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Player-personnel calls, especially drafts from 2001-05, are cause for Shanahan's downfall.
By Jim Armstrong
In the end, Mike Shanahan the coach can blame his firing on Mike Shanahan the general manager.
Collectively, Shanahan's last three drafts may have been the best in the NFL. The Broncos' 2006-08 drafts netted several starters, including Pro Bowlers Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall and bookend tackles Ryan Clady and Ryan Harris.
Now for the fine print: "If that's the case, if they got all those starters out of the draft, they had some holes they had to fill," said Marty Schottenheimer, Shanahan's longtime rival. "I imagine some of those young guys aren't the quality of players that was available to them three, four, five years ago."
No one ever has questioned Shana-han's abilities on the sideline or in the film room. Said ex-Cowboys personnel chief Gil Brandt, now an analyst for NFL.com, upon hearing the news of Shanahan's dismissal: "His legacy is that he's one of the best play callers in the league. He's just a tremendous football coach."
But his player-personnel calls left much to be desired. Shanahan's five drafts from 2001-05, more than any other factor, led to his demise. The Broncos, as he walked out the door, had three players remaining from those drafts — Ben Hamilton, D.J. Williams and Karl Paymah. The rest, including such draft-day busts as Willie Middlebrooks, Paul Toviessi and George Foster, will go down in Broncos infamy.
And so it was that, after watching in horror as his defense allowed 409 points in 2007, Shanahan was forced to use his first three picks — Clady, Eddie Royal and Kory Lichtensteiger — to patch holes on the offensive side of the ball. The fallout was that a defense that ranked among the worst in the league the year before returned largely intact this season.
Bottom line
The results were nothing short of embarrassing, so much so that a two-time Super Bowl coach, the 15th-winningest coach in pro football history, is out of a job. The numbers speak for themselves: The Broncos have allowed 26.9 points per game in Cutler's 37 starts. Sixteen times in those 37 games, the Denver defense has been scorched for 30-plus. Five times, the opposition has eclipsed the 40-point mark, including Sunday's 52-21 loss to San Diego.
It was ugly, all right. Shanahan acknowledged as much days after the first of the Broncos' two three-game losing streaks in 2008.
"It's a challenge right now," Shana-han said in early November. "I understand that this is a performance-based business. If you don't perform, you don't keep your job. I understand that as well as anybody. The bottom line is, if (owner) Pat (Bowlen) feels like someday his best interests are to go in another direction, I know he'd sit down with me and we'd have a great conversation. He's a great owner, one of the best. That's his decision."
It was a decision announced via a short news release titled "Shanahan, Broncos Part Ways." And make no doubt, it sent shock waves throughout the league. It was one thing for Eric Mangini, Romeo Crennel and Rod Marinelli to get fired. But Shanahan, a man who began the 21st century as arguably the most secure coach in the business?
"You've got to be kidding me," said Brandt, when told of the news. "I know they've struggled so much on defense, but that's one of the biggest shocks I've heard in some years. Mike will get a job in 10 minutes. He's a guy who has really added a lot to the league."
Not his first firing
Tuesday's lightning bolt
(Click image to enlarge)marked the third time that Shanahan had been fired as an NFL coach. The first came four games into the 1989 season, when Al Davis dumped him as head coach of the then-Los Angeles Raiders. Two years later, Shanahan was fired as the Broncos' offensive coordinator for what Dan Reeves termed insubordination, a reference to Reeves' perception that Shanahan and John Elway were circumventing him in game planning. Reached at his Atlanta home, Reeves, too, said he was shocked by the news. It was 16 years earlier, virtually to the day, that Reeves had been fired by Bowlen after assuming he would be the Broncos' head coach for years to come.
"Unbelievable," said Reeves. "It happens. It's a business in which you've got to win and win big. The thing that surprised me was that they have a quarterback, and that's what you have to have. They've definitely made an awful lot of moves defensively that haven't panned out. You win with defense and a running game. They've had the running game, but the defense hasn't been there."
Said Schottenheimer, who squared off with Shanahan more than any other NFL head coach: "I don't want to use a lot of dialogue. Let this old English major put it to you straight and simple: He's one of the finest coaches I've ever competed against. You just knew, when you played him, it was going to be tough. You knew he was going to be prepared."
Post-Elway slide
The 2008 season marked the first time in Shanahan's NFL coaching career that he had missed the playoffs in three consecutive seasons. It was a far cry from 1996-98, when the Broncos won 46 games, the highest three-year total in NFL history, including victories in Super Bowls XXXII and XXXIII.
Shanahan's critics point to the fact that he hasn't won a Super Bowl without a superstar quarterback. He won with one in San Francisco, when he was Steve Young's offensive coordinator, and two in Denver with Elway under center. Shanahan won one playoff game in the 10 seasons after Elway's retirement, a victory over New England after the 2005 season that set up a loss to Pittsburgh at Invesco Field in the AFC championship game.
Once the core of the Broncos' two Super Bowl teams departed, Shana-han's teams were largely mediocre, making the playoffs four times in the past decade. When Shanahan the GM wasn't drafting defensive players, he was signing them via free agency, with much the same results. The list of free-agent signees who didn't pan out included Dale Carter, Daryl Gardener, Lional Dalton and Niko Koutovides. Shanahan also acquired a handful of former Browns linemen who became known as the Browncos, but only Ebenezer Ekuban made a long-term impact.
One of the greatest
The bottom line? A coach once considered the best in the business finished 24-24 in his last three seasons.
"I expected something to happen, but I didn't expect this," said ESPN analyst Mark Schlereth, a guard on the Broncos' Super Bowl champion teams. "I expected the firing of a defensive coordinator or Pat Bowlen coming in and saying he wanted a real GM, an empowered GM, to run the personnel side of things. But to see Shanahan get fired, I was honestly shocked. He'll go down as one of the great ones — obviously the greatest ever in Denver, but, for a time, one of the greatest of all."
Bowlen, then Shanahan, will answer questions at a news conference this morning. After that, the only questions remaining are who'll be Shanahan's successor and did Bowlen just fire a Hall of Fame coach? Given his spotty track record in the past 10 seasons, Shanahan has accumulated his share of critics. Then again, he has all the credentials for Canton.
"Absolutely," said Schottenheimer, when asked if Shanahan belongs in the Hall of Fame. "I don't think there's any question. By every standard you would use to evaluate, I'd say he's a Hall of Famer."
But today, he's out of a job.
Shocking? Yes, particularly since Bowlen waited for three other coaches to be fired the day before. But Shanahan said in early November that he knew what was at stake.
"I understand the big picture," he said. "I understand you've got to get through these highs and lows. It's part of the process. If you can't work through it, then you're not in it very long."
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