Denver Broncos

The Denver Broncos are one of the great success stories in professional football — a franchise that began as an AFL afterthought in ill-fitting vertically-striped socks and slowly, stubbornly built itself into one of the NFL's marquee organizations, a team synonymous with the thin air and fierce pride of the Rocky Mountain West. Denver has won three Super Bowls, produced two of the greatest quarterbacks in league history, and cultivated a fanbase so loyal and so loud that the mile-high altitude is only part of the reason visiting teams struggle to breathe at Empower Field.

The early years were lean. The Broncos were founding members of the AFL in 1960 and spent their first decade and a half as lovable losers, the kind of team that inspired devotion precisely because they were terrible. The franchise's fortunes turned with the arrival of head coach Red Miller and the "Orange Crush" defense in the late 1970s, a unit that carried Denver to its first Super Bowl appearance after the 1977 season. But it was John Elway who transformed the Broncos from a regional curiosity into a national powerhouse. Acquired in the famous 1983 draft-day trade, Elway was the most electrifying quarterback of his era — a scrambling, cannon-armed improviser who engineered "The Drive," "The Fumble," and three Super Bowl appearances in four years in the late 1980s. Those teams lost all three championship games, and Elway's legacy seemed destined to be defined by close-but-not-quite — the greatest quarterback who couldn't win the big one.

Then he won two. The 1997 and 1998 Broncos, powered by Elway, Terrell Davis's devastating rushing attack, and Mike Shanahan's zone-blocking scheme, won back-to-back Super Bowls and rewrote the franchise's narrative overnight. Elway retired as a champion, Davis was the most dominant postseason running back in history before a knee injury cut his career short, and Denver had cemented its place among the NFL's elite. The post-Elway years brought inconsistency until Peyton Manning arrived in 2012, choosing Denver in free agency and leading the Broncos to four consecutive division titles, a record-setting 2013 offense, and ultimately Super Bowl 50 after the 2015 season — a championship won not by Manning's fading arm but by one of the most dominant defenses in NFL history, led by Von Miller's legendary performance.

What followed Manning's retirement was the longest sustained drought of the modern Broncos era. From 2016 through 2023, Denver missed the playoffs every single season — eight consecutive losing or mediocre campaigns that included the disastrous Russell Wilson trade, a blockbuster deal that was supposed to restore the franchise to contention and instead became one of the worst transactions in NFL history. The Sean Payton hire in 2023 was the organization's bet on a proven winner to fix things, and the selection of Bo Nix in the 2024 draft signaled a new direction. Nix showed promise as a rookie, and the Walton-Penner ownership group — which purchased the team for a record $4.65 billion in 2022 — has shown a willingness to invest. The Broncos are no longer the dumpster fire of the post-Manning years, but they are not yet back to the standard that Elway, Davis, Manning, and Miller set. In Denver, that standard is the only one that matters, and the current regime knows that anything less than a return to championship contention will not satisfy a fanbase that has tasted glory and refuses to settle for less.