Super Bowl Buzz Kill: Denver Broncos

Anybody can pick winners. We at The Hater Nation like to predict the losers. And last year, who could match our accuracy? The Hater Nation went 31 for 32 in picking teams that would not win the Super Bowl. If you read through the lines, too, you would have saw that we were secretly picking the Saints to take the whole thing.

So here is the 2010 Super Bowl Buzz Kill. A feature so awesome, those (expletives) at Deadspin have blatantly ripped it off. Turns out the schmucks at the Bleacher Report did, too. Always imitated, never duplicated.

Why your team won't win the Super Bowl: Denver Broncos

by The Bain

One of my favorite movies of the past few years is Charlie Wilson's War, especially the parts when Tom Hanks and Phillip Seymour Hoffman get riffing on the bureaucratic Who's On First:

Hanks: What is U.S. strategy (in Afghanistan)?

Hoffman: Most strictly speaking, we don't have one. But we're working on it.

Hanks: Who's 'we'?

Hoffman: Me and three other guys.

Subtract three other guys and you have the Denver Broncos under Josh McDaniels.

This summer the Denver sports media (actually, the whole sports media) has been tying itself in knots trying to put a positive spin on McDaniels' blueprint for the Broncos. By all outward appearances, McDaniels' only gameplan is to get rid of every trace that Mike Shanahan ever existed. This is what Freud called an oedipal complex, and while I'm sure Shanahan has figured out he's the father in the equation, I wonder when Pat Bowlen will realize he's the mother.

One person aghast to be tangled in this cluster of big teeth and Canadians is Kyle Orton, whose facial expressions these days resemble those of a man who's just realized he's Kyle Orton. Imagine going to work every morning and being greeted by throngs of local kids in Tim Tebow jerseys. Can you blame Orton for looking like a guy who's just proudly come home with his first Levitra prescription to find his wife getting (courted) by Justin Bieber?

Some Denver sports clod speculated that Orton could carry the Broncos to a Super Bowl so long as the offensive line is tight, the running game is strong, and the defense keeps opposing offenses off the field.

The same could be said of Lady Gaga, Jerry Lewis, and my neighbor's spastic cat.

Asked to please be serious, Broncos supporters have pointed to Elvis Dumervil as proof that the Donks have a D. Unfortunately, the collective weight of index fingers tore the mighty linebacker's pec muscle, and by all reports Elvis has left the building.

Hey, put that down. Come on, now.

At least the defense still has Champ Bailey and Brian Dawkins, two of the most formidable backs in the NFL so long as their Rascal scooters are kept fully charged. Dawkins recently made headlines for rejecting the idea of an eighteen-game season... unless three of the games are cribbage, Yahtzee, and shuffleboard.

Oh, let's just cut the crap: this team's gonna blow, and hard. My fellow staffers here at THN speculate that the Donks will wind up as the worst team in the league; I'll play it safe and say they'll be the worst team in the AFC West, which, come to think of it, is saying the same thing. On the upside, fantasy dopes should gobble up Eddie Royal--he's going to catch ninety thousand passes this season, all of them for three yards--but that's it. It's fitting that the Bronco's most famous and beloved fan wore a barrel. As the old punchline goes, Wednesday is your day in the barrel, and for the next five months in Denver every day is Wednesday.

Of course, the Bronco beat writers know this and will probably admit as much when the WiFi goes down. Ask them in private why the Donks are a mess, and they'll answer, well... Wilson's War again:

"Because (McDaniels) is a tool. He's a cake-eater, he's a clown, he's a bad station chief, and I don't like to cast aspersions on a guy, but he's going to get us all killed."