Sean Payton has seen the mountaintop, metaphorically speaking.
Where the Denver Nuggets currently stand atop the basketball world, flag planted and nothing but thin air above, he’s been there in football.
apEO Greg Penner has literally seen the mountaintop. Many of them, actually, including Mt. Everest and the highest peak on several other continents. So Payton had his boss address his team Thursday morning, the final day before summer break arrives, in a meeting to convey real-life beta illustrating the football journey ahead.
“There’s a process involved in that — weeks, months,” Payton said of the long climb on Thursday as Denver wrapped up its three-day mandatory minicamp and finished its offseason program. “And yet the descent down can take place in a day and a half or two days.”
In the Broncos’ team room, Payton said, was a photo of the Rocky Mountains with an ‘X’ marking the team’s current location: base camp.
“We can’t afford in this journey to decide to hang out at base camp for two weeks or go backward,” Payton said. “We’ve got to acclimate. One or the other is happening. I don’t like the term ‘maintain.’ So I gave my completely rookie, generic version of what I thought it would be and then I asked Greg to help me with it and realized I was clueless relative to climbing mountains.
“The work going north is much more treacherous, difficult, challenging, and itap very easy for that to slip.”
Though Denver and the rest of the NFL now arrive at the longest stretch of the calendar that approaches a true break, the idea is to avoid sliding back when players and coaches return for training camp in late July.
“Itap a chance to get away from the structure of certain times (of the year),” Payton said of the next several weeks. “But at the same time I think these guys understand that, man, there’s been a large investment here this offseason and it can escape us pretty quickly.”
Players today have all kinds of data that can tell them where they’re at physically. Practice output is measured, and the smallest details about changes in performance can be tracked precisely.
Measuring the progress of an entire team this time of year, though, is tricky work. Letter grades get assigned to free-agent and draft classes, players and coaches speak generally in positive terms and there’s no scoreboard to serve as judge and jury.
Payton’s not particularly interested in that part of the equation.
“It seems like every day on Twitter we’re grading something,” Payton said. “I’m not putting a grade on it. I’m pleased with our attendance, I’m pleased with our health right now, I think the guys are working hard. And yet, itap June. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
The longtime New Orleans coach has been through this stage of the offseason dozens of times as a head coach and assistant, but not with an entirely new group since 2006 with the Saints.
He acknowledged itap difficult to know exactly where a team stands before the pads come on and before games begin.
“The unique thing about the offseason compared to the season is, in the offseason, all 32 teams are kind of running this race with blinders on,” Payton said. “I don’t know how the three other teams in our division are at this point. I don’t know where they’re at. I have to assume they’re going in a certain direction. From an experience standpoint and historically for me, I always feel like when the season gets near, training camp — and this will be the case this year — I always say I’m anxious to see what kind of team we have. There are a lot of things that can dictate that, especially in the first four weeks of the season.”
No summits in sight yet. Not for a while. Heading into the summer break, Payton’s only worried about incremental elevation gain.
“To the conditioning level, to the strength, to the running, to the offseason program, I like where we’re at now,” he said.
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