New Denver Broncos coach Sean Payton has chosen a very — shall we say — creative way to inspire his new team this offseason.
Speaking with NBC Sports’ Peter King, Payton shared the automotive way that he’s planning on sending the Broncos a message on how to go forward after a dismal 2022 season.
It involves putting an old car in the team’s facility parking lot and taking out the rearview mirror and side mirrors. Get it? So they won’t look back. Hypothetically, if you put a car on the road without a rearview mirror or side mirrors, it’s likely to crash because it doesn’t know how to avoid what’s behind it:
Payton told me he’s going to put an old car front and center in the parking lot so that all players and coaches will see it. He said he’ll have the rearview mirror plus the side mirrors removed from the car. As he said at the Combine, he wants his players and his new organization to look ahead, and not behind, at the nightmare that was the 2022 Broncos season. So if you see a stripped-down old jalopy alongside some very nice vehicles in the Broncos parking lot this season, you’ll know why.
So is Payton telling Denver that they’ll refuse to learn the lessons of yesterday and just drive ahead wantonly toward an even worse disaster? It feels like there were other, much more successful, ways to personify this metaphor.
Broncos fans will have to hope that this old car won’t be the vehicle that the team drives this fall. If it is, all the metaphors in the world won’t save them from crashing. Mirrors are there for a reason, you know.
