ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — The Denver Broncos were missing something last year.
The buzz around town felt muted, the roar of the stadium not as ear piercing, the edge of the team lost.
“I had a bad feeling,” linebacker Brandon Marshall said Thursday. “I had a bad taste in my mouth all of last year.”
He wasn’t the only one. It seemed all around Denver there was a bad taste. It’s not as if the team was awful, finding themselves in the hunt for the playoffs for just about all of the season, even jumping out to a 4-0 start, but something was just off.
One phrase had been thrown around all offseason, but the message out of the team was that it could never happen to them. Now, a 9-7 season and a third-place finish in the division later, Marshall is ready to admit that it may have.
“I think there were some distractions and maybe a Super Bowl lull.”
The words nobody wanted to hear.
“Before we won the Super Bowl, I didn’t even think about it,” he added of the lull. “I was so mesmerized to be on a winning team and thinking that we’re about to go to a Super Bowl. I never thought that was a real thing. You would see teams that win a Super Bowl and then next year didn’t make the playoffs. I never thought that it would happen to us because of who we have on our team. I think it’s real.”
It is, and it was. The Broncos didn’t have their edge last season because they stopped to smell the roses, and can you really blame them?
“One of my old trainers put it to me like this,” Marshall said. “‘When you reach all of your goals, or when you have something that you work for your whole life, and you reach it, naturally, you take a deep breath.’ Even though you reached that, we have to set new goals and new aspirations and work towards that. Once you reach those old goals, I guess those goals won’t do it for you anymore.”
Consider last season a victory lap. A weird, long, sometimes painful to watch victory lap. At the same time, consider this season a redemption tour.
“Nobody is letting anything slide,” the defensive leader explained. “We don’t want to be 9-7. That’s not us. We still believe that we’re the best team in the AFC West. So being in third place was not acceptable. I think our leaders are doing a good job of stepping up, not letting anything slide, getting their own individual groups ready and together. They’re getting everybody each day, each practice. They brought in some new guys for the offensive side of the ball. Those guys are bringing some juice too. I feel like it’s going to be a good year.”
In 2016 the Broncos fell victim to a sigh of relief, in 2017 they’re looking to get their swagger back.
