Lessons learned: Broncos’ Courtland Sutton intends to apply rookie year experience to become elite in 2019 By Ryan O’Halloran Denver Post July 22, 2019

An unremarkable Thursday was being followed by an equally non-descript Friday for Broncos receiver Courtland Sutton. Nothing was going wrong. Nothing was being noticed, either.

Then Sutton ran down the right sideline against cornerback Chris Harris. Quarterback Joe Flacco lofted a throw of at least 20 yards. Sutton went airborne to snatch the pass with both hands. Falling to the turf, his right foot hit first and he made sure to drag his left foot in bounds.

Pass completed. Applause generated.

The highlight play is what the Broncos need from Sutton in his second pro season.

Listed at 6-foot-4 and 216 pounds, he has the speed, vertical ability and hands to make the difficult catch look easy. But just as important is the game-to-game consistency — precise route-running, adjusting to what the coverage presents and not over-complicating the simple catch.

“Obviously, we think a lot of Courtland,” general manager John Elway said. “We think there’s a lot there and he’s only scratched the surface of what we think he can do.”

The Broncos’ receiving corps is long on potential and short on production. Emmanuel Sanders has 535 career catches; the other 10 receivers in camp have a combined 96.

Sanders’ Achilles injury kept him out of the offseason program and has so far limited him to individual camp drills. Yes, the Broncos figure to prioritize the tight end position more in the passing game, but absolutely, any potential recipe for success in resuscitating the offense includes Sutton.

The Broncos’ ideal modus operandi offensively is run to set up the play-action pass. If rookie tight end Noah Fant and Co., can occupy attention in the middle of the field, it will free up Sutton for one-on-one matchups outside.

“He’s a big target that’s competitive and wants to be great,” Elway said. “We’re thrilled that he’s on our team and we think he’s just going to continue to get better this year.”

Knows what to expect Sutton’s rookie season should qualify as a success.

Among first-year receivers, he ranked eighth in catches (42), third in yards (704), sixth in touchdowns (four) and first in catches of at least 20 yards (16). But he is still looking for his first 100-yard and multi- touchdown games.

“To be a rookie and try to be a starter in this league, I couldn’t imagine,” Sanders said. “Me and Antonio Brown came in together (with Pittsburgh) and we weren’t even starting as rookies. (For Sutton) to put up those numbers was impressive.”

In 2010, Sanders and Brown combined for one start (by Sanders), 44 catches and two touchdowns (both by Sanders). Things worked out for them.

Sutton was thrust into a leading role when Demaryius Thomas was traded to Houston at midseason and Sanders was injured a month later.

Being the No. 1 receiver for a struggling team? Not ideal.

The benefits of being the No. 1 receiver for a struggling team? Priceless.

“A year under his belt is going to be huge for him,” Elway said. “He knows what to expect.”

In the four games minus Sanders, the Broncos went 0-4 and Sutton caught 14 passes (one touchdown), including only two for 14 yards in the loss at San Francisco that derailed the season.

“Just assuming that No. 1 role, you can’t go into a game and have one or two catches — you have to be ‘That Guy,’ every day,” Sutton said. “I accept that role.”

Good thing Sutton is fired up about accepting the No. 1 role — he may not have a choice.

Projecting Sanders’ role and production at this point is an exercise in guess-work. Ditto for how much of an impact can be made by DaeSean Hamilton, Tim Patrick and rookie Juwann Winfree.

In Sutton, the Broncos believe they have a firm idea on what he can be because he showed glimpses last year.

According to The Denver Post’s game charting, he was targeted 27 times on passes that traveled at least 16 yards in the air. He had 13 receptions for 366 yards and three touchdowns. Throwing deep to a big body is right in Flacco’s wheelhouse. Another obvious priority is in the red zone. Sutton had only three catches inside the 20-yard line last year, an inexcusable total. The Broncos were 19th in red zone touchdown percentage (56.8).

“I’m hoping (offensive coordinator Rich Scangarello) wants to maximize that,” Sutton said. “I think I’m gaining trust with him and Joe and showing them that I can make plays so when we get to the games, they feel comfortable calling those plays.”

