I was through about 20 minutes with new Broncos coach Nathaniel Hackett, and that’s where he stopped me in my tracks. It was Saturday afternoon—he was fresh out of draft meetings, less than 72 hours away from the start of his first offseason program in Denver—and he might as well have been shot out of a cannon as he digested the point I’d been waiting to make with him.
Specifically, I asked if the challenge he’s facing is a little different than it is for most first-year coaches, since the great majority come into situations broken by definition—the job wouldn’t have been open otherwise—and, as such, might be afforded some semblance of a honeymoon phase.
“First and foremost I want to clarify something when you talk about ,” he said. “I don’t think that exists anymore. I think in this profession, because of the way that society is, everybody wants to win now. Look at what happened in Jacksonville [where he coached from 2015 to ’18]. We jumped in, we win, the next year we’re supposed to win the Super Bowl and I’m losing my job. So it’s like wherever you enter in, you gotta win, or you at least have to show signs of getting better and showing improvement to be able to win.
“You can’t be getting blown out. You can’t look like a fool. You gotta have people in sync, working together. And as a leader, you have to point that out. Even through adversity, there are things that are very good that come from that. For us, when we went into Green Bay, it was the same pressure to win that I had at Jacksonville. Nothing was going to, ‘Hey, Blake Bortles played so great, he got a contract …’ No. S—, you gotta win.”
A new era is underway in Denver, and it hits another checkpoint this week.
On Tuesday morning, new quarterback Russell Wilson and most (if not all) of the players making up the roster that helped lure him to Colorado a couple months ago will spill through the doors in Dove Valley to kick off the 42-year-old Hackett’s first offseason program as a head coach. What they find when they get there will be, to be sure, a little bit different than what most are used to.
And really, getting the guys to feel that is where Hackett’s going to start this week.
“You want them to feel an environment that they want to come into, and they’re excited to come into,” he continued. “That’s all you can do, that’s what you’re trying to create. My philosophy is I want everything we’re doing now—it’s voluntary, it’s all voluntary, so I want them to be excited to come into the building. That’s my job; my job is to make it so that they’re like, .”
From there, everyone, including Hackett, knows the score. The Broncos went into the offseason believing, after GM George Paton’s first year, they were close to contention. Wilson’s decision to weaponize his no-trade clause and steer himself to them was only more affirmation of that, and Hackett, you can be certain, isn’t running from it.
So, no, he won’t ask for a honeymoon. As he said, he hasn’t gotten them in the past, and he doesn’t want one now.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a very deliberate plan that’s playing out.
