Vic Fangio is making a strong statement as he settles into his new role

“Once you hit a certain age, when I go back to visit her, she’s lost her iron hand over me,” That was Denver Broncos head coach Vic Fangio talking about his 92-year-old mother Alice back in January.

In fact, she even lets him wear his patented sweatpants at the dinner table now.

At 60-years old, Vic Fangio is a grown-ass man, and nobody has an iron hand over him anymore. What’s more? For the first time in his football coaching career, Fangio has the iron hand, and he’s not exactly afraid to use it.

For more than 30 years, Fangio has trolled the sidelines during a practice being run the way some other coach wanted to run it. That all changes next week, when Fangio’s Broncos will hold their first practice of OTAs.

“There have always been some things that I’ve wanted to do, that I thought should’ve been done, that weren’t done, and now I get to do them,” the newly-minted head coach said with his trademark smirk at the NFL owners meetings in Arizona.

It’s safe to say Fangio isn’t exactly easing into his new role as the head man. While he will assure you that he “wasn’t stressed” about becoming a head coach, an assertion that you should believe, he also has certainly thought long and hard about how he would do things when he got here, and that’s allowed him to jump right into his new position of power without a hint of self-doubt.

Just listen to the way he answered a few of the many, many questions thrown at him in Arizona.

Does he feel like he belongs there as a head coach?

“Sure, I belong. I have no qualms about that. Many of these guys already in the room, I’ve been coaching against for a long time, some longer than others. It’s no big deal.”

Some of them, *cough* Sean McVay *cough*, weren’t even alive when he got into the NFL.

As the team in Denver with the longest playoff drought, does he feel extra pressure to get the Broncos in this year?

“I don’t feel any pressure because I haven’t been here for that streak.”

Hard to argue with that.

As someone who has spent his entire career on the defensive side of the ball, he won’t get involved with the offensive operations, right?

“I do get involved and will be involved.”

Okay, what about with evaluating QBs?

“Absolutely. The first thing I said to a lot of coaches, I said, ‘Now I get to evaluate quarterbacks and I won’t make the same mistakes some of you offensive coaches have made over the years (laughs).’”

Fangio is making a statement in his early days on the job—he runs the show now.

He’s so comfortable and confident in the way he does things, he essentially said he doesn’t want to watch the way the previous coaching staff messed up with his new players, sharing that he’s only watched 150 plays from the 2018 Broncos season.

“If the guy’s on our roster and he’s going to be on our roster, I want to form my own opinion. I don’t want to watch other stuff.”

Vic Fangio is so dang comfortable in his own skin, he was willing to publically admit that he never really watched Seinfeld but did, in fact, enjoy watching Friends re-runs with his daughter back in the day.

That sort of thing will get you killed on Twitter. Luckily, he doesn’t have one.

With all due respect to Fangio’s predecessor, Vance Joseph never displayed this type of confidence. Often times, it felt as if Joseph was still trying to convince himself that he was the guy. How could you blame him, though? Joseph had been a defensive coordinator for a grand total of one year before taking the head job in Denver. When Vic Fangio first became a coordinator, the Denver Broncos had never won a Super Bowl.

Fangio is not only ready to be the guy, he’s leaning into it, and anyone who thinks he’s just going to be another “yes man” for John Elway is sorely mistaken. After all, his mom can’t even push him around anymore.