Brandon Krisztal, KOA Colorado Broncos Reporter

Dana Carvey and David Spade here. You might know our podcast, Fly on the Wall. We decided a spinoff called Superfly, and it's fun. It's just two of us riffing on current events, pop culture.

Maestro is an Oscar-nominated movie Bradley Cooper's in, and I'm sure it's a perfect quality, well-done movie, but it looks a little boring. Honestly, I fell asleep during the billboard. Listen to and follow Superfly on the Odyssey app or wherever you get here. Podcast. Brandon, thank you for taking the time to join us. Yeah, JR, happy to do it.

Thanks for having me. No doubt about it. Now, I think I have an idea of how fans feel in Denver right now, but tell me, how do fans feel based on what has taken place with Russell Wilson, his contract, and now the release of someone like Justin Simmons? Oh, they're different feelings for different reasons. The Russell Wilson failure here is a disappointment because of the assets that were given up, the contract, not that it's any of their money, but the way it can hamstring a team when you commit money, but that deal wasn't gonna happen if there wasn't a commitment to a long-term deal. And at the time, there aren't too many GMs in the league, I think, that wouldn't have taken that swing based on what we saw from Russell Wilson, but pretty quickly after he got here and it wasn't working with Nathaniel Hackett and you weren't sure was it Hackett's fault, was it Russ's fault? You heard about all the other stuff going on with Russ, and Sean Payton brought it up when he got the job to me and a couple other reporters at the Super Bowls and he brought it up again last year at the Combine.

I'm gonna talk about him having an office and a masseuse and all that, that the grownups let it happen. Had they have won, though, nobody would care how Russ spends his time in the building if they were a playoff team. And they weren't in year one, they obviously weren't in year two, and Sean Payton pretty quickly realized he couldn't run his offense with Russell Wilson. So the fans were resigned to Russell Wilson, that being a failure, it stings. Justin Simmons, it's sort of like when Champ Bailey, now his contract was done, but they officially said they weren't bringing Champ back. You knew that Justin Simmons' days in Denver might be numbered, you weren't sure if maybe a contract restructure was in the works, but then you see the market correction, if you will, or bloodletting, depending on how you wanna look at it, across the league of safeties, you thought, okay, Justin may be in some trouble and there's not gonna be a viable trade partner. But fans are just really sad because Justin has been the only Bronco that's been here through all eight years of losing. He was a rookie that first year, I guess, they were a winning team at nine and seven, but no playoffs all eight years of his career, but he's been outstanding on the field, most interceptions in the league and off the field. He's been the best guy in the community that teams maybe ever had. Three time also paid Man of the Year nominee here locally, goes to every teammates charity event that he possibly can.

I've never seen anything like it. So it just stings to lose a guy that means so much. Broncos reporter Brandon Kristall is here with us, the JR sport reshow on CBS Sports Radio. So what does this mean over the next couple of weeks, next week with free agency, with the draft pick at number 12, what is the Broncos plan, A, potentially at quarterback and then also in free agency? You know, it's funny because I talked to a bunch of different people in the building on the personnel staff, coaching staff, media relations, and you get different messages from everyone and getting to spend a week with everybody at the combine and talking to people and kind of getting their sense versus someone else's, you know, even though their offices may be two doors down from each other, it's pretty fascinating. And the sense I get is that they have a plan, but executing that plan may not always come to fruition because they're, as you pointed out at 12, 11 teams in front of them that are all gonna have something to say about it. Plus the teams behind them that could leapfrog them if they identify, say a rookie QB. I think we have to keep an eye on the veteran market next week to see, do they bring in a Jacoby Brissett or a Jamis Winston or someone like that, Gardner Minshew, what do they end up having to pay that quarterback or do they leave it alone? Cause they have fallen in love with one or two of these rookie QBs that's gonna come into the league, these college kids, and they're gonna try to maneuver up from 12.

But I think they probably have more than one plan, honestly, a plan 1A and a plan 1B, but they need to have plans, you know, two, three, and four ready. And I think fans, you know, they're feeling eight years of no playoffs. Sean Payton is not feeling that. Even George Payton, who's now going into year four, first time with the same head coach from the year before as the GM, he still doesn't feel the eight years of no playoffs. But I wish I could tell you what their plan is. I'm not sure that even if they have a favorite plan, they know that they'll be able to execute it unless let's say it is Jared Sitteman, Jacoby Brissett as their plan A, but I can't imagine that's what it is. Well, Brandon, knowing that Sean Payton basically left television to come back to coaching, you talked about George Payton being here for four years.

We know that the Waltons are the new ownership group in town, Mr. Walmart family, Walmart group. Like how much patience are they going to have with rebuilding this? They threw money at Russell Wilson to bring him in first, but now that that's done, like how much patience are they gonna have? And how much patience is Sean Payton gonna have?

