ENGLEWOOD, Colo. -- In 2010, Aaron Pelch had just been named head football coach at Millsaps College, a school of 960 students in Jackson, Mississippi, that plays Division III football on fall weekends. Pelch had a career's worth of names for potential assistants on his first staff, but he knew who would get his first call, because, he says, he knew where the guy would eventually end up.

And with that he dialed Rich Scangarello.

"Easily the second-best recruiting job I've ever done, and the first was my wife," Pelch said. "The second was him. I did pretty good, right? But he is absolutely one of the best teachers that I've been around, and to be a great teacher you first have to have a great understanding of what you're doing. He has that and hey, if people don't know him now, they will. He is headed where I always thought he would be."

The 47-year-old Scangarello is the Denver Broncos' first-year offensive coordinator, hired by coach Vic Fangio, endorsed by John Elway and with roots in the same playbook Mike Shanahan and Gary Kubiak used to put three Super Bowl trophies in the team's lobby. But to reach that acclaim, he has sharpened his coaching acumen with stops at small schools sandwiched between stints in the NFL.

"And maybe when they hired him, people were like Scanga-who?'" Pelch said. "But Rich was willing to make the moves he needed to make to put himself in position that he's in right now. Not everybody is willing to do those things. He never played college football, that's one thing ... just the thought that you never played puts some people off in this business. So, there's kind of a path in coaching, but he wasn't on that path, but he just kept making the moves he needed to make to put himself in the position he's in right now. He's made some moves that are maybe unheard of, or maybe not heard of a lot (laughs). I know I'll always be appreciative of my time with him."

Yes, there are roads that are less traveled and then there are roads most folks would just look at and say never mind. Scangarello's road is distinctive in many ways and includes several stops where Scangarello believed going from a "bigger" situation to a smaller school would actually help raise his game.

In short he went small, multiple times, to ultimately try to go big.

He did it to learn how to call plays and he went where someone would allow him to do it. He has stops on his résumé at Carleton College, Millsaps and Wagner sprinkled in between stints at UC Davis, the University of Idaho and Northern Arizona.

"It's not out of choice, really, I'm not sure anyone would choose specifically that route," Scangarello said with a laugh. "The reality of it is the NFL is a very difficult league to get into, people don't hire you unless they know you in some fashion. You need advocates. But I knew where I wanted to be so I did what it took to get here."

He counts a stint on Tom Cable's Oakland Raiders staff in 2009 -- with Pelch -- as a watershed moment, when Cable and current Atlanta Falcons offensive line coach Chris Morgan became two of his advocates. Oh, and there was that stint on the Falcons staff in 2015 with Morgan and Kyle Shanahan, when Scangarello had left a nicely-appointed playcalling job at Northern Arizona to earn roughly $17,000 as a Falcons "offensive assistant."

"Maybe a nice way of saying no benefits and less than $20,000, but a single guy that can do it and was in position to pull it off and it was a really important opportunity from [Falcons coach] Dan Quinn," Scangarello said. "Chris Morgan and [Cable] fought for me and I trusted their advice. I just felt like it would work out. Maybe not every moment of every day, but in the big picture I thought it would work out."

Said Pelch: "You're not talking about a 25-year-old guy at that point. That took some courage, a lot of courage, at that point."

But even from that stint with the Falcons, even as recently as four years ago, Scangarello left the NFL's ground floor, a place many assistants wouldn't leave for fear they wouldn't return, to go to Wagner College to call plays. He was then Kyle Shanahan's quarterbacks coach with the 49ers after Wagner and then joined the Broncos.

In Denver, he'll run the offense Elway wants, the offense Elway believes in since as he says "we won two Super Bowls and had a lot of success and I just felt like, and Vic felt like, Rich had an updated version. He had really impressed Vic before Vic was hired here."

"I kind of did whatever I could to meet with all kinds of coaches, especially defensive guys I respected so I could talk about things and really find out what I was as a playcaller, what I believed," Scangarello said. "I kind of begged, pleaded, had a mutual friend, get me in front of Vic at the [scouting] combine one year."

It's a playbook, if the Broncos get what they hope to get, that will feature the signature run plays that powered Mike Shanahan's two Super Bowl wins as well as what Kubiak has featured for decades. There will be play-action passing, the quarterback rollouts former Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer has called "the foundation of it."

But Scangarello has been tasked with updates as well, some motion here, some different personnel groupings there. To sprinkle in some of the run-pass options and spread concepts he has seen in the college game into the scheme he believes can win.

"I think he just knows football, you can see that," quarterback Joe Flacco said. "This is his first chance in the NFL as a coordinator, so in that sense I do think he's really eager to get out there and get going and get this thing off and get us rolling."

The bottom line always awaits, however. Scangarello has certainly been around, been enough places to know that. He knows touchdowns and wins, how he teaches players to get both, will ultimately decide how he's doing in the job he always has wanted to have. He has moved up and down the coaching ranks to prepare for that.

"It's like this scheme, why I believe in it," Scangarello said. "It allows you the flexibility, whatever types of players you have, you can adapt, you don't get boxed in. You can adjust. I've tried to do that and my family supported me with advice, with money, with the whole deal to make it happen at times in my life. There were many times you could step away because you don't catch a break, but you need a little help to not give up."

Said Pelch: "There was a time I begged and pleaded with him to come here. I'll say there was a little putting him in position to feel bad for me because I didn't have anybody. I was asking him to come to a job where we were all going to bunk in the basement of a dorm until we found a place to live. I used all of the tools at my disposal, a Hail Mary, because everyone, including me, could see what kind of coach he was and was going to be. And nobody can ever say he didn't earn it."