The Setup Man

When a long and winding road led me through Las Vegas and points unknown last week, I had the pleasure of stopping by a well-regarded comedy club on the Strip to take in a night of laughs. The results were laughable in a few regards.

The show took the usual shape, with a host, a featured comedian, and a headliner taking up a couple of hours telling jokes, getting a few gasps here and there from the crowd with some of their more outrageous stuff. The host was funny… for the most part. The featured comedian? He sadly fell pretty flat, not just for me, but the entire crowd. Things were pretty tense-to-middling, when the headliner, a pro of nearly 40 years, came out and had the audience in tears in 20 seconds, and then spent the better part of the next hour simply knocking us out. A pro’s pro, that one.

After spending the last decade living a couple miles from both the Laugh Factory and The Comedy Store, I was lucky to get to see dozens of shows of the sort I saw last week: Host, featured comedian, headliner. Host, featured comedian, headliner. Lather, rinse, repeat. Those titles are such much cleaner and more telling than Comedian 1, Comedian 2, and Comedian 3. But the way I heard a lot of the comedians referring to each slot made even more sense to me: Emcee, Setup Man, Headliner/Star.

Now, when it comes to the outcome of a comedy show, the funniest part about the Emcee slot is he/she barely matters to the night. A killer Emcee can make a show marginally better, but a crappy emcee won’t put too much of a dent in an evening. The Headliner/Star? The Star almost never sucks. Clubs want you to walk out that door having had a good experience, and if you left at the end of the evening unhappy, they know you’ll rarely be back. So they make sure that whoever wraps up the evening will at least have made you laugh enough to remember it when you go.

But the Setup Man? Or Woman? It’s the Setup that really decides just how far the evening can go. Oftentimes, the Star is building off of the energy the Setup left the crowd with. While we all walked out happy from the show I saw in Vegas, if the comedian in the middle had been a rock star, we’d have left that place on fire. I saw it too many times with the best of the best in L.A. If the person in the middle sets the crowd alight, the evening will probably be one you’ll never forget.

There are similar concepts in sports as well, with baseball’s “setup men” being one of the largest developments in the sport over the last couple decades. Baseball’s setup men are the pitchers who bridge the innings between the starter and the closer, and are often a huge part of a team’s overall success in terms of sheer wins and losses.

Hockey has less of a theme this way, but still coaches – especially home team coaches – stack their lines and squads in ways that hopefully end up with their best lines running downhill against a lesser lineup. The “setup” guys keeping things going in between are setting up the mismatches that will hopefully put the scoring combinations on the ice enough to win.

Basketball’s “setup” men are usually sitting on the bench when the game begins, or are maybe their team’s fourth- or fifth-best option from the starting five. They are the guys who are tasked with keeping things at least even while the stars are taking a breather. If they can tack on to a lead, or make up a deficit, a coach will often ride that wave as long as it will play out, giving his MVPs a badly needed breather in the bargain.

In football, the setup men are often in the offensive or defensive backfield. Often a running back who specializes in certain downs or a situational linebacker coming in to make a key stop and set their teams up for larger success.

In the case of the Denver Broncos coming into this season, their setup man is actually no longer even with the team.

If you follow the team closely, you’d be hard-pressed to read much of anything that doesn’t involve their biggest offseason acquisition, quarterback Russell Wilson. Articles on the offense? The receivers can’t believe the detail and presence Russ brings to practices, extra practices, and extra extra practices. Articles on the defense? Russ is sitting with the coaches and watching, trying to help spot weaknesses and liabilities. Articles on the ownership change? Well, owners are very excited at the prospects Wilson brings to the team. Articles on the mascots? Well, I haven’t seen one, but I’m guessing Russ may have Miles and Thunder doing something coordinated by season’s start. If it has anything to do with the Broncos, you’ll get at least a whiff of Wilson somewhere in there.

But Russell had help in getting the Denver Broncos ready for him, something of a setup man, in the person of one Theodore Edmond Bridgewater, Jr. Yes, boys and girls, his name is quite literally Ted E.

When Teddy dropped by Denver on his journeyman journey last season, he was initially brought in to simply push manchild Drew Lock into becoming the quarterback several suspected he possibly was. When Lock proved unequal to the task, Bridgewater stepped forward with the qualities that had made him a fan- and organization-favorite at several stops prior to the Denver. As a thoughtful and well-planned game manager, Bridgewater had few peers. When the Broncos started the season wholly whole and fighting against a series of pushovers, they looked for a moment like worldbeaters with Teddy at the helm. As one tentpole after another crumbled as the season progressed, a set of players and playcalling took a lot of the best parts of Bridgewater away.

But Ted E. never relented, both on the field and off, in the face of a tsunami of issues. Even team leader Von Miller called out the leadership qualities the team had been missing until Bridgewater built them back.

Make no mistake, I don’t pretend to say that Bridgewater and Wilson are equals on the field in terms of talent, or even of game management and gamesmanship. Wilson is in a class of his own in marrying brains, mobility, and a cannon arm. He will bring Denver to heights they’ve not seen in quite a while. He and the team are gleeful to have one another, and the swath he cuts for others to follow is deep and wide.

But when we speak glowingly of Russ this season in terms of his leadership, ownership of successes and failures, game management, inspirational abilities, abilities to make the right read, and spread the ball where it needs to be for the team to succeed… we ought to remember a guy who came before and laid some track for this team to be on these rails right away.

Broncos Country hopes this marriage is a lengthy and unparalleled success as headliner Russ Wilson takes the stage. But make no mistake, at least some of the early trajectory of this show, and maybe even the heights of its eventual success, will come from them having had an exceptional setup man.