Yeah, that's a great point. Now, Sean Payton, as best we can tell, is the highest paid coach in football. I guess I don't know what Andy Reid makes, but we understood that Sean was just behind Bill Belichick last year, maybe right in line with Pete Carroll. It's not a little bit more than Pete, but somewhere between 18 and 20 million a year on a five-year deal. So he's got one of those years behind him, but still four more. And that money would come his way if he got fired, but I don't think he's in a hurry to walk away from it. And Sean, I think in a lot of ways knows that he can do something no one else has done, and that's win a Super Bowl in a second city, right? No head coach has done that to this point.

And so are they close to that now? It certainly doesn't feel like it. You talk about, it's really Greg Penner who runs the day-to-day. So he is Rob Walton's son-in-law, and he and Rob's daughter, Carrie, are married, and they're in Denver in the building. Rob Walton lives in Phoenix.

He's big in the car racing. He shows up on game day. He was involved in the hiring process for Sean Payton, but beyond that, he's not tracking.

He's not tracking, I'm not saying he's not aware of the Justin Simmons move, but when they make moves on Saturday to bring guys up from the practice squad or they're signing guys with the practice squad, he has no idea what's going on. And so Greg Penner though, who was the CEO of Walmart and the chairman of the board for a long time and ran a hedge fund as well, is a really, really smart guy. You talk about the money they gave to Russ, he kind of inherited that promise. And so with that being understood, and again, we're going off Russ's resume, I don't think he was reluctant or they were reluctant to write that check. Now I'm sure they're not loving the fact that they're having to write a $39 million check. They're still paying Nathaniel Hackett and his staff and having obviously pay Sean Payton and his staff.

And they're in salary cap purgatory, at least for another year or so. But I don't think he's impatient, even though he moved on from Nathaniel Hackett that quickly, just less than one year, which is something you don't see. So I guess we're gonna revisit that if George Payton gets fired before the year ends next year and or Sean Payton were to get fired, then we're gonna have to start looking at Greg Penner the way we look at David Tepper in Carolina.

But to this point, I think that he's pretty calculated and is kind of taking everything in, right? He didn't come into it thinking he knows everything about running the NFL and has no problem saying that he's okay knowing what he doesn't know or not knowing what he doesn't know and learning that. And that's one thing I think Sean Payton sold him on was look, I was there with Mr. Benson all the way until the end of his life, but really showed him what being a top class owner is after being around the Maras and around Jerry Jones.

And I can show you that, and obviously we know the success they had. And so I think he maybe doesn't sell it exactly like that, but just that, hey, I've been in the competition committee for years, I've been around lots and lots of owners, and if we do this together, we can have success. Doesn't mean they will, but I think that's how Sean sold himself to Greg Penner.

I think Greg is going to kind of follow Sean's lead until he feels the need to intervene. Broncos reporter, Brandon Cristales here with us, the JR Sport Reshow on CBS Sports Radio. The man that got all of this money, and now there are rumors that he's gonna be joining the Pittsburgh Steelers, or at least that there's mutual interest we know is Russell Wilson. How does the city feel about Russell Wilson? Are they blaming Russell? Are they looking at the team and the injury surrounding him? What's the overall take? We know people ain't happy about the money.

Yeah, I think it's kind of a combination of both. Not that they were sold a bill of goods, but that just Russ isn't what we thought we were getting. Thought you're getting a guy that's throwing 300 touchdowns. He showed up with 292 career regular season touchdowns and eight playoff appearances and nine Pro Bowls. But then you realize, and maybe it's because of where Seattle's located, and I don't pretend like I haven't watched Seahawks games, but we all saw the highlights week in, week out, and I had Russell on plenty of fantasy teams.

But I wasn't watching every game. You realize how much Pete Carroll and his staff over the years maybe managed Russ. So it wasn't that they didn't wanna let Russ cook. It's that they didn't think that he was capable of making a meal everybody would like, if you will.

So at the end, it's like, he's gonna make the dessert, and everyone's gonna love that. And he did, right? He was, up until Patrick Mahomes has come along and is kind of rewriting every quarterback metric.

I think you could make a case that Russell Wilson's the best off-schedule quarterback that we've seen, certainly in the last 20 years, when you look at his ability to maneuver outside of the pocket. In his whole life, he's just been able to do that with so much success that you thought you were gonna get that here. And it just didn't work from the get-go. And I put some of that on Hackett and his staff, and maybe the way they approached everything with Russ and with the team there in year one. And then this year, I'm not sure how much Sean Payton really gave Russ the keys to anything.

I think it was paring everything down. I talked to lots of people at the combine, lots of analysts and insiders and reporters, and I asked them all just one simple question, how do you fix a Broncos quarterback situation? And I think Chris Sims gave me the best answer. He said, you don't bring Sean Payton to run nine plays. You have Sean Payton to run nine million plays and be on the cutting edge of things offensively. And if you're gonna just run nine plays, then why is Sean Payton even here? And obviously we know why Sean is there.

