The press conference started on time.
With militaristic precision, Greg Penner and George Paton walked into the Broncos team meeting room at 9:59 a.m. for their scheduled 10 a.m. question-and-answer session. At 10, Penner said, “Good morning, everyone.”
And that was the first sign that things are going to be different after the dismissal of Nathaniel Hackett.
You see, when things go down the drain, the descent often starts with the details. The small things that don’t mean much, but add up to something massive. It’s what Vic Fangio, in one of the moments of brilliance that were sadly infrequent in his three seasons as head coach, meant when he talked about “death by inches” at his tenure-opening briefing in 2019.
And for the last few months, the press conferences didn’t start at the scheduled time.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. One week after another, people would wait. A scheduled 11:50 briefing became more likely to start at 12:05. If Green Bay in the 1960s was on “Lombardi Time” — with the clocks 15 minutes fast — the Broncos became defined by “Hackett Time,” which was 15 minutes late.
In a way, the experience became oddly reliable. But it was a leading indicator of the things going awry in a Broncos season that will see the franchise match its club record for single-season defeats unless it can sweep Kansas City and the Los Angeles Chargers in the next fortnight.
Being a few minutes late is the start. A sideline fight involving a shove by the team’s Man of the Year nominee and a punch thrown by the club’s biggest free-agent acquisition last March is the culmination.
And this week, Penner made it clear that he had seen enough from the coach he inherited.
He spent the season observing and evaluating the Broncos operation from stem to stern. It’s part and parcel of learning about the business into which he, his wife, Carrie Walton Penner and her father, Rob Walton, bought at a record purchase price.
Monday, the learning stopped. Penner took the wheel.
The Walton-Penner group officially bought the Broncos on Aug. 9.
But on Boxing Day 2022 — 139 days later — it became their team. Their show. They are the collective period that ends every sentence in orange and blue.
They will hire the next coach. Penner, his wife, Walton and fellow owner Condoleezza Rice will be on the search committee.
Paton will be involved, but Hackett’s eventual replacement “will report to me,” Penner said.
And that new coach will learn: Penner has a demanding — but justifiable — standard. And he doesn’t want to dither and wait to make it right.
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“I’M IMPATIENT”
Indeed, impatient enough to make Hackett the quickest non-interim coach fired in Broncos history — and with a coaching tenure that was shorter than all but six non-interim NFL head coaches since 1970.
At one point Tuesday, Penner let that sentiment slip. It was in response to a question about injuries and the role of a new head coach in reviewing the team’s calamitous injury rate in recent years.
Penner, as it turns out, doesn’t want to wait for a new coach to find answers.
“The new head coach will definitely be involved in that, but I tend to be impatient,” Penner said, noting that a review is ongoing — with input from Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer.
In some NFL organizations, change can be glacial. Status quo is defended — often at great cost to innovation and even the workplace environment and experience for employees themselves. “This is the way it’s always been done” is a sentiment that exists in too many corners of the sport.
With Penner at the wheel, those days are over in Denver.
Which is why when he reached his breaking point with Hackett and the embarrassing state of affairs, he didn’t want to wait for the end of the season. As Penner admitted, he wasn’t heading into Los Angeles thinking about sacking the beleaguered coach right then.
“We would have liked to have been patient until the end of the season to make a decision at that point,” Penner said. “We didn’t go into this week thinking this was a time we were going to make a change
“But after the effort that we put forward on Sunday and some of the things that were going on off the field, we just felt like it was time to make a decision.”
What you saw on Sunday — the shoddy effort, the loss of composure on the sideline and after the game, the ease with which the injury-battered Rams diced up the Broncos — resonated with Penner on a visceral level.
The Broncos ruined your Christmas as a fan.
They ruined Penner’s holiday, too. At a big, Kroenke-Walton-Penner family gathering at SoFi Stadium, the Broncos were the lout who showed up at the table inebriated and spouting conspiracy theories about lizard people and the Illuminati.
And so, what he decided would be done eventually needed to happen immediately. With that, Hackett became the second-quickest coach shown the door since 1979. Only Urban Meyer lost his job faster.
“Once we had made that decision, it was in all fairness to the organization and to Nathaniel,” Penner said. “We felt we needed to move forward and make the change.”
To paraphrase Popeye, Penner had all he could stand. He couldn’t stands no more.
“Part of this decision was seeing something that wasn’t up to our standard,” Penner said, “and making the decision to move forward and have that clear to the whole organization.”
Penner knew what it meant to sack a coach after a tenure as brief as Hackett’s.
He did so, anyway.
Which says a great deal about what he expects.
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“I’M SORRY”
And the failure of this season was also something Penner took personally. He’s still learning about the nuances of the sport and the business that surrounds it.
But his involvement in Walmart taught him something about customer satisfaction — and how to handle the lack thereof.
Broncos Country is pissed. And over 18,000 empty seats at the Week 15 game against Arizona shows that some of its members have reached a state of apathy.
But around flat screens from Craig to Campo and everywhere in between, epithets and remote controls flew as Sunday’s game devolved into a debacle. One look at social media showed that despite a sixth-consecutive losing record in a lost season, that the vast majority of fans CARE.
And it is to those fans that he said the two words that can be so difficult to utter, but drip with meaning when uttered sincerely:
“I’m sorry.”
“The main message I said from the beginning is, ‘I’m sorry to the fans,'” Penner said. “The frustration of a number of losing seasons is high, but this season, it’s even higher because of the expectations that we had going in.”
A moment later, he added, “Our fans have been patient. We have the best fans in the world, but we need to put a better product on the field.”
He knows it.
Penner and his family spent the season learning the landscape. By and large, others who they inherited pointed the way.
But now, he has the reins.
And for reasons big and small, he showed that this is his show, and it’s going to be different. Success and competency are expected — and expected in every way.
Like a press conference that actually started on time.