It has been an interesting post-season since Peyton Manning stepped back into his roll as lead Bronco during the final two quarters of the season ending San Diego Charger victory.
Starting off, as an NFL fan since the late 70’s I like to see team movement errors corrected and the announcement the Los Angeles Rams are back in action is huge. The LA team question has been addressed and I would like to see our fellow AFC West cities of Oakland and San Diego finally solve their playing field issues and keep the division match-ups in the same locations.
The play on the field during the playoffs has been really entertaining. The first round of games saw the four lowest seeds go on the road and win but when they traveled to play teams that earned byes none of them advanced. It’s pretty rare when no team from the 1st round makes it to a conference championship and the top AFC & NFC teams meet in the Super Bowl as Denver and the Carolina Panthers will in San Francisco Feb. 7th.
The New England Patriots (defending AFC/World champs) left Denver Sunday cursing the red-eyed Bronco at DIA after failing to reach an NFL record 9th Super Bowl appearance. The Broncos gain a tie for the lead in that stat as the standings of teams appearing in 8 Super Bowls looks like this: Steelers 6-2 Cowboys 5-3 Patriots 4-4 Broncos ?-? (I can’t bring myself to guess the result of the game but our current record is 2-5).
Denver now sports an 8-2 record in the AFC Championship game since the merger in 1970 (Oak. 4-7, S.D. 1-3, K.C. 0-1). Those two loses are the brutal 2005 Pittsburgh Steeler loss here and a January 1992 loss to the Buffalo Bills when Gary Kubiak played a great game in relief of John Elway in the 10-7 defeat.
On the positive side, how great would it be to be able to see the Broncos play all 16 NFC clubs at least once in the Super Bowl? Those 8 wins occured the same weekend 8 different NFC champs were crowned . We are half-way to 16 having gone against Dallas, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Green Bay, Atlanta and now Carolina. I am guessing it’s pretty slim odds to have it work out that way.
My NFL Since 1970 publication is just weeks away from updating and as I have mentioned before it will be Denver’s first off-season spent as the NFL team with the 2nd best winning percentage of all regular season games played since the merger (712 games total). Currently it is the Pittsburgh Steelers at 433-277-2 .609 and Denver posting a 417-289-6 .590 record. The publication is my effort to show what a great team I have been a fan of for a long time. I make a version for all 32 teams but my goal is to see the Broncos at #1 by the 2020 season when we celebrate 50 seasons since the merger and 100 seasons since the NFL started in 1920.
If you would like to hear me speak about Bronco/NFL history I will be at the Forney Transportation Museum Jan. 30th at 1:00 and at the City Stacks book store in LODO Feb.6th.