Broncos CEO Dishes on the Depth of Sean Payton's Impact Early On
While it's true that NFL games aren't won during the offseason, any team that rests on its laurels will be exposed when the real action gets underway. The Denver Broncos have been extremely proactive during free agency, spending significantly in order to equip head coach Sean Payton with the puzzle pieces he coveted.
How enthusiastically Broncos CEO Greg Penner threw himself behind re-tooling the roster is telling of the weight Payton brings to the head coach position.
“You definitely don’t win the season in free agency and you don’t necessarily want to spend that way each year, but we just felt this year with the lack of draft picks and the needs we had on the offensive line that that was the approach we needed to take,” Penner told Parker Gabriel of The Denver Post. “… We just looked at it and said, ‘Ok, these are our needs and if we get these players, we really want to get them.’ And, fortunately, we had players that we were targeting and we got all of those players.”
Payton has hit the ground running thus far, but he still perhaps takes a backseat to Penner in terms of the overall impact made to galvanize the franchise. Setting a completely different tone for the club was how Penner wanted to attack the process of turning around the seriously under-performing Broncos.
A big part of that mission was to successfully recruit a proven head coach, and Penner has not been afraid of handing out some serious plaudits to Payton.
“He immediately set a different tone coming into the building,” Penner said via Gabriel on Tuesday in Arizona. “As a head coach, probably the most important thing that you do is the staff that you hire and right away he came in and he’s built a staff that’s diverse. And I mean diverse across multiple dimensions – it’s age, you’ve got everyone from (75-year-old assistant head coach) Mike Westhoff to (28-year-old quarterbacks coach) Davis Webb, diverse backgrounds from different coaching trees and perspectives – and that’s probably the most impressive thing.”
Penner's vast experience as a high-flying corporate negotiator meant that filling the Broncos' head-coaching vacancy was done with exceedingly great care, copious amounts of due diligence, and attention to detail. Consequently, it's allowed everyone within the organization to take a deep breath and re-focus their efforts on sailing the ship in the same direction once again.
“For me and Rob and Carrie and the rest of our ownership group, the expectation is around the right process and the right approach and the right culture,” Penner said. “It’s not necessarily around ‘we have an expectation of X numbers of wins or Y number of wins.’ One thing that we’re really confident in is that we’re going to take the right approach and that we will have the right expectations of our staff and players.”
It all sets the Broncos up for success both on and off the field, especially if continuity can meet in the middle with creativity. Long have the Broncos sailed without a steady rudder through the fractured leadership era of the Bowlen Family Trust, and several lackluster head-coaching hires, but that all looks like it's becoming a distant memory. Finally.
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