John Elway goes into extreme detail regarding what he's looking for in a young quarterback

ENGLEWOOD, Colo — Quarterback, quarterback, quarterback.

The Broncos 2018 offseason is all about the quarterback position, and they aren’t afraid to admit it.

“For us to have a chance to get better, we have to get better at that position,” president of football operations and general manager John Elway said on Tuesday morning. “The number one goal is to get better at that position.”

The man under center was the main focus of a press conference that Elway took the blame for not putting head coach Vance Joseph in the best position to succeed as a head coach.

Read between the lines.

With the Broncos on the hunt and the one certainty being that their quarterback room will look drastically different in 2018, we now embark on the long, long journey towards finding out who will lead the Orange & Blue next season.

So, on Tuesday, Elway was asked just what he is looking at when evaluating young QBs and not only gave us a great blueprint for what we should be looking for, but also may have shined some light on why it didn’t work out for the quarterbacks currently on the roster.

“Well, I think half is what you see on film, and the other half is figuring out what kind of guy it is,” the GM said. “There are a lot of good football players, a lot of guys that have a ton of talent out there. Obviously, stepping into that role when you come out of college—in college, you’re allowed to be a kid—you come to the NFL, and the expectation levels rise, especially if you’re a high pick. You’re expected to be good or show signs of being a very good player early.”

“How are they going to handle the situation? How are they going to handle the “bigness” of being a quarterback in the NFL?” He added. “That is the biggest part, I say it all the time, trying to figure out how these guys can handle the tough times—because there are going to be tough times. When the world feels like it’s caving in, are they going to be able to battle through that and not lose their confidence?… What gets you here is your swagger and your confidence as a quarterback. If you have a chance to play in the NFL, that’s what gets you here, and you can’t be afraid of it. If all of the sudden things aren’t going well, the world starts caving in on you, and you lose that swagger, or you lose that confidence, it’s very, very difficult to get it back. You have to figure out how strong they are in what they believe in, how strong they are in what they are as a quarterback. To be able to battle through that, if they can do that, then they have a chance to be a have a great, long career. To me, I say it all the time, it’s 50 percent the physical side of it, but the 50 percent mental side. The heart and finding out what they have inside, that’s the difficult part.”

Within that long, long explanation, you might be able to dig up where the head man believes he went wrong in selecting Paxton Lynch in the first round. And while he has certainly taken his lumps for that selection, it may be comforting for fans to at least know that he learned from that experience.

On Tuesday, Elway was as open and honest about his own faults as you’ll ever see, noting, “I always try to get better, and I don’t have all the answers, but I want to search and find all the answers because I want this team to be as good as it can possibly be.”

As the Broncos move forward and address their No. 1 priority, fans looking for reasons to be confident can turn to Elway’s seemingly increased sense of self-awareness and willingness to admit where he went wrong as a reason for optimism.