Second-year jump Sutton should also be encouraged by the recent first-to-second year improvements by second-round receivers. Looking at the numbers of nine previous second-round receivers. In Year 2, they increased their production by 28.1 catches, 316.5 yards and 2.4 touchdowns

Sutton should look toward three receivers: Allen Robinson (increases of 32 catches, 852 yards, 12 touchdowns), Alshon Jeffrey (increases of 64 catches, 1,054 yards, four touchdowns) and JuJu Smith- Schuster (52 more catches). Scangarello and receivers coach Zach Azzanni provided Sutton with another example: Atlanta’s Julio Jones, who went from 54 to 79 catches, 959 to 1,198 yards and eight to 10 touchdowns in 2012.

“Coach Rich and Coach Azzanni are great coaches to have in your corner — they push me to make sure I maximize every rep,” Sutton said after practice Friday. “They showed me Julio running the same routes in this same exact offense. I’m excited to work every day to get to that point. You just don’t wake up and it happens. You have to stack up the days and be productive.”

So what happens between Years 1 and 2 for receivers? What type of figurative light bulb goes on?

“At his position, he’s seeing coverages and coverage techniques that he had never been exposed to,” coach Vic Fangio said. “The unknown of that, hopefully, has gone away. There’s still some there — he’s not a seasoned vet yet, but he should be better and he’s worked very hard in the offseason knowing what he’s up against.”

Sutton will have to be ready to face Kyle Fuller/Prince Amukamara in Week 2 (Chicago), Jaire Alexander/Kevin King in Week 3 (at Green Bay) and Jalen Ramsey/A.J. Bouye in Week 4 (Jacksonville). Thus the emphasis of piling up positive practices against the Broncos’ top cornerbacks of Harris and Bryce Callahan. Enter the season with momentum, and production could follow. There is no question Sutton has the right want-to level to be No. 1.

“The transition period takes a little bit of time, especially coming from a spread system at SMU,” Scangarello said “You combine a good football IQ, good work ethic and a guy with some talent — the sky’s the limit.”

Broncos training camp rewind, Day 4: Early-practice penalties irk coach Vic Fangio By Ryan O’Halloran Denver Post July 22, 2019

Player Attendance Did not practice: LB Todd Davis (calf, third consecutive missed practice), WR River Cracraft (oblique, second consecutive), TE Jake Butt (day off, first missed practice) and LB Justin Hollins (hamstring, first missed practice). WR Emmanuel Sanders (Achilles) continues to be limited.

Coach Vic Fangio, on Butt: “We thought he could use a day off. Normal work-back-into-play (plan) from the (knee) operation.”

Fangio, on Hollins: “He tweaked his hamstring a little bit (Saturday). We knew he was going to be out (Sunday). He possibly could practice (Monday) but not sure.”

Fangio, on Fumagalli: “He did a little bit early. He’s going to be a day-to-day guy.”

Top play During 7-on-7 work, QB Drew Lock’s throw over the middle was deflected in the air and toward S Dymonte Thomas, who battled the ball in the air and then made the interception.

Thumbs-up QB Kevin Hogan. He probably had his best day of camp, showing decent poise in the pocket and completing several passes over the middle of the field.

OLB Von Miller vs. RT Ja’Wuan James. During one-on-one pass rush/protection, Miller won the first matchup, but Jones won the second meeting when he didn’t bite on Miller’s spin move.

WR Trinity Benson. He caught three passes during 11-on-11 work, taking advantage of moving up the depth chart because of injuries and departures at his position.

Thumbs-down RB Devontae Jackson. The undrafted rookie from Georgia Southern had at least one dropped punt, which is not the way to get into the early-game rotation during the preseason.

Presnap penalties. “Both sides had them early, and that’s something we must eliminate. There’s no two ways about it,” Fangio said.

Odds and ends *The announced attendance was 3,691.

*The Broncos ran 81 snaps of 11-on-11.

*Quarterback playing time (11-on-11): Joe Flacco 38 snaps, Kevin Hogan 19, Drew Lock 18 and Brett Rypien six.

*The inside linebacker rotation alongside Josey Jewell continues. Keishawn Bierria was first up with the No. 1 unit Sunday.

*Flacco was 7-on-7 passing during his first 11-on-11 period, completing passes to six different players.

*The only dropped pass during 11-on-11 was by rookie WR Kelvin McKnight.

*In addition to S Dymonte Thomas’ interception, the other takeaway was by S Will Parks, who intercepted Lock’s pass that was broken up by ILB Joe Jones.

*During the second 7-on-7 period, the quarterbacks completed 14-of-15 passes. Flacco and Lock were both 5-of-5 passing. The only incompletion was thrown by Hogan and was broken up by ILB Jones.

