The Denver Broncos, who battled their way to a 12-4 regular season record and Super Bowl berth on the back of a dozen wins by seven points or less, don’t need to be best team, says Hall of Fame finalist and Broncos great Terrell Davis, they just need to be better than the Carolina Panthers on one day. That’s a tall task, considering Carolina steamrolled their way to a 15-1 regular season record and have outscored their playoff opponents 80-39 so far. The Super Bowl is about who has the best day, not who has the best team.
“Obviously the better team,” Davis told Eric Goodman and Les Shapiro on Mile High Sports AM 1340, “if you want to look at numbers and look at records, people would suggest that Carolina is. They only lost one game. But I don’t think it matters who’s the best team. To me it’s about who’s going to play the best that day. That’s all that matters, just one game.”
It’s a curious role reversal from the last time the Broncos were in the Super Bowl, where they entered the game with a record-setting offense that appeared unstoppable. The Seattle Seahawks and their stifling defense, not to mention an ill-prepared Broncos team, turned a game in which the Broncos were favored by two into a 43-8 runaway. That can happen, says Davis, because in football the “best” team doesn’t always win; the team that has the best day does.
“In basketball, the best team wins,” Davis said. “You’re in a seven-game series or five-game series, it’s hard to beat a team that is better than you. But in football, that’s not the case. It just takes that one Sunday. That you’ve got to come prepared to play and you have to play better than that team that one day. There’s all kinds of mitigating factors that factor into that. That’s why I love football. We [analysts] can sit here all day and we can say, ‘Hey the Broncos are down, they’re four point underdogs and they should lose this game,’ but there’s a lot of reasons you could make a case they could win this game.”
A case can certainly be made for Denver because of their defense, which ranked the best in the league in total yards, passing yards and sacks, and finished in the top five in rushing and scoring.
“They have a defense that is unique … I don’t think [Panthers quarterback] Cam [Newton] has seen a defense like Denver. As many athletes as they have on the front line, the linebacking corps is solid, the secondary is consistent and very solid back there, where they can run man with you all day long.”
Still, Davis couldn’t deny how impressive Carolina has been throughout the season.
“I think a lot of it too – I mean, look at Carolina – look at this machine that they’ve built. It is hard to poke holes in the weaknesses of this team,” he admitted. “They have a top-ranked defense [No. 6 overall]. They have an offense that was the highest-scoring offense in football. The have a quarterback who’s unique in his skill set and is difficult to game plan [against]. So I get it.
“The good news is, the people who make those predictions, they don’t play. That’s the good news. I’m sure if you’re on the Broncos that that is just fuel to the fire. That’s just allowing you to focus more and giving you a little more of an edge … so I don’t think they mind being underdogs.”
Denver has thrived this year in the underdog role, one they were thrust into when future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning struggled in the early parts of the year, then was sidelined with injury, and as the offense struggled to score points both with Manning and Brock Osweiler at the helm. Still, Denver more often than not scored enough points to deliver victory, including in an AFC Championship that many analysts expected to be a runaway for the New England Patriots. As home underdogs in that game, Broncos defensive coordinator Wade Phillips engineered perhaps the greatest game plan of his life and his defense executed it to a T, sacking Tom Brady four times and hitting him 23 times on the day.
“We’ll see what Wade Phillips has in store,” Davis said, “because everyone was pretty shocked at the game plan he unleashed against New England. It was a great game plan.”
Phillips will have two full weeks to cook up another doozy to overwhelm another favored quarterback in Cam Newton. For Davis, he wants to see how the team conducts itself during the week leading up to the game before he makes any kind of predictions about the final outcome.
“I’m going to go down there this week and watch these teams and see how they act. Obviously, media day is big. But at the end of the day, when that game starts, we really don’t know what’s going to happen. It could take a turnover here or there, or somebody comes out and doesn’t play well, and [their team] could lose.”
Davis knows it’s not about who’s favored, or even who’s the best team on paper. It’s all about who has the best Sunday.
“You have to remember, I was in the backfield when we played the Packers. If I recall, we were double-digit underdogs.”
They were, and they won Denver’s first Super Bowl.
Listen to the full interview with Davis, including a discussion on his Hall of Fame candidacy, in the podcast below…
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