It was a balmy autumn day when the Brisbane Broncos – sitting on top of the NRL ladder – touched down in Darwin last year for a mid-season match against Parramatta.

Fullback Reece Walsh hopped off the plane and opened his phone. The notification bell on Instagram lit up with 20-plus messages from local women wanting to meet the NRL’s hottest talent.

Welcome to the life of a rugby league rock star.

It may sound like an enviable lifestyle – the fame and fortune that comes with being one of Australia’s most marketable faces at a powerhouse sporting franchise.

And Walsh isn’t alone, the Broncos became the most popular team in NRL history thanks to star power like Pat Carrigan and Ezra Mam.

But it’s this adulation that has been credited as one of the factors in the Broncos’ crash from NRL grand final rock stars to rock bottom.

“Playing for the Broncos, it’s never easy,” coach Kevin Walters said.

“I keep saying that to everyone. Unless you’ve actually played here, it’s never easy, and that’s what some of our younger players are getting their heads around.

“It’s tough playing here every week. I feel like we’ve done a great job as staff with keeping the players together.”

MAKINGS OF A STAR

The exponential rise of Walsh from an emerging talent at the Warriors to the ‘Justin Bieber of rugby league’ is just one example of the unique challenges the Broncos have faced in recent times.

A handful of Broncos diehards used to line the training fields at Red Hill to watch their heroes train midweek.

These days there can be hundreds, and thousands during last year’s finals series, forcing the Broncos to erect fences and hire security guards to chaperone players.

Walsh once left training to find a young female in the tray of his $150,000 Dodge Ram ute, holding flowers and a gift.

He may also be the only NRL player in history to issue fans guidelines on how to ask him for a selfie.

All of this at age 22.

It’s no wonder Walsh – who is about to have more Instagram followers than the Broncos’ official account – has potentially struggled to cope with the pressures of becoming bigger than the game.

The powers at the Broncos have also had a difficult time managing Walsh and the growing personalities at the club.

With more than 60,000 members, and record average home crowds of 40,000 this season, the Broncos have never been more popular and CEO Dave Donaghy admitted the hype had become a challenge.

“The onus is on us as a club and the onus is on me to provide the environment that enables our players and our staff to thrive, not just survive,” he said.

“It’s a big footy club, we understand that. We understand that it means a lot to Brisbane and people ride the wave of emotion of wins and losses. Our members do as much as anyone. We get that.

“The mental skills side is such an important part of our game. We’ll look really closely around how we continue to invest in that space.”

GRAND FINAL SCARS

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it all started to unravel for the Broncos but around 9pm on October 1, 2023, is a good starting point.

Inspired by a remarkable Mam hat-trick, the Broncos had bolted to a 24-8 lead against back-to-back premiers Penrith in the NRL grand final.

There was 23 minutes remaining in the decider when Adam Reynolds converted Mam’s third try from a 12-minute individual blitz to give Brisbane a 16-point buffer.

Scribes in the press box at Sydney’s Accor Stadium went to work writing stories about Mam’s heroics to clinch the Clive Churchill Medal as the Broncos secured their first NRL title since 2006.

Walters – a five-time premiership player with the Broncos – was going to be the coach that snapped Brisbane’s 17-year title drought.

With one of the NRL’s best game managers in Reynolds at the helm, all the Broncos had to do was execute the basics and put the Panthers to bed in the final quarter of the match.

But Penrith had other ideas. With champion halfback Nathan Cleary pulling the strings, the Panthers conjured the most remarkable comeback in grand final history.

Tries to Moses Leota (63rd minute), Stephen Crichton (68th) and Cleary (77th) turned Brisbane’s premiership-winning lead into a 26-24 defeat.

Mam’s medal went to Cleary and the Panthers hoisted the trophy for the third straight season.

The vibe in Brisbane’s dressing room after the game was one of pure confusion.

Despite his brilliant performance, Mam wept in the arms of his parents. Shattered lock Carrigan never emerged from the inner sanctum. Dolphins-bound prop Tom Flegler wasn’t sure how to feel.

Walters put on a brave face but ultimately realised the opportunity the Broncos had let slip. He has now missed the finals in three of four seasons in charge of the Broncos.

Melbourne mastermind Craig Bellamy, arguably the NRL’s premier current coach who has been on the losing side in four grand finals, believes the defeat would have stung the Broncos.

“You throw everything at it, especially that last month of the year, and they looked like winners with half an hour to go,” he said.

“There might have been some flatness from that.

“I don’t know because I’m not there, but I imagine if it happened to us and we got beaten like that in a grand final, I’m not sure how we’d come back.”

The Broncos went their separate ways after that night, some to Test duties while others holidayed. They all claimed to have moved on from the defeat.

When they reported for the first day of 2024 pre-season training in early December, Walters attempted to put it to bed by watching a replay and having an honesty session about where it went wrong.

