ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Sean Payton didn’t inherit complete chaos when he was hired in late-January to become the Denver Broncos’ new head coach.
A fair of amount of structure and order had been implemented by the most unlikeliest of sources -- an interim head coach -- in the final two games of the Broncos’ 2022 season.
Jerry Rosburg won’t be around today when the Broncos officially open training camp. He’ll be at the Philadelphia Eagles training camp complex in South Philly with his company’s company’s mobile unit, housing two hyperbaric chambers available to help a player’s recovery.
But before Rosburg returned to coaching retirement in late-January, he began the process of resurrecting the Broncos from the abyss of a Christmas Day embarrassment in Los Angeles, to instant respectability through a hard-fought competitive road loss to the eventual Super Bowl-champion Kansas City Chiefs and home win against the playoff-bound Los Angeles Chargers.
In just two games, Rosburg reminded Broncos Country that coaching matters. And by extension, the follow-up hire of Payton is reason for Broncos fans to believe better days are ahead.
“I know some of the players are coming back,’’ Rosburg said this week in an interview with 9NEWS. “In the last two weeks we had a lot of players who are starting camp this week who weren’t available to us at the end of last year. So everybody starts fresh and hopefully the Broncos will be a much healthier team and that in itself has got to be a major factor.
“You add that to the new leadership and that’s self-evident. Sean’s been a very successful coach in this league for many years. They have every reason to be optimistic in my view.
“We all know it’s important to have a well-balanced team with offense, defense and special teams but what drives a team is the quarterback. And I’ve said this publicly, I have great belief in Russell Wilson. The adjustment he made to what we were doing when we flipped it over in the last two weeks is something that I’ll always admire. At that point in time I saw how he listened. I saw how he adjusted. I saw the sacrifices he made. I always respected him but I never had more respect for him than I did at that moment of time. I think that will serve him well going forward. I think he’s going to have a great season.”
The adjustment Wilson made has been a popular subject of discussion. After Broncos general manager George Paton made the blockbuster trade for Wilson from Seattle last year, the new quarterback requested, and received permission for, his own personal coaching staff to have access to the practice fields and team headquarters, and his own office on the second floor – management’s floor -- at team headquarters.
Before Sean Payton was hired and said he would grant no such perks for one player, Rosburg had already respectfully handled it.
“That all ended when I took over,’’ Rosburg said. “That’s one of the reasons I said I never had more respect for Russell. He showed great humility which is a great characteristic to have. At that point in time things had not gone well, obviously. The coach had just got fired, the team was in turmoil as evidenced by the Christmas Day performance. After all that I asked Russell Wilson to make a sacrifice. And he did it.’’
Rosburg said it was with good intentions that Wilson had his own coaches around, and an office in which he could put in extra time for preparation. And to be fair to Wilson’s personal staff, they all were respectful of the Broncos’ space and made sure they did not cross to areas where they were not permitted.
“Russell and those that made those decisions did so because they thought it would help them win,'' Rosburg said. "But it wasn’t working. All great competitors think they can do everything and reach perfection and it’s admirable. However, sometimes our reach exceeds our grasp. Russell was trying to do everything he possibly could under his new coach and his new team and his new community, to be successful. He needed to step back and look at his team in a different way. After he made that sacrifice, you saw his teammates support him publicly. They saw what Russell was doing, by putting the team ahead of himself. His career record is impressive. He had done these things previously and they worked for him. I asked him to surrender that. To his credit, to his vast credit, he did that for all those around him and the organization.
“So people can criticize and hold marks against him for whatever it was that was set up – but that was done in good faith by everyone involved. He was the one who had the most to surrender and he humbled himself and he played well those last two games. I think that says a lot about the character of Russell Wilson and he’s one of the other reasons I think they’re going to have a great season.”
In his first 13 games with Hackett as his head coach, Wilson posted an 82.6 passer rating that projected out over a full season would have ranked 29th among quarterbacks in the league. In his final two games, Wilson compiled a 95.6 rating that would have ranked 9th in the league.
