The Cutler Era
The Broncos surprisingly drafted a quarterback, Jay Cutler, following the season in which Plummer nearly led them to the Super Bowl. Plummer’s erratic 2006 performance led to his benching in favor of Cutler 12 games into the season. Cutler would go on to lead the Broncos to a 2–3 record in the team's last five games. The Broncos finished the 2006 season tied for the last Wild Card spot with the Chiefs, with a 9–7 record, but lost the tiebreaker due to the Chiefs owning the better AFC West record (4–2 to the Broncos 3–3).
The 2006 season marked longtime wide receiver Rod Smith's last season as a Bronco after 13 seasons. A hip injury that required two hip replacement surgeries effectively ended Smith's career prior to the 2007 season, and Smith officially retired in July 2008.
2007 marked Jay Cutler's first full season as the Broncos' starting quarterback. However, the team suffered through several injuries to key players, including Rod Smith, Tom Nalen, Ben Hamilton, Javon Walker, Jarvis Moss and Ebenezer Ekuban, and finished the season with a 7–9 record, the team's first losing season since 1999. Perhaps the most notable event was a Monday Night Football home loss to the Green Bay Packers, in which the team set a franchise record for tickets distributed for the game, with 77,160 tickets (76,645 fans attended the game). 2007 also marked longtime placekicker Jason Elam's last season in a Broncos uniform after 15 seasons. Elam played with the Atlanta Falcons from 2008–2009, before retiring as a Bronco in March 2010.
In 2008, Cutler passed for 4,526 yards, breaking Plummer's Broncos record for passing yardage in a single season. However, 2008 was the third consecutive year the Broncos failed to make the playoffs, this time in spite of holding a three game lead over the Chargers with three games left to play.
In 2008, the Broncos got off to a 4–1 start, which included a controversial home win against division rival San Diego Chargers, but struggled through a mediocre stretch in the middle of the season. After 13 games, the team was sitting in first place in the AFC West, with an 8–5 record, three games ahead of the Chargers, who were 5–8. However, in the next two weeks, the Broncos suffered back-to-back losses to the Panthers and Bills, while the Chargers won two straight. This set the stage for the 2008 season finale, when the Broncos and Chargers met at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium to decide the AFC West division title. The Broncos were blown out 52–21 by the Chargers, and would become the first team in NFL history to enter the final quarter of a regular season with a three-game lead and squander the division lead. The Broncos and Chargers finished the season tied at 8–8, but the Chargers won the AFC West based on a better division record (5–1 to the Broncos 3–3). The Broncos missed the playoffs for a third consecutive season.
On December 30, 2008, two days after the disastrous season-ending collapse in San Diego, Mike Shanahan, the longest-tenured and winningest head coach in Broncos' franchise history, was fired after 14 seasons. Two weeks later, on January 11, 2009, the Broncos hired former New England Patriots' offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels as the team's new head coach. Three months later, following a turbulent transition from the Mike Shanahan era to Josh McDaniels, the team traded Pro Bowl quarterback Jay Cutler to the Chicago Bears for quarterback Kyle Orton.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Denver Broncos, The Post-Elway Years
Famous quotes containing the word era:
“The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.”
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