Keeler: Broncos Country is done with Vic Fangio, even if Broncos aren’t. “This is the lamest I’ve seen in close to 30 years.”

Bill Thompson — better known as “Wild Bill” to friends old and new — stepped out from the mother of all party buses and scanned the parking spaces to his left. Then the ones to his right. He sighed.

“To be honest with you, this is the lamest I’ve seen in close to 30 years,” Wild Bill said an hour before Chiefs 28, Broncos 24 at Empower Field. “People have given up a lot of empty (parking) spaces, too.”

It wasn’t the patches of Kansas City red that rankled Thompson, a Broncos ticket-holder for 37 years and a tailgating fixture for more than three decades. It was the patches of silence.

From the back row of lot E2, Saturday felt like a loss before the Broncos even kicked off.

“Half of the people that are here every game called and said, ‘I won’t make it today,’” Wild Bill mused.

“And I don’t know if they’ve given up. Or if it was the game being changed from Sunday to Saturday.  My daughter couldn’t make it because she had to work. But it’s very, very sad. You hope there’ll be changes (with the Broncos) after this, in some way. There has to be.”

But what if there aren’t? At least, none of substance?

“I’ll tell you right now, there’d better be,” Thompson countered. “Because if not, then the fan base, they’ll be like this.”

He pointed to the empty parking spaces where grills used to be. And should’ve been.

Broncos Country didn’t speak with their wallets during Week 18 so much as scream. Scream from their couches. The no-show count for the regular-season finale was 14,571. In person, it felt a lot larger than that.