*Fangio, on the conditioning progress of camp: “One of the big things about training camp is you have to get calloused to play NFL football. Some of that started to form today, being it the second day in pads, the fourth day in a row. It’s like the guy that swings the sledgehammer out at construction. The first few days, he has blisters and his shoulders are sore. And then by Week 2 or 3, he’s all good to go. That’s kind of what we’re working through.”

*The Broncos ran 1-on-1 receiver vs. defensive back drills for the first time in camp. Fangio, though, wasn’t watching … and doesn’t plan to. “To me, 1-on-1s are a teaching drill,” he said. “It’s really not football. I tell the story and it’s a true story: In my years as a coordinator, I’ve never watched a 1-on-1. I’ve never watched it in person nor on tape because if I watched that drill, I would be afraid to ever call man coverage.”

*During an early-practice run play, LG Dalton Risner was rolled up on. He got up slowly and was limping, but stayed on the field.

*From the Should Practice Everything Dept.: Toward the end of the day, P Colby Wadman practiced running out of his end zone for a safety and the free kick that follows the safety.

Monday’s schedule 9:15 a.m.-noon practice (open to the public). Staff writer Kyle Fredrickson contributed to this report.

Royce Freeman’s physicality a valuable asset in new Broncos’ offense By Kyle Fredrickson Denver Post July 22, 2019

Broncos running back Royce Freeman checked in at almost 240 pounds in training camp. He plans on using every ounce to his advantage this season.

A hypothetical example: Denver’s offense faces third-and-long with a pass play upcoming. The defense sniffs it out and, suddenly, a linebacker blitzes through the A-gap on a warpath to quarterback Joe Flacco. When Royce Freeman plugs the hole in pass protection? You feel it.

“If he makes contact, he’s solid and has his feet set, I don’t think you’re getting by him,” fullback Andy Janovich said. “He’s a big, physical guy who is smart, too. He can process everything that’s going on, pick it up and see what’s coming. He’s great at it.”

That’s old news for many who witnessed Freeman’s rise from Oregon star to third-round NFL draft pick. It’s a new development, though, in Broncos offensive coordinator Rich Scangarello’s quest to orchestrate a well-balanced attack. Freeman is Denver’s most physically intimidating presence in the backfield, and whether blocking or rushing, the mechanics stay the same.

“Being a bigger back, you’ve got to put your foot in the ground and make sure you’re vertical, go north and south,” Freeman said. “It’s about making sure to get your steam ahead of you and your body weight moving forward.”

Those talents were sparingly on display in 2018. Freeman exploded out of the gate with six rushes of 12 or more yards through his first five games. But a sprained ankle in Week 7 limited Freeman’s production to finish the year, while fellow rookie Phillip Lindsay earned a Pro Bowl selection. Freeman’s final rookie stat line: 130 carries for 521 yards and five touchdowns. Scangarello gushed over Freeman’s talents Sunday, calling him “physical, smart and instinctive.” The Broncos’ offensive coordinator also drew parallels between Lindsay-Freeman and another prominent running back duo from recent memory: Atlanta’s Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman. In 2017, that pair combined for 2,109 yards rushing/receiving and 16 total touchdowns.

Scangarello needs Freeman’s yin to Lindsay’s yang to keep opponents off tilt. Freeman will often be asked to play the role of backfield enforcer.

“Royce is big and physical in pass protection,” Scangarello said. “That’s a big deal in the NFL. That durability that comes with it.”

Freeman described versatility among running backs as the unit’s greatest strength. He’s ready and willing to do whatever is required of him in 2019. Blitzing linebackers, beware.

“I know expectations at this level,” Freeman said. “It’s about going out here and competing, knowing my abilities and executing. Every day, I’m trying to take my talent to the next level.” “I took a different look at life”: Broncos’ Jeff Holland reflects on arm amputation of Dolphins’ Kendrick Norton By Kyle Fredrickson Denver Post July 22, 2019

Jeff Holland and Kendrick Norton were high school football teammates at Trinity Christian Academy in Jacksonville, Fla., with big dreams of reaching the NFL.

They both made it a reality last season as rookies.

Holland, an undrafted outside linebacker, appeared in three games for the Broncos. Norton, a seventh- round defensive tackle, was waived by the Carolina Panthers and signed to the Miami Dolphins’ practice squad.

“We went all through high school together,” Holland said. “I actually gave him his nickname, ‘Big Thick.’ That was one of my best friends playing high school ball together.”

