Shanny’s strength has always been his offense. Even in the latter years under Cutler, the offense was very strong, albeit turnover prone. Probably his worse years offensively were under Brian Griese. The Shanny offense is running out on the perimeter with zone blocking and keep the QB booting. Then when the weakside DE or weakside backer start over committing, they’ll go play action with the boot. I think a big thing Shanny’s offense will face is that I don’t think this works quite as well against 3-4 schemes as it will against 4-3 schemes, mainly because 3-4 OLB’s are more athletic and tend to line up out wider than the typical 4-3 DE. Still, it’s a sound scheme, the big thing is getting the right O-Linemen for the zone blocking, not getting RB’s that absolutely suck, and getting a QB who is really good at bootlegs. Shanny has said he liked Romo a lot out of college (and as a pro QB) and actually offered Romo the max amount ($20K) to come into Broncos training camp as a UDFA, but Romo took the Cowboys’ lesser offer because his competition was Quincy and Hutchinson. It’s easy to see why Shanny liked Romo given Romo’s ability outside of the pocket…it would fit very well into Shanny’s bootleg centric offense.
With Jake Plummer, he had a guy good at the bootlegs, but he could only trust him for about 25 throws. If they needed to throw more than that, they were doomed. When the Broncos went against the Steelers in ’05, a 3-4 scheme, their bootleg centric offense was pretty much told to go get their shine box.
With Cutler they had a pretty good bootleg QB (Plummer IMO was better at the bootlegs) and a very good pocket passer, but a mistake prone QB. Although IMO the real issue was the defense and the Broncos having to air it out and take chances.
But Shanny’s weakness has always been his defenses, questionable drafting and his inability to allow certain players to get out of his doghouse. While the Haynesworth situation is untenable and I don’t think many coaches would let Haynesworth out of their doghouse, Shanny has had issues with various players for even silly stuff and winds up benching them and letting them go only to see them perform well somewhere else. That really doesn’t do the team any good. His drafts were often inconsistent. Remember, this is the guy that drafted Maurice Clarett in the 3rd round not too long ago when it was pretty well documented that he might be the biggest headcase in NFL history.
And of course the defense has really plagued Shanny’s career.
With Elway and Terrell Davis they had this super explosive offense that dominated in the run game. So that gives them a high scoring offense that could really run the ball. I would always vote for Davis to be in the HoF because if you look at his numbers and compare them to Earl Campbell’s, I think most would take Davis. They were downright phenomenal. With Elway, you had a good bootlegging QB who was good from the pocket and didn’t turn the ball over a lot. So you get an explosive offense that scores a ton of points and dominates the time of possession and doesn’t turn the ball over. That would make any defense’s job easy.
I don’t think that Elway was *so much* behind Shanny’s early success, but more the combination of Elway and Davis and anything less than that combination made Shanny still pretty successful, but not nearly as good as he once was. And after awhile teams started to figure out how to control their running attack and that’s why latter years were pretty average to mediocre.
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