Bill Musgrave is putting NFL stubbornness aside as he curates the Broncos' offense

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — “West right slot 72 ‘Z’ bingo ‘U’ split. Can it with 58 Lexus, apple 314 hammer. Dummy snap count on one.”

Ready? Break.

They play clock is running down, and you’ve just heard that call. It took a few seconds to get into the huddle, a few seconds for the quarterback to get the play and a few seconds for him to call it. There’s no time to think about what the play is or what your job is on that play, and you better have heard it right because the team is heading to the line. Mess one thing up and the whole play could go wrong.

Depending on who you play for, you could have upwards of 200 of those calls to have memorized heading into any given Sunday. Some may have been in there since OTAs, and some may have just gone in this week.

Oh, and by the way, you’re a rookie who played in a no-huddle offense throughout college in which you just looked at a posterboard on the sideline to get the play.

And you wonder why some young players struggle to get a hang of the NFL?

For the Broncos in 2017, this was a problem. For all of his genius, Mike McCoy got a little carried away with what his team could handle. For an offense trying to integrate many young players, from Trevor Siemian to Garett Bolles to Carlos Henderson and more, a complicated offense may not have been the best solution. Add that to the fact that even some of the veterans were struggling with the verbiage, as well as the game-day volume, and it’s not hard to see why the Broncos struggled on offense last year. And that’s not even mentioning their talent deficiencies.

2018, though, figures to be different, as Bill Musgrave and his staff believe they’ve crafted an offense that will alleviate many of those problems.

“We’re trying to make it concise,” he explained. “We don’t want long-worded plays in the huddle. We have three of four ways to go no-huddle and a lot of those are one-word calls. We’d love for guys to know it like the back of their hand so they can just cut it loose and play. That’s what we’re trying to do… I feel like it can be teachable, it can be learnable and then guys can execute it and cut it loose.”

It seems simple and obvious, right? Take the thinking out of it for the players so they can do what they do best and play. But the NFL is a stubborn place full of coaches who believe their way is the right way, and to their credit, many of them have shown that their way works time and time again.

But just because something has worked before doesn’t mean it will work again, especially as a new generation of players is ushered in.

“I think it definitely applies to this day in age. You’re right. I know where you’re going with that,” Musgrave said after I insinuated that the new generation needed things simplified. “I also think it just helps. We don’t want to be thinking out there as players. We want to know what to do.”

For better or for worse, it’s true. Many of today’s players—millenials, if you will—are trained to take things in small doses. In the social-media age, we are constantly taking in huge masses of information, but it is all segmented into small pieces. In a sense, Bill Musgrave is making his offense more like a series of texts rather than a series of emails.

So far, it’s paying off. Despite Musgrave saying the offense is “pretty much” completely different from last year’s, many young players, including—most recently—running back De’Angelo Henderson, have referred to the offense as “player friendly,” meaning they are having an easy time picking it up.

Seems like all offenses should be “player friendly,” considering, you know, you need the players to be good at it, but such is not the case across much of the league. In an era, though, where designs such as the famed “RPO,” garner so much praise, maybe simply ‘millenializing’ the terminology is the next great evolution.