So it’s easy to imagine Holland’s difficulty digesting the news last week that changed his friend’s life forever. Norton, 22, had his left arm amputated at the scene of a Miami traffic accident July 4. Norton was released from a hospital last week after six surgeries. Holland could hardly believe it.

“I took a different look at life,” he said.

Norton’s resiliency since the accident has been powerful. He told CBS Miami in a recent interview: “I am alive, and I am grateful.”

“That’s the guy I know,” Holland said. “But like his mom said, he’s going to need his close friends more than anything. Obviously, he can’t play ball anymore, and that’s a big part of his life.”

Holland enters the 2019 season inspired by Norton’s positive mind-set with a greater defensive role in mind for the Broncos. The departures of outside linebackers Shane Ray and Shaquil Barrett in the offseason open the door for increased opportunity.

“It’s just studying my playbook,” Holland said. “The game is slowing down for me, so I can actually play faster.”

Brittany Bowlen looking forward to 'getting back to Broncos' and meeting with Joe Ellis next week By Mike Klis KUSA July 22, 2019

Brittany Bowlen attended Alzheimer's Day at Broncos training camp Sunday. She and Ellis will meet this week to go over her job description with team.

Brittany Bowlen is ready to sit down with Broncos’ chief executive officer Joe Ellis to go over the game plan for her return.

“Absolutely. Really looking forward to sitting down and getting back to the Broncos,’’ Brittany Bowlen said in a one-on-one interview with 9NEWS Sunday.

Her return to the Broncos in an executive role, she said, would occur before season’s end.

Brittany Bowlen is ready to sit down with Broncos’ chief executive officer Joe Ellis to go over the game plan for her return.

“Absolutely. Really looking forward to sitting down and getting back to the Broncos,’’ Brittany Bowlen said in a one-on-one interview with 9NEWS Sunday.

Her return to the Broncos in an executive role, she said, would occur before season’s end.

Ellis told 9NEWS on the opening of the Broncos’ training camp Thursday morning he was going to sit down with Brittany this week and go over her job description and timing of her return.

Until then, Brittany will finish up her one full year of working with McKinsey & Co., a worldwide management consulting firm. Her personal calendar includes getting married in mid-September, take a nice honeymoon and come back ready to work for the Broncos in a senior management position.

Brittany has stated she would eventually like to her way to one day succeeding her father as the Broncos’ chief owner, although at the same time she emphasized she has a lot of work to do before she can realize her goal.

She was standing next to her fiancé Alex on the concourse up from the Broncos’ practice fields on a hot, bright Sunday morning, greeting fans as they walked in. Fans who dropped money into the donation containers Brittany and Alex were each holding received some words of gratitude.

It was Alzheimer’s Awareness Day at Broncos training camp Sunday with the team matching all cash donations.

“There are a lot of fans showing up in their purple, which means they looked up what the practice was about today,’’ Brittany said. “And they knew that we were going to be honoring the Alzheimer’s Association and chose to come out and support and raise donations with us. That means a lot.’’ She was also joined by brothers Patrick and Johnny and later Lil Bel in greeting many from the crowd of 3,691 who attended the camp workout.

Think of how personal the fight against Alzheimer’s is to the five youngest Bowlen kids. Not only did their father, Broncos’ Hall of Fame owner Pat Bowlen, recently pass away from the disease, it was announced last year their mother Annabel is also battling Alzheimer’s.

“But it brought us together in a way that no one ever thought would be possible,’’ Patrick Bowlen said. “We’re extremely strong now and we’re going to keep fighting for my mom and for anyone else.’’

Said Brittany of Alzheimer’s hitting both her mom and dad: “It’s really hard but we’ve also met other families that have had multiple loved ones afflicted with this disability. We find support from them and know that by raising money and encouraging research that we can help find the end to Alzheimer’s. We just have to have hope.’’

Broncos notebook: Lindsay could be bigger weapon as receiver this year By Mike Klis KUSA July 22, 2019

Offensive coordinator Rich Scangarello dropped hint Sunday that suggested Phillip Lindsay might get more touches through the passing game.

All this fret about whether Phillip Lindsay should get the ball less this year as a way to preserve his smallish body.

New Broncos’ offensive coordinator Rich Scangarello dropped hint Sunday that suggested Lindsay might get more touches through the passing game.

The 5-foot-7 ¼ Lindsay was seen splitting out wide and matched up by various linebackers several times during 11 on 11 team periods Sunday.

