The Broncos today fired Mike Shanahan, their two-time Super Bowl-winning coach, who had spent a total of 21 seasons in Denver as an assistant and head coach.  Count me among the shocked.

I got to know Shanahan and Broncos owner Pat Bowlen pretty well, and recognized that their relationship was as much a friendship as a business partnership. Bowlen once described it to me as a marriage — a marriage suffused with trust. Before the 2007 season, when he extended Shanahan’s contract through 2011, Bowlen told me: “He might as well know that I have the faith in him until he and I both agree it’s probably the end of his coaching career.”

The owner deferred to Shanahan on just about every internal football decision, on and off the field, like sacking the GM who was with the team for 16 years, Ted Sundquist, after a season that could hardly have been blamed on the front office. Some people in Denver viewed their relationship as too one way, that Shanny had Pat’s number. But Bowlen’s no pushover, and no fool. He doesn’t make decisions to respond to public pressure; he is justifiably proud of the competent operational systems that he and Shanahan imposed over the years; and he understands as well as any owner I’ve ever met in any sport that operating a professional franchise is a fickle endeavor, that success is cyclical, especially in a league like the NFL, and dependent on too many outside factors. (Look at how many injuries the Broncos suffered this season.)

I haven’t spoken to either Bowlen or Shanahan, but I’d be surprised if one of two things didn’t happen: If something didn’t flip in their relationship, if Shanahan maybe overstepped his sense of security, perhaps in refusing the day after the team’s season-ending blowout in San Diego to agree with Pat’s apparent request to make changes to the coaching staff, as my friend Jeff Legwold of the Rocky Mountain News reports. Or, maybe more likely, if Bowlen didn’t just conclude that the franchises’s long-term business (and football) prospects would be improved by a change.

But this isn’t your garden-variety firing. Shanahan is no Mangenius anymore, some young, disposable coach. Love him or hate him — and fans do both, of course — he’s an institution in Denver. Players and executives griped about Shanahan’s omnipotence, about his entrenched habits and routines, but I never once heard anyone question his abilities as an organizer and a coach.

There was a fundamental belief, even a cockiness, that the Broncos had figured out how to make an NFL organization operate efficiently and effectively, that the team wouldn’t win every year but it wouldn’t embarrass itself if it didn’t. But after three really bad seasons in a row — a run that I think began with the benching of Jake Plummer when the Broncos were 7-4 in 2006, but that’s just me — the Teflon may have worn off. I wouldn’t say Mike Shanahan was the Great and Mighty Wizard, but he certainly stopped looking quite so invincible, maybe even to Bowlen.

Tags: Broncos, Mike Shanahan fired, Pat Bowlen

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.