Tuesday afternoon marked the end of an era in Denver, Colorado. A short era, but one nonetheless.

The Broncos will be trading away their franchise quarterback. Their young and proven Pro Bowl quarterback. And no one really knows why.

According to the Broncos front office, Denver will be acquiescing to Jay Cutler’s trade request in the near future and will attempt to trade their forlorn star QB.

Who they’ll be working with and what they’ll be getting in return is anyone’s best guess, but you can expect any deal to be a major one. Teams don’t offer up young franchise QBs everyday you know.

You may be sitting at home scratching your head, wondering why in God’s name would Denver do something this stupid. You might be right, if the Broncos handle the actual trade poorly, but for now their choice to trade Cutler makes sense on a number of levels.

This move smacks of control to me. It’s a power grab plain and simple. The Broncos have grown tired of being painted as the bad guy by Cutler et al, and yesterday they made it very clear that dissension in the ranks will not be tolerated, no matter how valuable that player is to the organization.

Then again, there’s always two sides to the story.

Cutler obviously has felt an increasing lack of care coming from Denver’s front office ever since the team sent former head coach Mike Shanahan packing at the end of last season. As the undisputed leader on the field (at least on offense), he rightfully expected the team to keep him in the loop with any major decisions, yet the Broncos went away from that tack fairly quick after they snatched up Josh McDaniels as their new head coach.

McDaniels quickly set to work remaking the Broncos into his own image, and realized right from the start that Cutler was not the kind of quarterback he preferred. McDaniels is coming from New England where he had every toy imaginable to play with and a future Hall of Fame QB in Tom Brady to run the show.

Cutler and Brady are polar opposites as QBs: one is precise and surgical with his throws, carving up defenses with his brain instead of his braun; the other is a gunslinger that attacks defenses with reckless abandon, throwing the ball into places that make people gasp everytime he drops back to pass.

That style of play simply doesn’t fly with the philosophy employed by McDaniels and Co. He expects precision over strength; intelligence ahead of instinct. Cutler is not that kind of quarterback. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with his style of play, but his continued success in Denver was doomed from day one of the McDaniels regime, and both sides knew it.

That’s why this trade was inevitable. Neither side was going to back down from the way they work on the field, and it was just a matter of time before the team made the right decision in siding with their head coach.

Players come and go, but the team as a whole is what really matters. Giving in to Cutler’s demands could be seen as a weakness by some, but in reality it’s more a sign of strength in my book, as the Broncos have made an emphatic statement to anyone who believes they’re greater than the team that their antics will not be tolerated.

It remains to be seen whether the Broncos will get the better end of the stick in this fiasco, but no one can blame them for the conclusion they finally reached. It’s in everyone’s best interest to resolve it in this way, and the longer they waited, the worse their position became.

In other words, they had no choice but to try and make a deal.

Now it’s time to see what the market will bear.

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