"One of the great things about coming to Denver that really excited me from the day I walked in the door is there are very few players in the league like Phillip that have the ability to win in a one-on-one matchup at any time," Scangarello said. "I think the easiest matchup to create in the NFL is the halfback on a linebacker. That's what we try to do in this offense a lot, and I think he has that gift and that ability and those traits."

Lindsay averaged a tick more than 15 touches a game last year – 12.8 carries and 2.3 receptions. He wound up with 1,037 yards rushing and another 241 yards receiving even though he missed the final game because of a right wrist injury that required surgery.

Eli’s coming

Asked to pick a player who has most surprised him since he got the job as offensive coordinator this offseason, Scangarello picked the Broncos’ top backup offensive tackle.

"I'll say Elijah Wilkinson," Scangarello said. "He was an undrafted free agent, I believe. He was a lot heavier, he's lost weight. He's a very athletic and a great scheme fit. I just like the way he works out here."

Bronco Bits

The Broncos gave tight end Jake Butt a day off as he continues to come back from ACL surgery. …

Rookie linebacker Justin Hollins was hobbled by a hamstring pull. …

The Broncos have drawn bigger crowds each day. The count Sunday was 3,691.

Broncos big receiver Tim Patrick ready to grow in second season By Mike Klis KUSA July 22, 2019

He finished final four games last season with team-best 242 receiving yards.

As I moved in to interview Tim Patrick following the Broncos’ camp practice Sunday, I was struck by how far I had to look up to catch his eyes. What the heck, I said, have you grown?

"That’s what everybody says," Patrick said, laughing.

He’s 25 years old, so it’s unlikely he’s another inch up from his listed 6-foot-4.

"I might still be growing," he said. "Everybody says that. I did put on some weight."

Maybe that’s it. Patrick said he put on 10 pounds. Of?

"Muscle," he said, laughing again. "I hope muscle."

The trick? It helped he drew a full, $480,000 rookie minimum salary from the Broncos last year and he collected another $237,112 in play-time bonus.

"I had a little more money in my pocket so I was able to eat every single meal," said Patrick, who now has 220-plus pounds on his 6-4 (or so) frame. "I went and got some real training. I shouldn’t say real training. All my training is real. But I went to a facility in Florida and trained."

It’s too bad head coach Vic Fangio doesn’t watch his team’s one-on-one drill between receivers and defensive backs. He would have seen Patrick make a heckuva catch Sunday on a deep flag pattern that beat rookie Alijah Holder.

"That’s what I do, I beat man coverage," Patrick said. "That’s fun. That gets you going. Get the ball, catch it, get your swag right so when you get out there on team (11 on 11) and 7 on 7 you’re ready to go."

When the Broncos season essentially perished with Emmanuel Sanders’ Achilles injury prior to the 13th game last year , Patrick was the receiver who most stepped up. New No. 1 receiver Courtland Sutton may have hit the rookie wall as he had just 146 yards receiving in the final four games. DaeSean Hamilton had 182 receiving yards.

Patrick, who had just 4 catches for 73 yards through 12 games, finished with 19 receptions for a team- most 242 yards in the final four games.

"I wasn’t banking on my technique, I was just wanting to make plays," Patrick said. "Being able to do that with no technique gave me so much confidence going into the offseason to work on my technique. And if I do that then it’s going to be really hard to stop me." Q&A: Broncos OC Rich Scangarello talks scheme, QB competition, running back roles and more By Nicki Jhabvala The Athletic July 22, 2019

Joe Flacco has lauded his devotion to fundamentals, Kevin Hogan has labeled him a true “quarterbacks coach” who instills confidence in his players, Drew Lock has called him “100 percent the man” and Brett Rypien has credited him with bringing him to Denver. Vic Fangio has acknowledged he’s already exceeded his expectations, and John Elway has repeatedly expressed excitement over his arrival.

Ask around Dove Valley and it’s clear first-year offensive coordinator Rich Scangarello, 47, has earned the trust of his players and instilled hope in reversing a four-year spiral in offensive play.

But Scangarello’s task in remaking the Broncos’ offense is a tall one, and one that is only beginning. It’s arguable that no coach on staff is under the kind of pressure he is to revive the unit while also developing quarterbacks of varying experience and strengths, much like he did in San Francisco as a positional coach.

Similar to Fangio, the “first-year” moniker can be misleading with Scangarello. While many teams have been on a hunt for the next Sean McVay — a young, bright coach to make the leap — the Broncos went against the grain and hired a head coach with 40 years of coaching experience and an offensive coordinator with 24 years, spread across 10 different colleges and pro teams.

