Mike Shanahan was once the best coach in the game. Period. Yeah, with the kind of talent he had during the Super Bowl years even one of my idiot cousins could have been the best coach in the game, I guess, but there have been a lot of guys who had great talent and managed to lose anyway. So let’s start by giving credit where it’s due.

The problem is that Shanny isn’t the best coach in the game anymore. He’s not even one of the best coaches, I don’t think, although I’m more than willing to accept that he might again be someday. But not in Denver, and absolutely not anywhere he has both the coach and GM jobs at the same time. GMing in the NFL is wicked hard, and coaching is probably harder still. There aren’t a lot of guys who can do either one well enough to be consistently successful, let alone doing both at the same time. While Shanahan managed the task okay at first, you can look at what’s happened since Elway retired and make a case that having one of the great QBs of all time on the roster somehow simplifies the rest of the challenges you face. I don’t know – there are perhaps other factors at work, but the bottom line is that since #7 hung it up Shanahan hasn’t won a playoff game (and I predict that he’s a-fixin’ to lose his third this weekend unless Peyton Manning gets shoved in front of a crosstown bus sometime before the game starts).

I spent a few minutes today reviewing the Broncos’ season records over the past four years, because I’ve had the sense that there are some patterns we’re seeing overand over again, and that season-by-season breakdown reveals something kind of interesting. Look at the cumulative records for each quarter of the season since 2001:

You notice that his teams start fast and finish strong. Their win percentage in the first and last four games of these seasons is .718, but contrast that with their combined record of 14-18 through the middle half of these seasons, which comes to a thumping .437 percentage. Are stats lying here, or are they telling us something meaningful?

Well, for a few years I’ve had the sense that Shanny is a great planner, but not such a good adapter. (If you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs, I suspect he’s an off-the-chart J.) What this means is that his teams are well prepared and game-planned (remember how he likes to script the first 15 offensive plays of a game, right? – that’s his comfort zone). However, it means that he’s not going to be nearly as good once the plans meet resistance.

How does this apply to the numbers we see above? Well, he’s 13-3 in the first four weeks of the season, and that’s a top-seed pace most years. From the standpoint of getting everything ready, everybody starts the season more or less even. You can’t really put much of a scouting report together out of pre-season games, so the first few games of the season are going to favor the best planners. Advantage Shanahan.

After a few games, though, there’s a lot of film available on everybody, and by week 5 opposing coordinators have a pretty solid idea what the other team wants to do and how they think they can do it, so at this stage of the season the advantage shifts from the hard-core planners to those who are better at reacting and adapting (in Myers-Briggs terms, we’re talking about the Ps).

So look at the numbers – Shanahan’s teams slide from a 13-3 pace to a 7-9 pace. Super Bowl-level to watching the Super Bowl on TV-level. He doesn’t recover quickly, either: the 7-9 pace continues through week 12, at which point his teams are now an average of roughly 7-5 – still in the hunt, but probably only for a wild card.

At this stage Shanahan has demonstrated that he can crank his teams back up a bit, going 10-6 with the postseason on the line. So he has the capability to win once the situation gets dire (this would be the “day-late/dollar-short” school of strategy).

I don’t know Shanahan, and I’m not really a football expert, but I’ve been watching the Broncs for several years, and this middle-of-the-season malaise is very real. You can feel it coming. I’m open to speculation about what’s going on here – maybe some of you have some insight that I’m lacking. But as it stands now I don’t see Denver doing much more than what they’re doing right now as long as they’re stuck in the Shanny rut. I think it’s time for him to move on, and I wish him all the best wherever he goes.

And hey, I’d love to be proven wrong over the next few weeks. Don’t see it happening, though. Manning might throw 6 TD passes versus this defense…..