Believing in Jay Cutler is a must. Otherwise, this coming Bronco season is Brian Griese all over again.

Wishing is not the same as doing, and reality is the spoiler of dreams.

Looking too hard at the meager evidence of Cutler is like staring at an oyster. Are you sure about this? Best not to chew but simply swallow.

So it is that the Broncos must again be taken on faith, not unusual nor unexpected for Bronco fans, now bearing down on a decade since solid assumptions could be made.

This is by rough count either the third or fourth post-Elway rebuilding by Mike Shanahan, this one the most elaborate and complicated. If starting with an untested quarterback were not extreme enough, the Broncos have more new parts than a game show host.

Considering where Cutler is, a quarterback with five games of experience, no reassuring example comes to mind.

All young quarterbacks disappoint, all young quarterbacks fail.

Seldom, if ever before, has one season been surrendered so deliberately as was last season in order to get on with the next one. And now here it is. This is what all that was about, the pressing of Cutler so that from the first snap of training camp the job was his.

Never mind that the logic behind drafting Cutler in the first place was to give Jake Plummer competition, to somehow make each of them better. Plummer reacted like a bat to a headlight and Cutler moved up with the eyes as wide as a deer in the spot.

Now Cutler is without real challenge, other than his own ambition and Shanahan's demands. This is no longer about competition. It is about realization.

Shanahan realized that Plummer was lost and that Cutler was fresh, imagining the remarkable after seeing too much of not good enough.

And at the core of how the Broncos do is Shanahan's decision to put today in the hands of tomorrow's quarterback.

It will be expected to forgive losing in the name of progress, struggling in the name of getting experience, failure in the name of patience.

Whether what happens next is worth the upheaval, or works well enough fast enough, it is a tribute to Shanahan that it is expected to.

The standing of Shanahan accounts for an ease of trust, that the coach knows what he is doing. This is earned from Super Bowl success, of course, though a check of coaches nine years after a Super Bowl victory indicates a bit more faith in Shanahan than the norm.

Of the 24 winning Super Bowl coaches, only three were still with their teams as far beyond glory as is Shanahan.

And of those since Shanahan won, two - Dick Vermeil and Bill Cowher - have left and the rest are still in place. The important number is that only three coaches - Tom Landry, Don Shula and Chuck Noll - coached longer with the same team after their last Super Bowl win than has Shanahan.

This is pretty heady company and of those three Hall of Famers, only Noll was allowed to walk away without being pushed.

The curse of great success is an impatience to do it again, not just on the part of the fans but of owners and coaches as well. On the other hand, no coach's legacy has ever suffered from not winning a third Super Bowl.

On average, discounting the great trio of Landry-Shula-Noll, coaches who won Super Bowls before Shanahan were gone an average of three and half years later.

Dan Reeves, who lost Super Bowls for both the Broncos and the Falcons, hung around each place four more years, and Marv Levy, who lost four in a row with the Bills, hung on five seasons more.

Shanahan is more or less coach for life, which recalls an old Levy story of when Levy got the same assurance from the Kansas City Chiefs. "And then they declared me dead," Levy said.

The point here is that Shanahan is getting an unusual opportunity to do something as dramatic as he is doing with this year's team.

Through fate and injury and age, and most significantly, Shanahan's own design, the Broncos could as easily be absolutely horrible as more or less acceptable.

What seems impossible to consider is a Bronco team even as good as last year's, and certainly a long way from the AFC title game loser of just two seasons ago.

lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com

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