Broncos a case of no ands, ifs or buts

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Honesty seems so ... well, so day-before-yesterday. But let's try.Of all the modifiers for the Denver Broncos against the Oakland Raiders, any of these would have been entirely satisfactory. Squeaker. Struggle.Adequate. Passable.At the most optimistic? Promising. Encouraging. Routine.Nowhere on the list would have been romp, rout, crush, thrash, smash. Humiliate. Annihilate. Anything that ends in -ate, including ate itself.Of all the marks of punctuation, a comma preceding the word "but" would have been wholly sufficient.In the opening game of the season, the Broncos managed to defeat the Raiders but ... And there would follow a whole list of concerns. Poor pass protection. No pass rush. Shoddy tackling. Dropped passes.Missed field goals. Ineffective running game. You know, all of those worries that have now just magically evaporated.No buts, no ands, no ifs, just an unmarked view of the horizon.How could we have been so worried, just because the Broncos are too young, too unproven, too recently mediocre, too dubious?Now it is almost impossible to examine what happened late Monday night without using the exclamation point. Wow!Eddie Royal! Jay Cutler! Nate Webster! The defense! The running game! The kicking game! The football game! All of this without Brandon Marshall!The hated Raiders! Ha! Ha!Not only is the sky not falling, it is soaring above on the sweet scent of surprise.The town is a-bubble with certainty, every step has a spring in it, citizens are humming to themselves in elevators. Woodland creatures are smiling. No one is a stranger.Ah, yes. There is nothing like winning. And nothing better than winning big, as in 41-14. Nothing like starting off the season as if the rest of the season is just table scraps.Better than the worries raised with a last microsecond field goal that began last season, worries that proved entirely justified.Nothing is more stirring than being astonished.Still, we are left to consider if this is a good thing, if scoring more points than any other NFL team the first week isn't just a shout too loud, that expectations are now too high.Even those doubts seem out of place, as if we knew this all along, as if to hesitate is to mistrust what we witnessed.Where's the Super Bowl again? Tampa. Nice town, great paella.Let us now scoff at the general consensus for the Broncos this season, from all those so-called experts, from yours truly. What was it, again? Subdued competence, and that being a nod to Mike Shanahan and tradition, maybe 10 wins at the most and two of those would be flukes.This was no fluke. This was the anti-fluke. This was the future.Do not consider that the Raiders might very well be as awful as they seemed, granted, that is a very bad football team in Oakland, and not just bad but muddled and aimless, like one of those playground pick-up crews in it for the exercise.To think that 33-year-old coach Lane Kiffin is going to pull it altogether is to believe that Tinker Bell is a teamster.But that's the Raiders' problem, securely as awful as they were supposed to be. The only way from here is up.The Broncos are looking down from the top of the standings, the only undefeated team in the division, while San Diego, everybody's darling, found a way to lose its opener to Carolina, all the more painful because it came in the final seconds.Kansas City managed to lose and shake up all of football, delivering New England quarterback Tom Brady to the infirmary, to next year, thereby making the NFL playing field not only even but tilting it a bit away from Foxboro.Many of the darlings of the AFC, not just the Chargers, took it on the chin. The Indianapolis Colts anointed their new home with the humiliation of losing to the Bears, while Jacksonville and Cleveland lost as well.Only the Steelers were nearly as impressive as the Broncos, and they were supposed to be.But no team has a player with a stronger arm than Cutler, better moves than Royal, a better end-zone instinct than Michael Pittman, more awareness than Webster, a sense of purpose more pronounced than Elvis Dumervil, a coach with greater leadership than Shanahan, a kicker with greater leg than . . .. . . Uh, what's that? There's another game to play. And 14 more after that? There would be, wouldn't there?(Contact Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News at lincicomeb@rockymountainnews.com.)