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Broncos Fans Start a GoFundMe to Get Rid of Paxton Lynch. Sad!

SourcePaxton Lynch probably thought he hit his lowest point as a Denver Bronco on Saturday night, when the ballyhooed bust of a quarterback was booed off the field.

But the real rock bottom came after Denver’s 42-28 preseason-opening loss to the Minnesota Vikings. Adding insult to insult, one Broncos fan has created a GoFundMe in order to expedite Lynch’s release. …

Keep in mind the Broncos would suffer a $2.5 million hit by cutting Lynch, who carries a $4.457 million dead money charge in the third of his four-year rookie contract. …

The last thing he had in mind was completing 6-of-11 passes for a whopping 24 yards and an interception across two quarters. Context: He logged less completions (six) than his QB2 challenger, Chad Kelly, had incompletions (seven).

After the game, Broncos coach Vance Joseph characterized Lynch’s performance as “up and down.”

I’m not arguing that Paxton Lynch is the biggest QB bust of all time. Most people put Ryan Leaf at the top of that list. But I’ve always thought JaMarcus Russell pretty much retired that trophy. Because he was not only the No. 1 overall pick who only made 25 starts over three seasons, but he was drafted before the rookie salary cap, so he hauled in $39 million for that flaming bag of dogshit (18 TD, 23 INT, 65.2 Passer Rating) he called a career. Which worked out to just over $5,570,000 of Al Davis’s money per win.

But Russell had one huge advantage over Lynch. And it’s that he had the good fortune to carry out the entirety of his professional futile and stupid gesture before social media. He was out of football by 2009. Back then your niece was just transitioning her duckface selfie game from MySpace to Facebook. Twitter was still called “microblogging.” And GoFundMe wouldn’t exist for another year. If these things were not in their infancy/prenatal period, the world would have haunted every waking moment of an utter failure like Russell. Instead, that dishonor falls upon the very inaccurate shoulders of Paxton Lynch.

I give the Broncos fan responsible for this credit. Not so much to the other Broncos fans, since as I’m writing this the account has 50 bucks in it. But the idea is inspired and the point is made. And I just don’t see how you can possibly come back from this, whether you’re Lynch or the team. When you take a quarterback in the first round, you’re handing him the keys to your franchise for the next 10 years at least. It means you’ve obsessively gone over every detail of his game, his IQ, his mechanics, his leadership. You’ve put his entire life through an MRI and under an electron microscope. The careers of everyone in the organization depend on getting it right. If three years later he’s been in five career games, is throwing for 2.1 YPA (even in a preseason game) and has the fanbase arranging to pay him go to away, ownership has to clean house.

And that means John Elway has to go. On his watch, the Broncos have used the 57th pick on Brock Osweiler and the 26th on the bucket of guts that is Paxton Lynch. That’s the kind of failure that will keep a team from  being competitive for a generation. For a guy who some people still argue is the best quarterback ever, the only right decision Elway has ever made at the position is drafting HGHQB Peyton Manning out of the Guyer Anti-Aging Institute. I just don’t see any way he can survive drafting a quarterback whose become a punchline.