And so it wasn't gonna work. So I think fans were just disappointed, but Russ isn't their guy. Payton wasn't their guy either, but you go to the playoffs four years in a row and you set the offensive records that he did and go to Super Bowls and win one. Yeah, you become their guy, and Payton stayed here, right? So Payton has become their guy almost as much as Elway, who of course is their guy. But so it's kind of one of those things where they're gonna beat up on George Payton, beat up on Sean Payton, beat up on the ownership group until they have their guy, which is why I think they need to draft a rookie in this first round for no other reason just to appease the fan base, because they are feeling the effects of eight years of no plus.

And they haven't really had their own young guy. You can look at Paxton Lynch, no, that wasn't really it. Tim Tebow, we know that that probably wasn't gonna work. And then you go back to Jay Cutler in 06, and he was gone after year three. And in some ways it seems like Josh McDaniels was right. It wasn't like Jay Cutler went on to a Hall of Fame career after he left Denver.

And so you gotta go back to 83. Don Elway was their guy coming in, and that's all that this fan base, and so many fan bases. Chicago, I mentioned them. They have no 4,000 yard passer in the history of their franchise. So it hasn't been field, it wasn't Trubisky. They hope it's Caleb Williams. So the Broncos just want someone to believe in.

Well, let me ask you this. Listening to you and your insight, and from what I know and what I've obviously observed over the years, simple question, final question, Brandon. Are the Broncos a mess? It seems like they're a mess. They seem like a mess.

JR, I think that's the scientific observation, and I think you're spot on. I can give you reasons all these things happened, but it doesn't change the fact that they're a mess currently, right? And so we can, whether you call them excuses or just why things played out the way they are, they are a mess. I feel bad for the fans. I feel bad for the fan base. Absolutely, and your pal, Amy Lawrence, has now become a long-suffering Broncos fan.

She cheers for the orange and blue, and it's been eight long years. And look, they're not Cleveland. They're not Detroit. They're not Jacksonville. They're used to playing in Super Bowls and winning division titles and being in the playoffs all the time. When Pat Bowen bought the team, he famously, like Mike Tomlin, there was never a year where they were under 500, or he had more Super Bowl appearances, I'm sorry, than years under 500 when he owned the team or when he was alive, right? And that was eight or seven trips of the eight that the franchise has made. And so it is frustrating for a fan base that 90,000 people on the waiting list, they still sell out every game, but if they fire Jarrett Stidham out there at JR without one of those first-round rookies behind him, or it's Brissett and Stidham, or Minshew and Stidham, or Winston and Stidham, and a rookie mid-late rounder that you have to go really Google their highlight tapes on YouTube because you didn't watch a lot of two-lane football or Southeast Louisiana, you're gonna have, I think by the middle of the year, if they're not winning, you're gonna have a lot of empty seats. Even with the long waiting list, you're gonna have a lot of empty seats in the power field at mile high.

And especially, you go right down the road, not even right down the road, literally across the highway. And I mentioned Kerry Walton-Penner, her cousin, Dan Kroenke, his two teams, the Nuggets and the Cavs, their favorites are right there to win another title in both sports. Fans are excited about that, but they want their Broncos to be right in that mix because at the end of the day, this is still a Broncos' tent. Wild, wild stuff, for me, 2015 feels like yesterday, but it's quite some time, so I understand. Good memories, but yeah, and you're like, God, eight years must have been 18 years.

It does feel like it wasn't longer until you just do the quick math on it and realize it's only eight years, but man, it does feel like it's been a long eight years around here for a lot of folks. Well, Brandon, thank you so much for sharing your insight. Where can people keep up with you, your knowledge, and everything that you find out and know and learn about these Broncos? Just follow at BK Denver Sports. I say on all the social platforms, but mostly on Twitter, not that my Instagram every now and then I'll have something. My TikTok's pretty limited, but at BK Denver Sports, it's like when you think of Denver Sports, think of BK.

It's like when you think of Garbage, you think of Hakeem. Well, thank you, Brandon, we appreciate that. We'll talk to you soon, okay? Let's connect and see what they do after the draft, okay? Sounds great, J.R., I appreciate it.

Dana Carvey and David Spade here. You might know our podcast, Fly on the Wall. We decided to do a spinoff called Superfly, and it's fun. It's just two of us riffing on current events, pop culture. Maestro is an Oscar-nominated movie Bradley Cooper's in, and I'm sure it's a perfect, quality, well-done movie, but it looks a little boring. Honestly, I fell asleep during the billboard. Listen to and follow Superfly on the Odyssey app or wherever you get here. We'll see you on the podcast.