The grand final loss, particularly the manner of it, was supposed to inspire the Broncos to redemption this year.

Instead they have bombed out of the premiership race before the finals and NRL legend Cameron Smith said Brisbane’s attitude hasn’t shaped up.

“You have to take into account what the team did last year. It was a fair effort to make a grand final and let’s be honest, they should’ve won it,” Smith told SEN.

“When you pull on the Broncos jersey, you have got to be prepared to play every week because other teams are coming to get you.

“For some reason they haven’t been able to find that this year, which is bamboozling because look at how close they were to winning a premiership last year. They were 15 minutes away from winning the comp and now they’ve struggled all year.

“They haven’t played with the same attitude they did last year. Have they struggled with expectation or put the slippers on the feet and said ‘we had a great year last year’?

“They haven’t had the same hunger or motivation that they had last year. They haven’t put in the work needed to go again.

“Penrith have made four grand finals in a row and if they make it this year then it’ll be five. It’s just incredible. They are a side and a group of individuals who are willing to work hard and make sacrifices every week.

“It’s gone wrong this year for the Broncos so they need to sit down pretty quickly and do a full review as an entire squad and be brutally honest with each other.

“It’s the only way you can move forward and people need to put their hands up and admit they weren’t good enough.

“That’s senior players and the coaching staff. All of it. If they let it linger and don’t deal with it, how can they move forward next year?”

CRASH AND BURN

Riding a wave of popularity and the high of playing finals for the first time since 2019, the Broncos launched their 2024 NRL campaign with a grandiose function at Brisbane Airport.

The theme aligned with the club’s selection to be part of the NRL’s historic Las Vegas venture and humility was left at the front door.

After being involved in a drunken scuffle in Fortitude Valley days earlier, Carrigan and Reynolds re-enacted the wrestle for photographers. It was all fun and games.

A private jet was stationed in the hangar as an Elvis impersonator and dancers took the stage to farewell the team bound for the United States.

But the Vegas expedition was an ultimate failure as the Broncos fell 20-10 to the Roosters in a drama-charged clash at Allegiant Stadium, where Mam became the centre of a racism scandal.

After a tough opening month, the Broncos had a 2-3 record but fought their way into the top four for the first time this year with a gritty 13-12 win against Manly at Magic Round – before the wheels fell off.

The Broncos went on to lose nine of their next 12 games, hurtling down the ladder before Wayne Bennett’s Dolphins delivered the final blow with a 40-6 derby thrashing in the penultimate round.

The crash of the Broncos has been more dramatic than the club’s rise from ninth in 2022 to last year’s grand final.

Injuries to key players like Payne Haas, Reynolds, Walsh and Mam have contributed, but there has been more to the demise.

“When we reflect on it there’s going to be a whole range of factors. There’s never one thing,” Donaghy said.

“There’s multiple reasons why we’ve found ourselves where we are. The important thing is that as we go through the review process, we’re really honest and transparent with each other and work together to identify where we fell short and come up with the solutions to fix it.

“The reality is all the answers are inside the building. It just hasn’t come together this year, which for us, when we set ourselves high goals, is not good enough.”

“One area that we’ll look at closely is how we addressed last season. Did we do enough to address the come down from last year?

“The physicality side is a big part of footy but the other part is the mental side of it. We’ve already identified that that’s a gap for us and we’re taking steps to put some much improved measures in place there to support the program and the players.”

RISE AGAIN

When the dust settles on the failure of 2024, the Broncos’ brains trust will gather to dissect what went wrong and how to fix it next season.

The Broncos are laced with the talent to be an NRL force, but this year’s implosion was a stark reminder that talent will only take you so far.

Former captain Corey Parker has struggled watching his beloved Broncos burn and the 347-game NRL great believes only one thing will take Brisbane back to the top.

“It comes back to understanding the value of the football club and if every decision is made in the best interest of the team and the club, they will be the right calls,” he said.

“They need to get back to standards and values. Go back to the start of 2023 and end of 2022, they made a conscious effort to change some things over the summer defensively, they worked really hard and it was evident.

“They need to be held accountable, each and every one of them. They need to understand that to continue to play well in the NRL, you need to do it week in and week out.

“You need to live the habits. You don’t just do it when you want to.

“There’s no resilience. It’s something you get from consistently doing the hard yards at training. You can’t just find resilience, you have to be able to live it and that’s through training methods. That’s the big one for me and that was the big difference from 2023.

“They made a grand final based on their defensive resolve. Yes they didn’t have as many injuries, but you can’t blame that solely for what’s happened this season.

“The criticism has come off the back of their success from last year. I haven’t seen a united and happy and fun footy side for a long time at Brisbane.

“If you go back to last year, they had an air of arrogance about them. They believed in themselves.”

Perhaps they believed in themselves too much and this was the year the Broncos had to have.