Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen says his former general manager, Ted Sundquist, didn’t have the right chemistry to work with head coach Mike Shanahan, and that’s why Sundquist was fired.

“There was in my mind a dysfunctional relationship between the head coach and the general manager,” Bowlen told Mike Klis of the Denver Post. “Not that they didn’t like each other. It just didn’t seem the proper chemistry was there. I’m not blaming either party.”

Last year, another AFC West owner, Dean Spanos of the Chargers, also described the relationship between his coach and his general manager as “dysfunctional.” In that case, it was the coach, Marty Schottenheimer, who was sent packing, and the general manager, A.J. Smith, who got to keep his job.

But in San Diego, the general manager was the coach’s boss. In Denver, the coach was the general manager’s boss, as Bowlen made clear, saying, “Ted was the general manager and Mike is the vice president of football operations, so Ted works for Mike.”

And since Ted works for Mike and Mike got his way, that means Mike is the one who will be held responsible if the Broncos again miss the playoffs in 2008. Bowlen seems to have sent that message to Shanahan.

“When the season was over, Mike and I had a number of discussions of how we were going to right the ship,” Bowlen said. “It went from players to coaches to football personnel. That’s just part of what you do, because I’m not in this business to have seasons like we did last season.”

Bowlen was harsh in his assessment of the Broncos’ 2007 season, saying that last year the Broncos had a “dysfunctional locker room and a coaching staff that I think everybody would agree was not in sync,” and adding that in his conversations with Shanahan, “we both agreed we needed to make significant changes across the board, including in the locker room where we had some bad guys.”

This year, Sundquist has taken the fall for those “bad guys.” Shanahan had better hope no one has to take a fall next year.