Scangarello’s lone season in Oakland (2009) laid a foundation as he learned behind Tom Cable. His year in Atlanta (2015) and two more in San Francisco (2017-18) further shaped his style and system as he learned behind Kyle Shanahan. And his years as a coordinator at various colleges provided him an education on quarterbacks that he believes was invaluable.

Sunday, following the Broncos’ fourth training camp practice, Scangarello spoke with The Athletic about his offense, the progress of the quarterbacks, the depth of the offensive line, the expectations of the running backs and much more.

What did you want to see from the quarterbacks when they returned from the break?

Yeah, each one individually has something they need to really focus on or a couple things. The young guys, it was about command of the offense and things that they could work on on their own, such as tightening up their mechanics, which I think they did a nice job. It’s their first time as a pro away, and to understand how valuable that time is and to make it count, I thought they did a good job.

With Joe as a veteran, for guys like him who have command of certain things, it’s really about coming in with a fresh mind and body and just being ready to attack this thing and be a great leader. And he’s done that.

How similar is your system to Kyle Shanahan’s, and are there things you added to it that are exclusively yours?

Ultimately my whole career, even before I got to Kyle, it was modeled after this system to some degree. But yeah, Mike Munchak has definitely been a huge influence on a lot of things, just his experience and some of the stuff he’s done in the past and had success that he’s been able to bring to the table. It’s just going to make us be a little more diverse and have some things that maybe people won’t expect.

How much did your time coaching in college help you for this job?

It’s hard to explain, but I believe that it’s just a lot harder in college to do this kind of offense. You don’t have the time, you have young kids that you’re developing, you don’t get to talk to the quarterback on the field through the headset. It’s just a different game, and it’s very challenging to do it right. And you don’t have the type of staff that you have here — experienced coaches, great assistants that can really mold their players in their room and (teach) the techniques it’s going to take to be great in this offense. That’s the luxury of being in the NFL. It makes it a lot more fun.

How complex is this offense, especially with regards to younger players who have to adapt from college offenses?

It’s the NFL. This offense is about taking players and putting them in a position to be successful. To do that, there has to be some flexibility, and that comes with some of the mechanics in the offense that can make it complex. But there are some core fundamentals that run through it in the run game, the play- action and the drop-back game and our protection schemes. I think that once you have a grasp of that, you’ll have a pretty good handle on what you’re required to do in the offense.

What do you need to see from Lock and Hogan for either to secure the backup quarterback job?

Every day is a competition. But in the end, each one has different things they’re working on when they step on this field. They need to compete, but they also need to work on their craft and get better at things. So it’s our job to evaluate all those things, but we have a lot of time — we have five preseason games, extra practices. There’s no hurry to make any of those judgments. Really it’s about them honing in their skills, having command and being the best player they can possibly be on this football team.

There’s been a lot of speculation about Royce Freeman and Phillip Lindsay, namely if their roles and workloads will change in this offseason. What do you expect of those two?

I think it’s week to week on all kinds of things, including the health of guys. But it reminds me a lot of our situation in Atlanta, where we had Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman. They were dynamic players, but each was different. Each brought different things to the table. I think the beauty of that room is there’s a lot of diversity in their skill sets. Obviously you have an elite player in Lindsay, but you have really complementary players, and (Devontae) Booker has done an outstanding job. We’re just fortunate we’re deep. It’s a good problem to have.

Can you use fullback Andy Janovich similar to the way Kyle Juszczyk is used in San Francisco’s offense?

Yeah, I think each fullback has strengths and weaknesses. The one thing they have in common that is one of the best parts of coaching guys like them is they’re very instinctive, smart football players. That allows you to do a lot without a lot of reps. They can figure it out and be very detailed at their craft, and because of that, we can do a lot of different things. (Janovich) is a versatile player; he’s tough, he’s smart, he’s physical in the run game and we’re fortunate to have him.

How do you feel about the cohesion of the starting offensive line, and what is your confidence level in the depth up front?

I feel good. There were concerns, but having Ron Leary back has been a huge addition, and I think Mike has done a great job molding that group. There are some really talented young players that are developing fast. I think Elijah Wilkinson has done a great job. He’s been a really good scheme fit for us, and I think he’s going to be a really good player. So there’s great competition and great depth and great youth. I think it’s a good group.

