Vintage Denver Broncos Orange Crushmobile T-Shirt 70s

Woody Paige gets the credit. Early in the 1977 season the Rocky Mountain News sportswriter started calling Denver’s defense the Orange Crush — orange home jerseys, a soda everybody drank, and a unit that had just opened 6-0 while surrendering 46 total points. The name stuck to a whole city, not just a defense.

That team finished 12-2 and reached the franchise’s first postseason, beating Pittsburgh and Oakland at home along the way — the winners of the previous three Super Bowls — before Dallas ended it in Super Bowl XII. They gave up 10.6 points a game that year, third fewest in the league, and ranked first in the NFL against the run. Randy Gradishar and Tom Jackson anchored it. Gradishar finally got his Hall of Fame call in 2024, forty-seven years late.

The graphic carries a 1978 copyright, which places this squarely in the afterglow — printed while Denver was still arguing about a Super Bowl it lost. Single stitch throughout, the tag long since faded past reading, the shirt reduced to nothing but what it depicts.

From the season that turned Colorado orange.