Vic Fangio couldn’t have done it unilaterally if he wanted to. Still, last week, there was real intention to his decision to gather his six captains and get direction on where they wanted to take their work week, coming off a season-opening win, the Broncos’ first September win in three years.
Normally, the Broncos go in two days before game day, on East Coast trips, to acclimate to the time difference. But as the team gathered information on just what it would be like traveling to Jacksonville, and what that might mean for its season, warning sign after warning sign came up that the players and coaches were probably best off spending less time, not more, in the state of Florida.
Therein lay a fork in the road. Either make the trip a more efficient in-and-out, and risk players’ not being at their very best, or stick to the plan and risk exposure to the coronavirus.
The team’s six captains—Teddy Bridgewater, Kareem Jackson, Brandon McManus, Von Miller, Justin Simmons and Courtland Sutton—affirmed to Fangio they wanted to go in on Friday. As for the rest of it? The players in the room said they’d take care of that. And later in the day, they did, holding a players-only meeting that laid out exactly what they needed to do in order to make the whole thing work.
“With the abundance of COVID in Florida, and in the Jacksonville area, we wanted to make the players aware, and make sure they were comfortable,” Fangio said over the phone on Wednesday morning. “And once we decided we really did want to do that, players were going to have to buy in to not treating it like a normal road trip. We basically treated it like a road trip last year. We stayed in the hotel; we didn’t leave it, we didn’t see family, we didn’t see friends. And I couldn’t make them do that—that’s not the protocol this year.
“They had to buy in to it to make it successful, and they did.”
Later in the week, Fangio revealed to his players in a team meeting that, for going through all this, the front office had arranged for a Ruth’s Chris located across the river from the Broncos’ hotel in Jacksonville to cater Saturday dinner, the night before the game. And hours after those guys picked through their steaks and asparagus, Denver feasted on the Jaguars, with the players’ paying off all the goodwill of the days leading up to the game.
Does a 10-point road win over a struggling Jaguars team mean the Broncos have arrived in Fangio’s third year in charge? It absolutely does not. We’ll learn more on how far they’ve come in October, with the AFC North’s three 2020 playoff teams dotting the slate over that month.
But for now, Denver’s fast start at least reflects good vibes in the building as the Broncos go through a transitional phase—and maybe, just maybe, a bright future ahead.
