The 1999 season was the Denver Broncos' 30th in the National Football League (NFL) and their 40th overall. The 1999 Broncos were heavily favored to win a third consecutive

Super Bowl The Super Bowl is the annual final playoff game of the National Football League (NFL) to determine the league champion. It has served as the final game of every NFL season since 1966, replacing the NFL Championship Game. Since 2022, the game ...

, but after winning a second against the

Atlanta Falcons The Atlanta Falcons are a professional American football team based in Atlanta. The Falcons compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) South division. The Falcons joined th ...

in Super Bowl XXXIII in Miami, the team suffered the retirement of Super Bowl XXXIII MVP quarterback

John Elway John Albert Elway Jr. (born June 28, 1960) is an American professional football executive and former quarterback who is the president of football operations for the Denver Broncos of the National Football League (NFL). Elway played college f ...

during the off-season. Elway had spent his entire career with the Broncos, and much of the focus in the weeks leading up to the season centered on the void left by Elway's departure. Head coach Mike Shanahan announced that third-round 1998 draft pick Brian Griese, son of Miami Dolphins quarterback

Bob Griese Robert Allen Griese (pronounced ; born February 3, 1945) is a former American football quarterback who earned All-American honors with the Purdue Boilermakers before being drafted in 1967 by the American Football League's Miami Dolphins. Gries ...

, would take the reins of the offense, passing over veteran and credible back-up quarterback Bubby Brister. In the preseason, the Broncos played in the first and so far only NFL game held in

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. On August 7, before a crowd of 73,811 spectators at Stadium Australia in

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

, the Broncos defeated the

San Diego Chargers The San Diego Chargers were a professional American football team that played in San Diego from 1961 until the end of the 2016 season, before relocating to Los Angeles, where the franchise had played its inaugural 1960 season. The team is now ...

20–17. Although no one expected a serious defense of their title, the Broncos would stumble out of the gate this season, losing the first four regular season games. Many of the games would be decided in the final two minutes of play, but the Broncos found themselves on the losing end at 6–10. It was their first losing season since

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, their worst season since

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and the worst record of the five-team AFC West. This was the worst-ever season for a team defending their Super Bowl title in a non-strike season. Only the 1982 San Francisco 49ers had a lower winning percentage as they failed to defend their first Super Bowl championship.Broncos' record worst among Super Bowl champions, Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Jan 3, 2000 by John Branch
/ref> The Broncos and the

combined for an 11–21 record in 1999. This is, as of

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, the worst combined record for both defending conference and/or Super Bowl champions in the season following a Super Bowl appearance. The 11-21 mark was matched by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and

Oakland Raiders The Oakland Raiders were a professional American football team that played in Oakland from its founding in 1960 to 1981 and again from 1995 to 2019 before relocating to the Las Vegas metropolitan area where they now play as the Las Vegas Raide ...

four years later, one season removed from

Super Bowl XXXVII Super Bowl XXXVII was an American football game between the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Oakland Raiders and the National Football Conference (NFC) champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers to decide the National Football League (NFL) cham ...

. Statistics site ''

Football Outsiders Football Outsiders (FO) is a website started in July 2003 which focuses on advanced statistical analysis of the NFL. The site is run by a staff of regular writers, who produce a series of weekly columns using both the site's in-house statistics ...

'' calculates that the Broncos went from the league's third-easiest schedule in 1998, to the hardest schedule in 1999:

Before
2011 File:2011 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: a protester partaking in Occupy Wall Street heralds the beginning of the Occupy movement; protests against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed that October; a young man celebrate ...
, the worst one-year increase in strength of schedule belonged to the 1999 Broncos. Denver had ridden the third-easiest schedule (in a 30-team league) to a Lombardi Trophy in 1998, only to fall apart the next season under the weight of John Elway's retirement, Terrell Davis' Week 4 injury, and – oh, by the way – the toughest schedule in the league.

This was the largest single-season change in ''Football Outsiders rankings until the

2011 St. Louis Rams The 2011 season was the St. Louis Rams' 74th in the National Football League, their 17th in St. Louis, and their third and final season under head coach Steve Spagnuolo. They finished with a 2–14 record – a failure to improve on their 7–9 r ...

. Week 4 saw star running back Terrell Davis, who was last year's league MVP, hurt his knee and was placed on injured reserve for the remainder of the season.

Offseason

NFL draft

Draft Notes

Personnel

Staff

Roster

Schedule

Standings

References

External links

1999 Denver Broncos
at

Pro-Football-Reference.com Pro-Football-Reference.com is a website providing a variety of statistics for American football. It is one of the few sites that provides information on both active and retired players. The site provides statistics for teams dating back to 1920. ...

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