The Case Keenum signing serves as an indication of a changed John Elway

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — During his playing days, John Elway was known for his perseverance, his never-say-die attitude and his ability to pry victory from the jaws of defeat.

As an executive, Elway has been known for his Super-Bowl-or-bust, win-from-now-on, we’re-goin-plan-A attitude.

That’s just the John Elway we’ve become accustomed to. Ultra competitive, sometimes to a fault.

This time, though, Elway took a step back. The John Elway that inked Case Keenum to a two-year deal worth $36 million on Wednesday is a new, seasoned John Elway. A John Elway that’s seen 5-11.

It would have been easy, and comfortable, for Elway to disregard that all signs were pointing to Kirk Cousins ending up in Minnesota, do anything to get his foot in the door and kick and scream until the ink dried in Minneapolis. Heck, even Keenum had a poster featuring No. 7 in his room that said, “It’s never over.”

Instead, though, Elway made the smart move. He took the check down instead of forcing the deep ball. He lived to see another down.

Failure in the pursuit of Kirk Cousins would have likely also meant failure in the pursuit of Keenum, leaving the Broncos in a place familiar to where they found themselves back in 2015. After the team won the Super Bowl and Peyton Manning retired, the Broncos expected to lock in Brock Osweiler as the quarterback of the future. When Osweiler took the money and bolted for Houston, though, the Broncos were left scrambling.

That’s how you end up signing Mark Sanchez, drafting Paxton Lynch, starting Trevor Siemian and going 14-18 in two years.

Not again.

This John Elway was proactive, not reactive. He saw the blitz coming at the line of scrimmage and diagnosed it to perfection. Before the ball was even snapped, the Broncos had identified Keenum as the primary target, they got their deal in place before the gaudy Kirk Cousins and Drew Brees numbers came down and before Keenum’s former teammate, Sam Bradford, squeezed another $20 million out of a quarterback-desperate team.

“We got our guy,” the GM told a horde of media on Friday morning.

This John Elway also opened his ears. Back at the beginning of January, the Broncos president of football operations and general manager brought a voice he trusted into the front office. That voice, of course, is the voice of Gary Kubiak and the newly appointed senior personnel advisor has his name all over this signing.

“Obviously Gary is helping us a tremendous amount on the personnel side,” Elway explained. “Gary’s relationship with Case and knowing Case, that was a big feather in Case’s cap.”

Back in 2012, it was Kubiak who signed the former Texas high school legend and all-time NCAA passing leader as an undrafted free agent.

“There was one team that called after the draft, and that was the Texans and Coach Kubiak,” Keenum said Thursday. “I owe him my shot in this league.”

Keenum may now owe a good portion of his shot in Denver to ol’ Kubes as well. But the man in charge had to be willing to delegate a bit for that reunion to happen.

Back in January, at the Broncos end-of-season press conference, a humble John Elway admitted he is still getting this whole executive thing down.

”You’re always learning. You’re learning every year… We continue to learn. I think every time you make a choice or make a decision on a guy, you see how it turns out. Then you look at it and ask, ‘How could I have gotten better? What did I miss? What did I get?’… If we don’t learn from that, then we don’t grow and get better as evaluators and providing guys for the football team. I always try to get better. I don’t have all the answers. I want to search and find all the answers because I want this team to be as good as they can possibly be. I’m fortunate in the fact that I played for a long time. I’ve been in this job now for seven years. I’m always trying to get better. As soon as I think I have it down, I’ll retire.”

With the idea outside the walls of Dove Valley often being that Elway is a stubborn shot-caller who unequivocally runs the show his way, allow the Case Keenum signing to serve as a signal that maybe, just maybe, Elway isn’t so stuck in his ways after all.