bay in 2019.
“It was a lot of paper-based things. I had binders that I just kept traveling with, and then realized real quick that anything you could PDF, you could put on your laptop or your iPad,” Outten said.
“… I thank [Hackett], and my wife thanks him, for teaching us the ways of notability and Excel and all those good things, and we got rid of all the binders.”
And while one doesn’t want to dive too deep into the contrast between certain aspects of the previous regime and the one arriving to succeed where it failed, it was impossible to ignore a clear difference between how Hackett and Outten operate on offense compared with the two-season stint of Pat Shurmur.
Shurmur didn’t put much stock in analytics and spreadsheets. As he said last October, “I still use a pencil.”
Outten, on the other hand, dove headlong into technology — especially when it came to better organizing his work life.
“Excel formats, stuff like that, just allow you to function a lot faster,” he said. “It allows you to be more uniform in game planning. You’re not having to go out of your way thinking, ‘What game was that when we ran it and what formation did we use?’”
The impact of efficiency and organization in the day-to-day work of Broncos coaches won’t have an obvious impact on the scoreboard. But it’s part of the collection of little things that Hackett hopes will add up to something big in his stewardship.
