Another Close Call has Crush Down, Not Out
Andrew Mason
Sunday February 16, 2003
”If ‘if’ was a fifth,” Broncos starting left tackle Ephraim Salaam surmised to The Denver Post in December, “we’d all be drunk.”
In the past four months, the Broncos went 3-5 and finished out of the playoffs – losing twice in overtime and once more on a last-minute interception – and the Crush have started 0-3, with Sunday’s 59-53 overtime loss to the Los Angeles Avengers serving as another syrupy coating of frustration on top of a mile-high stack of heartbreak incurred in two bitter season-opening defeats.
In the first two losses, the ‘if’s came in the form of fourth-quarter leads that slipped away, and in a minus-2 turnover ratio, which included three returned for touchdowns. Against the Avengers – the first division rival to pop up on the Crush’s schedule – the ‘if’s’ were in the form of penalties and special-teams problems.
In its first two weeks of existence, the Crush amassed just 11 penalties. Against the Avengers, the team was whistled for 14, with the oddest one of all being a delay-of-game call – when the Crush was on defense, with its linemen crouched at the line of scrimmage awaiting the snap midway through the second quarter. It wasn’t a case of the ball being spiked into the stands, or of a player laying on the football -- as one would often see during the last minute of an NFL game.
In the press box, the mood was puzzlement. For Crush head coach Bob Beers, it was befuddlement.
“You got me. You figure that one out, you let me know,” Beers said. “There are a lot of things that I had questions on, but I couldn`t figure `em out. They hit me with a couple of new rules I hadn`t heard. Trust me, I`ll look. Delay of game by the defense, I don`t know.
“I think there were a couple of (other) things. I can`t wait to get the film and a case of beer, maybe a fifth of whiskey, too.”
The special-teams problems were all the more crucial. Colorado yielded one touchdown from a kickoff that no one could handle off the soft netting, and suffered a blocked extra point that the Avengers returned for two points, as well as a holding call on a fourth-quarter extra-point try that forced kicker Kris Heppner to try again from 10 yards back. He subsequently missed the re-try.
“(Heppner) kicks one through, and we get a penalty for holding,” Beers said. “Holy smokes, I haven`t seen that before, and then all of a sudden we`re back. We swallow the olive on the extra point. ... That one really was crucial, because they would have had to go for the touchdown, not the field goal in the end (to tie the game at the last second and force overtime).”
Those were just the latest odd circumstances in a third consecutive heartbreaking defeat. Prior to the Avengers game, so much talk centered around quarterback John Dutton’s fumbles in the first two weeks that each newspaper devoted space to stories on the slickness of the new footballs. The ruckus made a minor celebrity of equipment manager Jason Schell, who was featured in both Denver newspapers.
But Dutton held onto the ball against the Avengers and continued his aerial mastery; his eight touchdowns and 359 yards allowed him to continue a strong start that has seen him post a sterling 19-to-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio for the Crush. He hasn’t thrown an interception since the fourth quarter of the first game against the Georgia Force.
“No more ball things anymore,” Dutton said. “That thing`s over, we cleared that up, worked with it all week. Every one of them felt great.”
Added Beers: “That one can die now. Our poor equipment guy is having a stroke; he`s getting more publicity than the quarterback. … I told him any kind of publicity is good publicity.”
So far, the crush of publicity around the team has been about chronicling the ardent devotion of the fans and to a series of tough defeats. But Beers, for one, doesn’t believe the close losses and change of venue will cause a letdown for the first of four consecutive road games.
“I don`t think this team will let down; we`ve got a lot of character,” Beers said. “When you`ve got character on your team and good people, you don`t worry about those things; they take care of themselves. And we do have good people on this football team that like the game and play hard. They bring their lunch bucket to work and they just keep plugging away.
“Hell, you go up against L.A. and you get down, it`d be easy to hang it up, to say, `They are pretty good.` But they didn`t; they just kept scratching and fighting. We`ve got a scrappy team. Now, where we`ll be at the end of 13 more games, we`ll wait and see. But I think we`re getting better every week and that`s all I can ask of them.”
Andrew Mason was at the Tampa Bay Storm`s first home game on June 1, 1991 and has followed the game ever since. While in college, he served as content editor and co-founder of The Storm Shelter, a Web site which covered the Tampa Bay Storm on the Internet from 1996-99. He also volunteered with the team`s media relations department in 1998 and currently contributes to ColoradoCrush.com. He's covered the NFL for various on-line outlets since 1999.