Joe Ellis sustained drive: the Denver Broncos' president and CEO brings a steady hand and deliberate approach to the job of running Colorado's most beloved team--and reigning Super Bowl champion. Oh, and he prefers road games.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: CEO of the YEAR

Joe Ellis steered his company car to the crest of La Veta Pass, rising from the swirls and curves of U.S. Route 160 to reach the road's high point, where the wide floor of the San Luis Valley beckoned below. Alamosa was dead ahead, and beyond it the little town of Del Norte. Both were familiar stops within Ellis' territory, a broad swath of southern Colorado where scattered exits from Lamar to Pagosa Springs led to local grocery stores and the people who ran them. Twenty-two years old and newly graduated from Colorado College, Ellis had a car, a job selling caps and T-shirts to retailers and a take-home salary of $1,000 a month. "I was living large," Ellis says. "I never had so much money."

Ellis didn't know it, but his future was riding shotgun over long stretches of Colorado roads in 1979. "We were selling Denver Broncos merchandise to supermarkets at the time," remembers Tom Burke, a Denver-based business owner who had been impressed enough by Ellis to hire him, unproven and untested, straight out of college. "So he kind of started early with the Broncos."

Some combination of fate or destiny or sheer coincidence has tied Ellis to the Broncos ever since. Thirty-five years after he prowled southern Colorado with a product list, Ellis succeeded team owner Pat Bowlen as CEO of the Denver Broncos Football Club and the organization's Stadium Management Co. affiliate. Previously chief operating officer, Ellis added the title of president in 2011 and was elevated to the CEO post in July 2014 when Bowlen, struggling with a worsening Alzheimer's condition, relinquished day-to-day operational control.

At a 2011 press conference tied to the reorganization that made Ellis president, he was the man literally in the background. The cameras and the media attention were trained instead on John Elway, the former quarterback and legendary comeback kid who had returned to run the Broncos football operations, reporting to Ellis. The moment was a metaphor for Ellis' professional career: understated, considerate and above all, deferential. Nowhere in Ellis' official biography, for example, is there mention of a link to one of America's foremost families: the Bushes. (Ellis' mother is the lone sister of former U.S. President George H. W. Bush). To those who know him, that's to be expected. "He has no ego whatsoever," says Paul Tagliabue, the former National Football League commissioner who hired Ellis in 1990. "Joe is decisive but deliberate. And he's willing...