The tight ends have had an unfortunate run with injuries (Jeff Heuerman has missed time each season, Jake Butt is easing his way back from his third ACL injury and Troy Fumagalli recovered from a sports hernia but is now dealing with a hip injury), but what have you seen from that group so far in camp?

You’ve got a couple of young guys (Noah Fant, Austin Fort and Bug Howard) that have taken a lot of reps, and they’ve gotten better because they’ve been able to get those reps. It’s exciting. Their opportunity is there because other guys are down, and because of that, they’re showing what they can do. There are still some things they have to clean up, but I think they’re on the right path.

The veteran guys, they’re nicked up, but they’ll need less to get ready. But it’s a deep room. A lot of competition.

Rich Scangarello believes Flacco more athletic than people think; praises Wilkinson By Troy Renck KMGH July 22, 2019

Scangarello sees Lindsay as unique

Eating shards of glass. Drinking lava. Rubbing a cheese grater on the shins.

Things the Broncos fans would rather do than watch the Broncos offense the last three seasons, for $500 Alex.

Everyone knew the transition without Peyton Manning would be difficult. But no one figured it would be this turbulent. The Broncos have missed the playoffs every year since winning Super Bowl 50. Denver bottomed out last January, posting back-to-back losing seasons for the first time since 1972. The Broncos are 12-25 over their past 37 games, including 10-21 over the past two years.

Offensive coordinator Rich Scangarello brings a fresh set of eyes and intriguing résumé as the Broncos attempt to revive an offense that ranked 24th in points (20.6), 19th in passing (230.9) and red zone percentage (56.8) and 28th in third-down conversions (33.3 percent). Scangarello has gleaned knowledge from Kyle and Mike Shanahan as he attempts to revive the attack.

It starts, as it always does, at quarterback. Can Joe Flacco, at 34, be a franchise quarterback and lead his new team back to the playoffs? He's durable, but is he valuable? Scangarello explained to me why he's optimistic.

“We've got to go out and do it and put it together. I have a lot of respect for Joe. I don't think the numbers truly reflect the player he is. I never have. Kyle Shanahan, who we’ve talked about a lot, I’ve mentioned this before, he's got the kind of ability that allows you to push the ball down the field. He is tough in the pocket. I think that there is a misconception that he is not athletic," Scangarellow said. "You guys have watched the guy run around to escape the pocket the last few days. He's probably more athletic than any guy I've been around— (Falcons QB) Matt Ryan, those guys. He's got fluidity, and he can move. I'm excited. It's not going to be easy. We'll see where we can take it, but I think that there is a great foundation there."

Flacco believes the system can help him rebound. He posted his finest regular season in 2014 in a similar set under Gary Kubiak.

"It definitely can help," Flacco said. "I am not taking this for granted. This is an amazing opportunity."

Flacco needs weapons around him. Tight end Noah Fant showed why he was a first-round pick on Sunday, making multiple tough catches in the red zone. And all eyes shifted to Phillip Lindsay when he touched the ball. The Broncos want to use him as much as last season, but differently. So expect fewer runs between the tackles and more alignments with him out wide. In space, he's a greater mismatch than plaid on stripes.

"That's the exciting part. One of the great things about coming to Denver that really excited me from the day I walked in the door is that there are a very few players in the league like Phillip that have the ability to win in a one-on-one matchup at any time. I think that easiest matchup to create in the NFL is the halfback on a linebacker," Scangarello said. "That's what we try to do in this offense a lot, and I think he has that gift and that ability and those traits. Excited to try to do that and try to force defenses to put a DB on him to open up other players.”

Early on, the offense continues to search for traction. It doesn't help that Von Miller and Bradley Chubb and Co. are creating relentless pressure. For Flacco to succeed, he must remain upright. The offensive line is a work in progress. The current starters are Garett Bolles, Dalton Risner, Connor McGovern, Ron Leary and Ja'Wuan James. It was interesting, then, that Scangarello mentioned Elijah Wilkinson as the biggest surprise in camp. He is the backup to Bolles, who is quickly reaching a crossroads in his career in his third season.

"(Wilkinson) was an undrafted free agent coming out of college, I believe. He was a lot heavier, he's lost weight. He's a very athletic and a great scheme fit. I just like the way he works out here," said Scangarello, who has drawn praise for his footwork and sets. "I think (offensive line coach) Mike Munchak has done a great job honing out his skillset and really helping him develop. I think he is a good football player. I think he is a guy that we are very happy with up to this point.”

