Home, bleep home.
The Broncos, as most everyone except Paris Hilton knows, have lost three in a row at home and won three in a row on the road.
Bob Armbruster and I are solutions-oriented.
“Shanny should treat the Chiefs game like a road game, do everything they do on the road . . . and see if it resonates with the team,” wrote Armbruster. “My dad carried me to a game on his shoulders when I was 2, back in 1960. I’ve been a lifelong Broncos fan.”
I’ve tweaked Bob’s idea.
On Saturday morning the Broncos’ players should set their watches to Eastern Standard Time, say goodbye to family and friends, kiss their dogs and board a chartered flight, which would fly for three hours over Wyoming and then loop back down and land in Colorado Springs. The players and coaches would be bused to the Holiday Inn Express in Castle Rock. (They traditionally check into a local swank hotel the night before the game). The clocks in the rooms would be set two hours ahead by the motel’s staff.
“Are you a brain surgeon?” someone would ask a player Sunday morning?
“No, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”
On Sunday the Broncos would take buses north on I-25 and get ready, in their white road jerseys, in the visitors’ locker room. When they stream onto the field (to the visitors’ sideline), the fans would boo and call them names.
And the Broncos win 45-0. Ahem.
Bob, “We’ll Always Have” Paris and I know the Broncos won’t go to that extreme, but they do need to do something radical to turn the clocks back to when it seems they never lost at home.
The Broncos were 24-0 in the regular season at old Mile High Stadium from 1996-98. They are 12-10 at Mile High from 2006-08. Shanny knows.
Denver used to be the most feared place to play in the NFL. Now, it’s just another bump in the road.
The taxpayers of the six-county metro area paid the majority of the expenses to build the new stadium.
Pat Bowlen got his new stadium. He’s paying for it.
He wanted many more lavish luxury suites, a club level with well-appointed indoor bars, higher ticket costs for seats with extravagant cup-holders and a high-end South Stands.
He drove the old, rough-and-rowdy South Standers to the upper regions, and priced thousands of others out of the stadium and into La-Z-Boy loungers, from where they could watch the games on big-screen HDTVs in the warmth of their homes.
So many old-time Broncos fans, who proudly would recite their priority seating number from the 1960s, began to retire and/or move away, and others lost interest in a different kind of team and sold their season tickets, or passed them along to sons and granddaughters.
My friends couldn’t wait for the next home game at the old Mile High. They loved the Broncos (and had an orange toilet seat in their bathroom) and enjoyed the ritual of sitting on Sundays with rows of people they had come to be close to (literally and figuratively) during 20 to 30 seasons. The husband died; the wife stopped going because she couldn’t enjoy the games without him and afford the tickets anymore, and the folks around them had disappeared, replaced by strangers who didn’t share conversation, or coffee, or cheers.
A longtime season-ticket holder called recently to say that different sightseers drop into the seats surrounding him for each game. “They don’t even care about the chants or the wave or making noise and stomping your feet when the other team’s on offense. They just want to get drunk and say they were there, then they leave when it gets a little cold. And we’re stuck with a silent stadium and that lame ‘in-com-plete’ thing.”
What the Broncos are left with are fairweather fans. Some Sundays those fans would rather shop. In the suites, behind closed windows, the “guests” eat shrimp and talk about the stock market — and don’t even know the score. On the club level, hundreds get out of the rain, stand at the bar and sometimes stare at the game on TV. In the stands, people come and go when the Broncos trail by three or lead by one. The booing of the no-show numbers has diminished as the no-show numbers have steadily increased.
At the beginning of the third quarter of the Broncos’ 1979 game against New England, with the Broncos leading 38-7, I looked out at the snowstorm blanketing the stadium and nobody had left.
The Broncos supposedly have “sold out” every game since 1970. The dirty secret is that Broncos tickets are on sale every week, and some go unsold. Upper level tickets for the Kansas City game are available on StubHub for $37. The Broncos’ ticket office sells those tickets for $45.
The Broncos should declare Sunday “The 12th Man Game” to salute the true fans and try to get the new fans involved.
Brandon Marshall was absolutely right last year when he chastised the fickle fans.
If you’re a 12th man, woman or child, come early Sunday, stick it out to the end, cheer and chant for your Broncos and help them win a vital home, sweet home game.
Woody Paige: 303-954-1095 or wpaige@denverpost.com
