John Elway played against some of the NFL’s most fearsome defensive players and in some of the biggest games when he was the quarterback of the Broncos from 1983-98. Yet his most difficult challenge in pro football comes as the Broncos’ executive vice president of football operations.
Elway wants to balance the team’s long-term mission with the team’s short-term necessity. If that balancing act works, times will be good. If it doesn’t work, the Broncos will be just another NFL team with holes in the depth chart and salary cap issues.
Free-agent quarterback Peyton Manning represents Elway’s desire to keep the Broncos relevant now. The Broncos would have to devote a lot of their salary cap space to Manning for him to play his home games in Denver. And they would have to sign other players to give Manning some help. Every personnel evaluator in the NFL that I have spoken to believes the team that signs Manning will also try to sign wide receiver Reggie Wayne, who starred with Manning in Indianapolis.
But when Elway was hired, he said “it’s important for us to build through the draft. We have to get our core guys through the draft. (In) free agency we would like to add to weak spots, but we are not going to make our team through free agency. We are going to make this team a championship team by drafting the right guys. … Drafting is obviously very tough and that is something we have to be good at.”
Elway was in Stillwater, Okla., evaluating quarterback Brandon Weeden the same day he was courting Manning. That’s a football team’s decision maker doing his due diligence leading up to the April 26-28 draft, getting cleats-on-the-ground intel. Meanwhile, Elway and the Broncos are trying to say that the future is both now and, well, the future.
Jeff Legwold: jlegwold@denverpost.com
