Broncos Have Come Out of Gate Stumbling

KANSAS CITY —  Two games, two defeats into 1999 and the World Champs have become overnight chumps.

The Denver Broncos can no longer stop anyone, giving up an average of 345 yards. They cannot score, the same team that averaged more than 31 points a year ago, now posting little more than 15 on the average. And they cannot win, tumbling Sunday to the Chiefs, 26-10, before 78,663 in Arrowhead Stadium.

Consider the depths to which the Broncos have plunged. At the rate they are going, the AFC West Division first-place San Diego Chargers will finish with a better record than the defending Super Bowl champions.

The Chiefs, pegged by most to finish no better than third in the woeful AFC West, couldn’t beat the anemic Bears a week ago. And at the start of this game, their hometown fans were booing their own quarterback, Elvis Grbac, who ain’t nothing but a hound dog in this city.

But Kansas City not only whomped the Broncos, it did so showing no respect, playing a traditional defense against Denver rather than stacking the line to slow down Terrell Davis, the NFL’s most valuable player last season.

“Not very many teams have played the last couple of years with seven men up front and stopped the run the way they did,” Denver Coach Mike Shanahan said. “They just did the job with a four-man rush.”

How the mighty have fallen.

“We just played straight,” new Chief Coach Gunther Cunningham said, “because we’re pretty good on defense.”

Davis, now looking as if he needed John Elway as much as Elway needed him to win twoSuper Bowls, ran 21 times for 79 yards--the second consecutive week he has failed to reach the 100-yard mark.

As a result, the Bronco offense remains grounded. The 10 points marked the lowest output under Shanahan since the final game in 1996, and once again spotlighted his last-minute decision to start this season with sophomore Brian Griese after promising veteran Bubby Brister the opportunity to replace Elway.

“It’s basically the same guys that won the championship last year minus one,” said Denver Owner Pat Bowlen, as perplexed as anyone about his team’s demise.

Minus one, all right, and dramatically affecting the Broncos’ bottom line.

“They’re going through it like every other professional team, when your star quarterback retires you put the next guy in,” Cunningham said. “I think Brian Griese is going to be a good player. I hope they don’t judge him too quick.”

Of course he doesn’t, because with Griese at quarterback, the Bronco offense is predictable. Griese has not shown the ability to go deep, in part because the opposition is going to blitz him and test his mental abilities, forcing him into mistakes and at the same time jamming the line to keep Davis from breaking loose.

Elway had the experience to turn a blitz into a touchdown, or change the play at the line of scrimmage. Brister filled that void a year ago, going 4-0 as a starter in place of an injured Elway, but Shanahan said nothing has changed--Griese will remain his starter.

The Chiefs confounded Griese, forcing him to throw short and be replaced by the punter. He completed 11 of 16 passes for 107 yards with an interception before being pulled in favor of Brister.

Brister, given the chance to seriously stir a quarterback controversy that has already caused turmoil inside the Denver locker room, flopped in relief.

Like Griese, he faltered under pressure, taking the short routes and completing nine of 15 passes for 65 yards, with a rally-killing interception midway in the fourth quarter.

Trailing, 23-10, Brister had moved Denver to the Kansas City 32-yard line, when he attempted to loft a pass over cornerback Eric Warfield to wide receiver Ed McCaffrey. But his pass was short, intercepted by Warfield, and the Broncos left, to prepare this week for Tampa Bay, a team that has yet to let an opposing offense score a touchdown.

“We are not playing good football right now,” said Shanahan, whose team has already lost as many games this year as it did in 19 games last season. “This is a situation that many of our coaches and players have not been in before. I know that I have not been in this situation in 16 years in the National Football League.

“We have started off 0-2, but the Jets started 0-2 last year and ended up pretty good. This is where you see what your football team is made of. Now we’ll find out how we react.”

As bad as the Raiders were when Shanahan was their head coach, they never opened 0-2. But he can take heart from the Dallas Cowboys, who won Super Bowl XXVII, opened the 1993 season 0-2 and then won seven in a row on the way to repeating as champions.

“This is no time to panic,” Denver linebacker Bill Romanowski said. “It doesn’t feel like the same time, but for the most part it is. We just have to get it together.”

The Broncos, however, are not only not the same team on offense and defense, but a team now prone to make mistakes. Last week in the loss to Miami, the Bronco special teams let them down.

This week they damaged their cause with a series of penalties. Offensive tackle Matt Lepsis was penalized five times for false starts, and cornerback Dale Carter, given a $7.8-million signing bonus to leave the Chiefs, helped his former team with illegal contact, wiping out a 13-yard sack on third down and giving Kansas City an automatic first down.

The Chiefs, ahead 16-10 at the time, took advantage of Carter’s poor judgment and scored seven plays later on Bam Morris’ five-yard run for a 23-10 lead with 9:25 to play.

“I didn’t have a great day,” said Carter, blending in nicely with his teammates who have yet to impress. “But it’s a long season, and we will be back.”

The Chiefs, who have their own problems--beginning at quarterback--lost running back Kimble Anders after a career-rushing day with an apparent Achilles’ tendon injury. Anders ran 22 times for 142 yards, which took the heat off Grbac, who finished 15 for 20 for 179 yards, with one interception.

“I told the team we were going to run the ball and play defense, and then run it again and run it some more,” said Cunningham, who didn’t risk success or failure on Grbac’s arm. “You run it and you play defense, and you’re going to win.”

That’s been the Denver formula for success the past years with a dash of Elway added for seasoning at just the right time. But with Griese learning on the job, and Brister unable to deliver, the Broncos look cooked after just two games.

“Anybody who writes us off is premature,” Griese said. “We need a change in attitude. We need to come out and play like we come to dominate the other team.”

This season, however, it’s just not going to happen.