Broncos

The Broncos went into the 1998 postseason as the team that had lost four Super Bowls in the 1980s without winning one, and John Elway had been the quarterback for three of them. Super Bowl XXXII changed that: Denver beat the Green Bay Packers 31–24, and Terrell Davis, who had rushed through the game despite a migraine that blurred his vision in the second quarter, took the MVP award. A year later Elway closed his own career the same way, throwing for the win over the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl XXXIII and taking the MVP himself.

Bob Howsam, a minor league baseball owner, put the club together in 1959, and it entered the American Football League as a charter member the following year. The move into the established order came in 1970, when the AFL folded into the NFL and Denver joined the AFC West alongside the Kansas City Chiefs, a rivalry that has run since that first AFL season.

The defense has done as much for the club's identity as any of its quarterbacks. Red Miller's unit earned the name "Orange Crush" in the late 1970s, and decades later, under a roster built around Von Miller, it was known as the "No Fly Zone." Miller's own moment came in Super Bowl 50, where Denver's defense held Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers to 10 points; Peyton Manning, in his final season, took the ring but Miller took the MVP.

Ownership passed from Howsam through a handful of hands before Pat Bowlen took control in 1984 and held it for three and a half decades, stepping back only when Alzheimer's forced him to hand the reins to Joe Ellis in 2014. Bowlen died in 2019, and the family trust ran the club until the Walton-Penner group bought it in 2022. Since Manning's retirement in 2015, the Super Bowl run that defined the franchise's best decades has not returned.