This week, as his former Broncos were preparing to start their quarterback camp, Jake Plummer packed up his favorite T-shirts and knapsack and moved back home to Idaho.
He left behind some impressive team records for Jay Cutler to shoot for, none more so than Plummer’s 4,089 passing yards in 2004 and four- year, regular-season mark of 39-15.
As for the Broncos’ playbook, Plummer could have buried it in the Sawtooth Mountains for all it matters. The book used by the nimble- footed, arm-challenged Plummer was loaded with bootleg diagrams, but the deeper pass patterns were all but sealed.
The strong-armed Cutler not only will cause coach Mike Shanahan and offensive assistant Mike Heimer- dinger to dust off the long-throw, big-play pages, but move them closer to the jacket cover.
“I heard someone saying the other day that they feel like they’re going to be able to do things they haven’t done since No. 7 was around,” Broncos safety John Lynch said. “Every time someone says that I cringe. It is just not fair to Jay. But I think Jay has some special qualities that will allow us to do some special things in terms of pocket passing and the concepts you can do within that.”
No. 7, for those who just now became old enough to read, will forever belong to John Elway in Broncos lore. Cutler is five Super Bowl appearances, more than 50,000 passing yards, innumerable scrambles and one helicopter spin shy of matching Elway’s career. But that roll to the left, pass 40 yards downfield to the right is one of the Duke’s signature plays Cutler can duplicate.
“I don’t want to take anything away from Jake Plummer, because he won 70 percent of our games and he did a lot of great things when he was here,” Shanahan said. “But it’s a new era, and we have a quarterback with different skills.”
More than the deep ball, Cutler will encourage Shanahan and Heimerdinger to call more passing plays on third downs. Too many times with Plummer last season, the calls coming in from the Broncos’ sideline dripped with timidity.
On third-and-3 or longer, the Broncos ran the ball an alarming 32 times in 127 such plays with Plummer, or 25.2 percent. Even Travis Henry, the Broncos’ new running back with three seasons of at least 1,200 yards, would have trouble picking up 3 yards on third down against today’s NFL defenses.
When the rookie Cutler was taking snaps last season, the Broncos rushed only six of 50 plays on third-and-3 or longer, or 12 percent.
With Javon Walker available for a full offseason at No. 1 receiver, the blossoming potential of second-year targets Tony Scheffler and Brandon Marshall, and the skill-position additions of Henry and tight end Daniel Graham, the Broncos seemingly have enough offensive weapons to never throw caution into Cutler’s helmet speaker.
But nothing quite opens up a playbook like confidence in the quarterback.
“I’m sure we’ll take some shots down the field a little bit more, but we have Travis back there so we’re still going to pound it,” Cutler said. “I think we’re just trying to clean up some stuff from last year, simplify some stuff. Get a lot of the gray area out of there. We get all that cleaned up, get everyone on the same page, we’ll be fine.”
As Plummer and the Broncos scuffled through the first six games last season, averaging a mere 13.2 points, a disconnect between the quarterback and play-callers became apparent. At least it became obvious to those watching Plummer and Shanahan scream at each other on the sideline. It was usually a conservative play call that set Plummer off.
This led many to conclude Plummer missed his old offensive coordinator, Gary Kubiak, who left the Broncos before last season to become head coach of the Houston Texans.
If it’s true Kubiak’s departure affected Plummer, there is no fear such a problem will exist this year. Cutler and Heimer -dinger, Kubiak’s replacement, broke in together last year.
“The work ethic he has and the way he sees things, it’s hard to not like the guy,” Heimer- dinger said. “We met even before he started playing last year, and then when he started playing, we had a lot of 6 in the morning meetings before anybody got in here. Since we’ve started together, it’s been pretty good.”
It may not make for good television, but a more harmonious relationship between the quarterback and the people transmitting the play calls may bring less pause and more gumption to the next play call.
“Me and Dinger, we kind of think alike,” Cutler said. “I think we have the same goals and concepts of where we want this offense to go, so it’s been fun working with him so far.”
Staff writer Mike Klis can be reached at 303-954-1055 or mklis@denverpost.com.
Sophomore slingers
Broncos quarterback Jay Cutler is likely to air out his throws even more this season. Here are some prominent QBs who received significant playing time as a rookie, then passed for more yards per attempt in their second season:
Quarterback 1st 2nd
John Elway 6.42 6.84
Ben Roethlisberger 8.88 8.90
Peyton Manning 6.50 7.76
Eli Manning 5.29 6.75
Donovan McNabb 4.39 5.91
Steve McNair 7.11 8.37
Alex Smith 5.30 6.54
Troy Aikman 5.97 6.47
Dan Marino 7.47 9.01
Jay Cutler 7.31 –
