Like me, you and the San Diego Chargers, Brandon Stokley can sense that the Broncos’ 2008 season is on the brink. That’s the easy part. What’s much more difficult to ascertain — even for someone in the Denver locker room — is whether the three-game losing streak the team rides into Cleveland tonight is merely a rough patch or a harbinger of total collapse.
“You really have no choice but to go one way or the other,” the wide receiver said. “I think we have too much talent and too much character to let it affect us the rest of the season. You have to have the mind-set every week, whether you win or lose, that it’s behind you and you move on to the next game.
“If you don’t, you get stuck in a rut. We can’t let that happen to us. People get frustrated. It’s an emotional game, but you have to let it go. That’s what the good teams always do.”
These days it’s hard to tell what constitutes a good team. Are the Cowboys? The Jaguars?
San Diego was a near-consensus choice to at least return to the AFC championship game this season, but started 2-3. The Chargers thought they’d turned their season around with a dominating victory over New England, but laid an enormous egg against New Orleans the next week.
“That’s just life in the National Football League,” Broncos coach Mike Shanahan said. “I’ve had these conversations before. In 2000 we were sitting here at 4-4 after getting beat by Cincinnati and we wind up at 11-5 and everything was great.
“It’s a grind, but you just have to keep working. You work on the things you do poorly and you get better and then you have the chance to do something special.”
After barely missing the playoffs with a 10-6 record last season, the Browns thought they would be in that special category this year. But they are 3-5 and giving Brady Quinn his first start at quarterback tonight.
For any slumping NFL team, the process of righting the ship is a difficult one. Unlike baseball, basketball or hockey, with their seemingly infinite seasons, football is a tornado, an intense 16-week set. And each defeat seems to create more problems.
One of the league’s biggest surprises this season may not be that the Tennessee Titans are 8-0, but that the team wasn’t waylaid after its opening game, when quarterback Vince Young not only was injured, but seemed afterward to be going through some sort of mental trauma to the point where his mother and even the Nashville police became involved.
The Browns, first with the controversy surrounding tight end Kellen Winslow’s staph infection, and now, with the demotion of Derek Anderson and the promotion of Quinn, haven’t been as lucky as Tennessee. And now the Broncos are undergoing their own trials and tribulations, such as in the aftermath of Sunday’s loss to Miami, when wide receiver Brandon Marshall questioned his team’s defensive scheme.
“When you start pointing the finger, saying the offense ain’t doing this or the defense ain’t doing that . . . when that happens, it’s a wrap. Your season’s going to be over. The team will divide and separate and it’ll be hard to get back any momentum that you might have had earlier,” Broncos running back Michael Pittman said.
“We’ve had inklings of it, but you can’t do that. We have to stay together. If you get the defense talking about offense and the offense about the defense, then you start getting shouting matches in the locker room. What we need is to stay positive and to pick each other up.”
Of course, that may be easier said than done, particularly for a young team such as Denver, whose players aren’t accustomed to the roller coaster nature of an NFL season. That’s where veterans such as Stokley could prove to be invaluable by providing a sense of perspective.
“In this league, no team is ever perfect, except for maybe the Patriots last year, so you’re always having to deal with the ups and downs,” he said. “When I was with the Ravens, we lost three or four games in a row and we couldn’t score a touchdown, and we ended up winning the Super Bowl.
“When I was with the Colts, we had a horrible December. We gave up 375 yards rushing to Jacksonville and got beat by something like 40 points. We lost to the Texans a week and a half later, but a month and a half later, we win the Super Bowl.
“It’s out there. Look at the Giants last year, they started off horrible, but you have to just keep plugging away. You can’t let last week dictate the next.”
Anthony Cotton: 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com
