The Denver Gold was an American football franchise in the United States Football League (USFL) from 1983 to 1985. The Gold played their home games at Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado; and were co-tenants in the spring with the Triple-A Denver Zephyrs baseball team (Denver Bears prior to 1984).
Contents
History
Holding fast to the USFL's original blueprint
When the USFL first organized, league officials identified Denver as a critical market. However, they had a difficult time finding an owner. Ultimately, the league's first operations chief, John Ralston, got in touch with local real estate magnate Ron Blanding, an old friend from his days as head coach of the National Football League's Denver Broncos. After some pleading, Blanding agreed to sign on.
Blanding was easily the poorest owner in the league. He held fast to USFL founder David Dixon's original blueprint for the league, keeping tight controls on expenses (including player salaries) while heavily marketing the team in the Rockies.
The Gold's original coach was Red Miller, who led the Broncos to their first-ever Super Bowl and had known Blanding for several years. Miller was still a very popular figure in the area; fans were still smarting at how the Broncos fired him after the 1980 season. However, Miller bristled at Blanding's bargain-basement approach to running the team. The players used rented cars from Rent-a-Wreck, some of which were in rather poor condition. They had to rely on bare-bones meals, traveled to training camp in old school buses, and only had 100 uniforms for the 120 men they invited to camp. Blanding also balked at signing any of the Gold's first seven picks in the 1983 draft. It got to the point that an irate Miller once threatened to quit unless Blanding decided to "act like a fucking owner of a professional football team."
1983 season
The Gold attempted to utilize some of the goodwill established by the more established Broncos by involving former Broncos players and coaches in the Gold organization for the Gold's inaugural 1983 season. Miller stocked his Gold roster with a number of former Broncos players. He also tapped his former starting quarterback with the Broncos, Craig Morton, as his offensive coordinator. Morton became head coach after Blanding fired Miller in the middle of the 1983 season. Despite one of the toughest defenses in the league, a weak offense kept the Gold out of the playoffs with a record of 7-11 in 1983. Blanding, however, was more satisfied with the fact that he actually turned a profit. He was also happy that the Gold led the league in attendance, with almost 42,000 fans per game. In part because of this, the league chose Denver to be the host of the inaugural USFL Championship Game.
1984 season
After finishing the 1983 season making a small profit, the Gold went into the 1984 campaign with a bare-bones payroll. They did not sign any significant free agents or college draft picks and traded away two of their three starting linebackers during training camp. First they dealt RLB Kyle Whittingham (84 tackles, 3 fumble recoveries and 2 interceptions) in a package deal to New Jersey and then traded popular All-USFL LB Putt Choate, who had 178 tackles the previous year to the expansion San Antonio Gunslingers.
With one of the league’s lowest payrolls entering the 1984 season, the Gold began with a 7–1 record and were tied for first place in the USFL with the Philadelphia Stars and Birmingham Stallions after 8 weeks.
However, the turning point of the season was a 20–18 loss at the Louisiana Superdome to the New Orleans Breakers on April 22. With starting QB Craig Penrose not dressed, the Gold dropped what would be the first of five consecutive losses. Their early success was attributed to an opportunistic offense and a bend-but-don't break defense that seemed to overcome their personnel issues at linebacker.
During this time, Blanding put the Gold on the market. Unwilling to join his fellow owners in reckless spending, Blanding sold the team to auto dealer Doug Spedding for $10 million in April 1984. By some accounts, Blanding was the only USFL owner who got a net positive return on his investment. Spedding shared Blanding's frugal approach to running the team; if anything, he was even more cost-conscious than Blanding. He ran the Gold out of one of his dealerships. Despite being rather eccentric (according to Morton and Blanding, he was notorious for opening players' mail), years later many former Gold players praised Spedding for holding fast to the original USFL model.
Over the second half of the season, Morton had a QB shuffle that saw him use four different starters in Penrose, Bob Gagliano, Fred Mortensen and rookie Ken Hobart at various points over the last nine games. The Gold went 2–7 down the stretch and finished out of the playoffs. Acquired from Jacksonville in May, Hobart made his first pro start on June 8, a two-point loss to eventual champion Philadelphia, decided by a late field goal.
The offense ranked a respectable eleventh in passing and fourteenth in rushing among the eighteen USFL teams in 1984. Running back Harry Sydney was the main offensive weapon rushing for 961 yards and ten touchdowns to lead the Gold. Quarterback Craig Penrose tossed twelve TD's and was picked fourteen times over eleven starts in fourteen appearances.
1985 season
In hopes of getting into the playoffs, Spedding hired Houston Gamblers offensive coordinator Mouse Davis for the 1985 season. Rumors had actually abounded that Davis was coming to Denver for much of the latter part of the 1984 season. Davis was the chief advocate of the Run & Shoot offense in the USFL and had implemented the system in Houston that helped make Jim Kelly a superstar.
Davis acquired former Chicago Blitz quarterback Vince Evans, who shared playing time with Bob Gagliano, a fourth-string quarterback under Morton. Although neither quarterback was particularly effective in leading the offense, Davis's offensive schemes and the team's strength at other positions helped the Gold finish fourth in the league in total offense.
Unfortunately, just after Davis took over, the USFL announced that it would switch to a fall schedule for the 1986 season. Spedding was one of two owners (the other being Tampa Bay Bandits owner John F. Bassett) to vote to stay on a spring schedule, knowing that the Gold could not even begin to go head-to-head with the Broncos. His guess proved right. While the Gold had been one of the USFL's attendance leaders, fans in the Denver area were not about to abandon the Broncos. Despite finally getting into the playoffs with an 11–7 record, the Gold's attendance crashed from over 20,000 to 14,400 fans per game.
As a result, despite finishing second in the Western Conference, they were forced to play on the road against the lower-seeded Memphis Showboats under pressure from ABC. The network, who had considerable influence over the USFL due to the structuring of the league's television contract, did not want the embarrassment of having a game played in a near-empty stadium. The Gold were shelled 48–7.
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Demise of the franchise and the league
The Gold would have been in an impossible position even without their attendance figures falling through the floor after the USFL announced it would move to the fall. Staying at Mile High Stadium would have been a logistical nightmare, and no other stadium in the area was large enough or suitable enough for temporary use.
Realizing it would be untenable to stay in Denver, Spedding announced in November that he planned to move the Gold to Portland, Oregon to take the place of the departed Portland Breakers. However, just three months later, Spedding sold the Gold's player contracts to the Jacksonville Bulls. Although the move was billed as a merger, Spedding retained the Gold's intellectual properties. He seriously considered joining Bassett's proposed spring football league before Bassett's failing health prevented that league from launching. Instead Spedding, Bassett, and the USFL as a whole were doomed by the ill-advised attempt to move the playing season to the fall in 1986 in direct competition with the more-established NFL.
The USFL's high-stakes anti-trust suit against the NFL ended in an award of only US$3.00 to the USFL. The jury cited the league's abandonment of Denver and several other major markets as one reason why it awarded the USFL only nominal damages. With no new funds to cover its high spending, the USFL cancelled its 1986 season and folded.
Single-season leaders
Rushing Yards: 1261 (1985), Bill Johnson
Receiving Yards: 1432 (1985), Leonard Harris
Passing Yards: 2695 (1985), Bob Gagliano