Greg Penner needs to find the cancers in the Broncos locker room

Field day. Jog-throughs. Taking the full bye week off. Not practicing on Thanksgiving Day. Complaining about having to play on Christmas.

These are some of the things that defined the 2022 Broncos. They’re a part of the reason why Denver is 4-11 and Nathaniel Hackett is unemployed.

The plan of “trusting the players” to be ready to go simply didn’t work. The Broncos often looked not ready to play. The idea that resting them during the summer would keep them healthy was also a bust. Denver has more than $57 million in cap space tied up in players on injured reserve.

So it shouldn’t have been a big surprise that Jerry Rosburg decided to do something different this week. Heading into a road game against the Chiefs, a team that has owned the Broncos for seven years via a 14-game winning streak, Denver’s interim head coach decided to have his team practice in pads one day this week.

It certainly was within his rights to make this decision. He’s the head coach. The team had one more padded practice available under the collective bargaining agreement. And the Broncos were coming off a 51-14 loss to the Rams on Christmas, a game in which they didn’t force a punt for the first time in 50 years.

Throwing on the pads and getting back to basics seemed in order. It’s a move that every old-school football coach in America would’ve made, from middle school to the pros.

But some Broncos players weren’t happy about it. According to ProFootballTalk.com, Rosburg’s decision wasn’t embraced by everyone in Denver’s locker room.

We’ve caught wind that some players — players who would prefer to emerge from final days of a lost season as healthy as possible — weren’t happy about it.

Greg Penner needs to find out who those players are and make sure they’re shipped out of town this offseason. Trade them or cut them, they have to go, no matter who they are.

This mentality is a huge part of the problem with the Broncos. They’ve become an organization that is just fine with losing. They’re a collection of mercenaries more concerned with being millionaires, celebrities and social media stars than part of a winning football team.

Players with any pride, those who hate losing and want to turn things around, would’ve embraced the day in pads. They would’ve welcomed a chance to work and get better.

That’s the right approach. That’s the winner’s mentality. That’s how things are done by champions.

Losers want to take days off. They want to coast. They want to point fingers, blame others and not realize that they’re a huge part of the problem.

And it doesn’t take many of them to destroy a team. They become cancers in the locker room, eating away at a team’s culture from within.

On Monday, when addressing the media to discuss the dismissal of Hackett, Greg Penner repeatedly addressed this situation. He kept hitting on this buzzword during his remarks. Five of his answers hit on that theme.

“X’s and O’s are important, but we need a strong leader for this organization that’s focused on winning,” the Broncos owner said. “That starts with culture. It’s instilling a sense of accountability and discipline. At the starting point, it has to be about culture and leadership. Those characteristics are what we’ll be focused on the most.”

Penner didn’t stop there.

“I’m a big believer that if you start with the right culture, (the right) people, and you have the resources and expectations, we can build a winning football team here again,” he added. “I don’t think that takes a number of years. Our focus should be on turning this around so that we’re ready to go this coming season with the right pieces in place.”

Part of having the right pieces in place is getting the wrong ones out of the way. It’s about making tough decisions and cutting ties with players who might look great on paper, but don’t have the right stuff when it comes to winning. It’s about parting ways with names that are perhaps familiar, if they’re deemed to be part of the problem.

Clearly, the Broncos have a losing culture. Six-straight seasons below .500, with three different head coaches, proves that point. So does a 4-11 record thus far in 2022. So does getting embarrassed on national TV by a 4-10 team starting a quarterback they picked up off the scrap heap.

But nothing screams what’s wrong with the Broncos more than yesterday’s report about players being unhappy about having to be in pads this week during practice. They have too many players who don’t care about the team; they only care about themselves.

If Penner is paying more than lip service to the notion of changing the Broncos culture, he should take notice. And the first order of business this offseason for Paton, or whoever is running the show after a head coach is hired, would be to root out the cancers in the locker room, no matter how painful the parting of ways might be.

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