From hyperbaric chamber to coaching fire
It was not the typical journey Rosburg took while fulfilling one of his career goals of becoming an NFL head coach. In fact, his journey had reached its end. He was 3 ½ years retired from a long NFL coaching career when Broncos general manager George Paton lured him back as a special coaching advisor in week 3 of last season.
In the COVID year of 2020, Rosburg met NextGen Hyperbaric owner and CEO Jonathan Rotella regarding the treatment for his professional hockey playing son Jared. The company has a clinic at the Swedish Medical Center in Englewood. It’s a two-hour treatment process of which 90 minutes is oxygen pressure. It’s used for treatment of muscle soreness, tears and sprains, as well as broken bone growth and regeneration.
“The concept of hyperbaric – under pressure – its cellular healing,’’ Rosburg said. “A cascade of oxygen that gets to the cells that actually promotes healing within damaged cells and regenerates new cells.’’
From nowhere Rosburg got an unexpected call from Paton, who thought his new head coach, Nathaniel Hackett, could use help in game management after a game 2 embarrassment in which the Broncos’ home crowd was mockingly counting down the play clock for an offense that was struggling to get the play off.
It seemed Rosburg did his job – he made sure to credit the Broncos’ analytics team of Brad Miller, Mark Thewes, Scott Flaska, Mehmet Erden, Kunal Singh and Tony Lazzaro – but the team continued to struggle mightily, especially on offense.
When the Broncos were obliterated 51-14 by the Rams as a stand-alone TV game on Christmas Day, first-year team owner Greg Penner had little choice but to fire Hackett, whose style of giving players the freedom to govern themselves wasn’t the answer. Penner and Paton first approached talented defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero with the interim head coach position for the final two games. But loyalty to Hackett, his close personal friend, led Evero to turn it down.
Next, Paton asked Rosburg, who was attached to neither side of the ball and had been quietly paying attention to all aspects of the team throughout the season.
“When George asked me, I didn’t hesitate, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it,’’’ Rosburg said. “And he said, ‘OK, we have a team meeting in half an hour.’ I said, ‘OK, I better get some things together here.’’’
Rosburg quickly made some dramatic changes. After the team meeting, he fired special teams coordinator Dwayne Stukes. The vast majority of Rosburg’s previous NFL coaching experience was as a special teams coordinator. He knew what special teams was supposed to look like and ranking No. 32 in a 32-league in multiple categories wasn’t it. Later that evening, he let go of offensive line coach Butch Barry.
And in short order Rosburg approached Wilson about surrendering his office and in-house access for his personal coaches.
“While I was doing game management, I had my role. I offered my advice if someone asked. But I wasn’t going to step on any toes,’’ Rosburg said. “I wasn’t going to insert myself into anything that wasn’t part of my description. Because I had my own work to do. In the big picture we as coaches we all have our ideas of how things should look and how they should work. My experiences, I have an idea of how the game should look like and be prepared and treat one another. The structure of it.
“It’s my belief that for any organization to function properly there has to be a certain structure. A certain framework operationally and philosophically. All of that has to be spelled out.’’
Hackett had an agreement with the players that the locker room was the players’ space, and that no one from his coaching staff could enter the players locker room during the week. After Rosburg became interim head coach, he considered the locker room as a metaphor for what had gone wrong with the team.
He had said in one of his initial press conferences, “we need to clean up our own mess.” The locker room was a good place to start.
“When I walked through the locker room in the morning, before anybody arrived, I would see what a mess the locker room was,’’ Rosburg said. “When I became the head coach I saw it as being representative of the state of the team. I respect players not wanting others in the locker room. But they don’t own it. We’re all temporary. The Penners and the Waltons own that space.”
Rosburg asked the player leadership group he had assembled to get the locker room cleaned up. It didn’t happen immediately. He asked them again the next day. Again, nothing changed. Rosburg then decided to walk through the locker room to contend with the territorial agreement.
A prominent player confronted Rosburg, reminding the coach in not so pleasant terms this was the players’ locker room. Without raising his voice, Rosburg told the player the locker room belonged to Mr. Penner, the Broncos’ owner. Treat the locker room with respect, clean it up, and they wouldn’t see him in the locker room again.
