John Elway Sounds Off With a Prediction on Payton/Wilson Experiment

Denver Broncos fans will always be indebted to the legendary John Elway for delivering so much joy and happiness down through the years. Before the three-time Super Bowl champion (two as a player, one as a GM) decided to finally step away from the team that became his life's work, it could be argued that he had become a somewhat faded icon.

After all of Elway's stratospheric accomplishments, to split hairs over his lasting legacy seems pointless, even in the face of the half-decade of losing he presided over in Denver to end his tenure. In truth, Elway deserves to be chiseled into a Mount Rushmore of sorts in the Rockies.

Even in retirement, Elway still loves talking about the Broncos. The Hall-of-Fame quarterback and Super Bowl-winning former GM also believes that the new regime in Denver, which ultimately ushered him out the door, has the team firmly on the right track once again.

When Denver7 caught up with Elway, he quickly pointed to the Broncos hiring Sean Payton as head coach, suggesting that they now have a boss with the required gravitas to take the bull by the horns.

"I am excited. He’s a perfect fit for where we are right now, where the Broncos are right now,” Elway told Denver7’s Lionel Bienvenu. “Obviously, he has a lot of skins on the wall. He won a Super Bowl before and won a ton of football games. I don’t think there could have been a better fit. I think he will be great."

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Elway knows all about being given enough time to succeed. After all, he was 36 years old before he set a trio of Super Bowl failures right by winning it all in 1997 and followed that up with a back-to-back World Championship in Super Bowl XXXIII before riding off into the sunset for a time.

Hopes are high that Payton can enact a much quicker turnaround, but Elway knows that it'll take some time to fully restore the Broncos.

"It’s going to take some time with a new system, new coaches, even though the spring was very good,” Elway said via Bienvenu. “The expectations are up there. But they have calmed the expectations compared to last year, which is good. We have to do better with injuries. Hopefully we can stay healthy."

You can't cross paths with the most legendary figure in Broncos canon and not talk about the quarterback position, which Elway made his own. Sure, his struggles to find a bonafide franchise QB post-Peyton Manning haunted the second half of his tenure as GM in Denver, but fans are still all ears when it comes to the Hall-of-Famer's opinion of the dynamic between Payton and Russell Wilson and how it'll shake out for the Broncos.

"Sean has a great feel for the QB position. He’s so knowledgeable on the offensive side. I think he knows what Russell will do to the best. Like every good football team, we have to try to run the football and run it successfully. And if we do that, it gives Russell a much better chance to be successful in the passing game," Elway said via Bienvenu. "(Wilson) is such a positive guy. I think he’s excited about it. With what was going on last year, a lot of different things, Sean brings in so much experience. I think Russell is looking forward to that coach to put him in the best position to be successful. ... It was a tough year for him last year. But he’s positive and tough. He will bounce back, and I think he’s going to have a much better year this year."

Just having Elway around seems like a warm comforting embrace for Broncos Country, but the Walton/Penner ownership group has stopped short of billing him as some kind of football consigliere. Those days might be in the rear-view, but Elway is happy to even be a sounding board for the man he hired to succeed him as GM — George Paton — as well as his friend Payton, when he happens to be around.

"I still go back for a lot of practices. So, I am around. I don’t have an official role there, but it's nice of them to keep me around a little bit," Elway said via Bienvenu. "I look forward to going to practices and games and still being involved. If they ever ask me a question, I have to do enough work to have an answer for them."

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