Just when John Elway thought he was out (of the Vance Joseph business), they pulled him back in.

The Denver Broncos' general manager was asked Wednesday at the team's annual media BBQ to describe the transition from Joseph, who "led" the franchise to historic futility, and his head-coaching successor, Vic Fangio, who's drawn rave reviews in his six months on the job.

Apples and watermelons, claims a high-road-taking Elway.

“I don’t want to say anything bad about VJ. It’s always hard to compare," he said. "I enjoyed working with VJ for the two years we worked together. Obviously, we didn’t have the success that we needed to have, and so therefore we needed to make a change. We didn’t win like we needed to win. I’m looking forward to working with Vic. Vic’s got a tremendous amount of experience in his background. He’s proven to win, he’s proven to be an expert on the defensive side. As I told you when we hired Vic, that what I was looking was an expert. Somebody that was great on one side of the ball. Vic’s proven to be great on the defensive side. I think he’s more than ready. We’ve really enjoyed working with him this offseason, and as I said, the maturity and the experience that Vic has, I think will turn into really good things.”

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Perhaps unintentionally, Elway's answer was buried within his non-answer.

"Proven." "Experience." "Expert." "Maturity."

None of those adjectives applied to Joseph, a defensive coordinator for only one season before Denver inexplicably tapped him as Gary Kubiak's replacement. He was a 44-year-old complete unknown who, unsurprisingly, proved ill-equipped to run a team, unable to rest on his NFL laurels.

That two-year disaster forced Elway to take a long look in the mirror, and re-evaluate his ability to find a requisite leader of men. Like in the real world, when somebody ends a relationship, they tend to find an antithesis of their ex.

Meet Fangio, a 60-year-old football lifer whose monikers range from "The Godfather" to "The Evil Genius" to, simply, "defensive mastermind." He's a no-BS-type hailing from the old school, where there were no deaths by inches, to use his verbiage. He's also highly decorated following successful stints in Baltimore, San Francisco, and Chicago. He worked his first professional coordinator gig in 1995 — the same year Joseph, a former defensive back, signed with the New York Jets as an undrafted free agent.

They're opposite in every way. Opposite men. Opposite coaches. Opposite resumes. The difference is, Fangio aligns with Elway, 59, in ways that Joseph couldn't have. They hail from the same generation and watched the sport change rapidly over the decades. They're accomplished in their respective positions and share a mutual respect as league peers.

Most importantly, Fangio cuts right to the chase. There are no campy T-shirts or wall slogans in Dove Valley. There isn't even music playing during training camp practices. After consecutive losing seasons, after the Broncos hit rock bottom, he couldn't care less about the noise, figurative or literal.

His sole focus is undoing the damage from the previous regime. To do what they couldn't, starting with the fundamentals.

“A winning identity. That is what we are here for, we’ve got to win games," Fangio said Thursday. "But, I’d like for it to be a team that obviously plays hard, plays smart, plays intelligent, plays good in crunch time and the critical times of a game and knows how to play in situational football. Those are some of the things.”