The next morning the locker room had been cleaned up. Order had been established.
“You can do structure to the degree where it becomes tyranny,’’ Rosburg said. “You know there’s been coaches who have reset the timing, the clocks to their time. That’s tyranny. If you think you can reframe the setting of the sun just because you’re a coach in the National Football League, I think you’re bordering on tyranny.
“There’s other people that run football teams, you hear this phrase thrown out: he’s a player’s coach. Where they provide freedom to whatever you want to do. Be yourself. And that’s the other approach. I think both have their benefits. But the job of a leader is to put the framework in place that brings out the best in the talent. If you let them do what they want, the result is chaos. If you impose order on everything then the result is tyranny and you won’t get the best out of everybody. It’s the job of a leader to find the balance.”
With Rosburg in charge, the Broncos did look like a more structured, professional team in the final two weeks, did they not? The Broncos gave the eventual Super Bowl champion Chiefs all they wanted and if not for a highly questionable offensive pass-interference call on Courtland Sutton, the Broncos may have gone up two scores late in the third quarter. And then they beat Justin Herbert and Chargers, whose starters played even though they were locked in on their playoff seed, in the finale.
“I was so glad that was the case,’’ Rosburg said. “I was happy we were playing the Kansas City Chiefs and the Chargers. Two very fine teams with talent. Playoff-bound teams. I was happy that was the case because I wanted a test. Let’s see what we’re made of. The only way you’re going to find out is if your tested. I’m sure glad we won a game. I would have liked to have gotten them both but there were very unfortunate circumstances.”
End of season meeting
After the season, Penner and Paton brought Rosburg in for a meeting. The owner and general manager wanted to get the interim coach’s take on the team, players and organization as a whole. Rosburg let it be known near the end of that meeting that he wanted to be considered for the full-time head coaching position.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. The fixer moved on. Did Rosburg feel any resentment he wasn’t kept on as head coach?
“First of all my feelings are dominated by gratitude,’’ he said. “I mean that sincerely. I was so grateful for that opportunity. I didn’t really see it coming down the track that day. I was so grateful because I had never been a head coach in the National Football League. I had aspirations of doing so but it never worked out. I wasn’t resentful of that at all.
“Now when the opportunity came, I was very confident I could do it. I felt like I belonged there. It was comfortable to me. And my family was really excited for me. You couldn’t make up the story. I come off the dock in retirement and suddenly here I am a head coach for the last two games. So I was very grateful to George and to Greg for bringing me in.
“When I was hired they asked me to stick around so I could offer my experience and my evaluations of the operation there. The players, coaches, the organizational structure. So that meeting was a planned meeting. My contract was written so that I would stick around after the season. The expiration date of that contract was the 23rd of January. So that meeting with Greg and George at the end of the year, that was a preplanned meeting.
“We talked about everything. It was a great conversation, a long-lasting conversation. Now at the end of that conversation I told them I should be the next head coach. And why. It didn’t work out that way. That doesn’t reduce my attitude one iota. I’m still very grateful for the opportunity and I understand completely why they hired Sean Payton.
“I think hiring Sean, all the projects like the stadium, the revamping of the organization’s structure within, I think it bodes well for the future. I think the people of Denver should be very happy with who they have running the show there.”
The fixer moves on
After his trip to the Eagles’ camp, where his hyperbaric chambers will be ready for use – the Eagles, by the way, had all 22 starters from their season-opening game last season available for them in Super Bowl LVII – Rosburg will drive to the Ravens’ camp to help out Harbaugh and see how his daughter Megan is doing as Harbaugh’s assistant head coach. And then?
“From that point on I’ll be John Q Citizen,’’ Rosburg said. “I’ll watch my daughter’s games with the Ravens. Perhaps some others. I’m not much of a TV watcher but the Rosburg family is going to get the NFL Ticket this year to keep track of Megan.”
The Broncos? They seem to have a good new head coach. For a brief time, Rosburg showed Broncos Country what coaching can do for a team.
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