Time for Shanahan to plug Broncos' many holes

The bad comes around to Mike Shanahan, just as the good did, and if the bad pile is higher than the good these days, it is still Shanahan's pile.It can't be blamed up or down, because Shanahan sits in both chairs (coach and GM). And if this lost Denver Broncos season might have been average instead of awful with fewer injuries, if one linebacker could play, if one defensive tackle could tackle, if Jay Cutler does not permanently flinch at every snap from here on out, still, it is on Shanahan.It is up to Shanahan to fix it, because it is Shanahan who broke it -- bad choices, bad plan, bad results, and unrealistic expectations.Maybe that last one is the most conspicuous because, while no one believed Cutler would be instant Dan Marino -- hoped, maybe, but never believed -- it was assumed that the rest around him would be better.This season was never Cutler's, although that's where the attention was aimed, from those early magazine covers to preseason newspaper sections to television jibber jabber. Quarterback is the easy place to look as it always is, a distraction like a magician's assistant in net stockings.And Cutler now discovers that 16 is more than 10, or however many games he played at Vanderbilt, that the responsibility for all of it weighs more than he thought, that with failure comes review.Maybe that was what the snarky quarterback of the Chargers was yelling at Cutler the other night, but bad form doesn't make the message a lie.Cutler was ready to do about what he has done, so the Broncos have done about what they were capable of.For Mike Shanahan to continue to overrate the team he put together is quite natural because it then becomes the fault of the players for not being as good as he thought they were.If he insists this losing bunch is better than his last losing bunch, that's like comparing litter.It is never too soon to panic, and in the case of the Broncos, it is too late.Shanahan has never seemed ready for a true refit of the Broncos, but something more instant, plugging old holes with used pieces, and then tossing them away when they proved to be what their last team believed them to be.Every coach believes he can make a player better than the last coach did, that things will be different because players want to play for him, and sometimes it is true.But no example is obvious of a player getting better on the Broncos than he was before, save possibly QB Jake Plummer, and that only until Plummer grew disheartened from being micromanaged.Todd Sauerbrun was never going to be anyone other than Todd Sauerbrun, a flake punter and a nuisance, but he did two jobs pretty well and now the Broncos have no one to do either of them acceptably. Coach's decision.The defensive line has looked like a lineup of vagrants over the last few seasons, and finally Shanahan has found running backs who cannot run, or Travis Henry at least, a slightly greater misjudgment than either Dre Bly or Daniel Graham.Any cornerback who plays opposite Champ Bailey is going to be exposed only because he is going to get much more attention, but Bly has made vulnerability routine. Bailey himself has had more bad moments than at any other time in his fine career.The offensive line has cracked and creaked and deteriorated from the most dependable unit into a do-it-yourself patchwork project, this leading to the battering of Cutler and exposing the ordinariness of Henry.And if there have ever been three more mismatched, unproductive linebackers put together than Ian Gold, Nate Webster and D.J. Williams, they were on an expansion team.All of this might have come apart the moment middle linebacker Al Wilson was injured, for he seemed to be the first domino.And add in receiver Rod Smith, as inevitable as that was, and leadership on both sides of the ball was suddenly absent.To be able to point to receiver Brandon Marshall as the breakout star is to point nowhere else. We shall see on RB Selvin Young. There should have been and needed to be more, at least one of those defensive line draft choices.None of this was unknown, nor unpredictable, but Shanahan got, and still gets, the benefit of any doubt because he is who he is.He can fire a defensive coordinator, a cliche move, and end up with a worse defense, and now he is stuck with his choice of Jim Bates.With so much to fix, the simple seasoning of a young quarterback seems the easiest thing to get done.(Contact Bernie Lincicome at lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com.) (Bernie Lincicome writes for the Rocky Mountain News at www.rockymountainnews.com.)