Footnotes Broncos safety Will Parks provided the quote of the day when I asked him about the dire national predictions for this team: "We don’t set goals because goals are limits. We think in terms of Pluto -- doing something out of this world.” Parks’ offseason work is playing off with strong play in camp. ... Tight end Troy Fumagalli (hip) remains day-to-day. ... Linebacker Justin Hollins is dealing with a strained hamstring issue.

Broncos lack experience behind QB Joe Flacco By Arnie Stapleton The Associated Press July 22, 2019

If Joe Flacco stays healthy, it won't matter that rookie quarterbacks Drew Lock and Brett Rypien are greenhorns and incumbent backup Kevin Hogan has gotten off to a rocky start in Denver this summer.

Hogan, who has started just one game in the NFL, back in 2017 for the Cleveland Browns, threaded an 11- yard TD pass to Noah Fant past two defenders Sunday that was easily his best throw of training camp.

Before that, the fourth-year pro had been misfiring with no pressure, repeatedly overshooting open receivers with either a clean pocket or in 7-on-7 periods where there was no pass rush at all.

That was an alarming development for a team that lacks experience behind Flacco, the 34-year-old QB the Broncos acquired from Baltimore in the offseason.

''I saw some good throws out there today'' from Hogan, coach Vic Fangio said. ''I'll see more when I go in and watch the tape. But I think Kevin has made a lot of improvements, and I'm talking from the spring to now ... and hopefully he'll keep doing that.''

Competing with Hogan for the No. 2 job is Lock, a second-round draft pick who's taking a crash course in the pro passing game after lining up under center at Missouri only a handful of times.

Rypien, who went undrafted after winning 37 games at Boise State, is hoping to stick around either as the third quarterback or on the practice squad.

''I like Brett,'' Fangio said. ''Brett, I think, maybe has got a future.''

Lock might very well be the future in Denver, but he's got a long way to go. He relied on his athleticism in college and was known for side-arming the ball, something Fangio only wants to see when his quarterback has a defender in his face.

''It's good that he can do that, but he needs to use it when he needs to, not when he doesn't need to,'' Fangio said. ''His college offense really had no carry-over to pro offenses and he was under duress a lot of times at his college, so a lot of his plays he was running around.''

Therefore, Fangio said, ''I don't think he's far along being a ready NFL quarterback as he could have been. ... He's not a quarterback yet. He's a hard-throwing pitcher that doesn't know how to pitch yet, so the faster he gets that, the better off he'll be - and we'll be.''

Fangio is hoping Lock proves a quick study.

''Every player is different, especially at that position,'' Fangio said. ''It could happen fast, like we've seen some rookies do. It could be a process to where it could be a couple of years. So, fast or a couple of years, somewhere in between. We'll see. I tell him that is on him. He's got to do it.''

For now, the Broncos are counting on Flacco, who's hoping to follow in Peyton Manning's footsteps and have a solid second chapter in Denver.

General manager John Elway said he finally feels good about his QB room after trading a fourth-round pick to the Ravens for Flacco and selecting Lock in the second round of the NFL draft.

''We just felt that with Joe coming in, getting him in a trade, and where he is in his career, we feel like he's in his prime. At least we hope he is,'' Elway said. ''To have a young guy like Drew learn under him and be able to kind of solidify that position for a while, obviously we've been looking for one since Peyton retired.''

Elway cycled through Trevor Siemian, Paxton Lynch, Brock Osweiler and Case Keenum following Manning's retirement in 2016.

''That's always a difficult position to fill,'' Elway said. ''But we finally feel pretty good about that position and where we are.''

Notes: TE Jack Butt took a scheduled day off, TE Troy Fumagalli is day-to-day with a sore hip and rookie LB Justin Hollins sat out Sunday with a sore hamstring. ... The Broncos hosted Alzheimer's Awareness D ay on Sunday, two months after team owner Pat Bowlen died at 75 following a long battle with the disease. Daughter Anabelle noted the sea of purple in the crowd replacing the usual orange. ''This day is hard,'' she said. ''But we are showing that we are strong and this is a way to raise money so things like this won't happen.''

Alongside Bowlen family, Broncos fans raise funds and show support on Alzheimer’s Awareness Day at training camp By Ben Swanson DenverBroncos.com July 22, 2019

Just over a month after the passing of Broncos Owner Pat Bowlen, several of his children reunited at UCHealth Training Center on the fourth day of training camp to continue fighting the battle against Alzheimer’s disease that he waged over the last five years after stepping away from the team in 2014.

With Sunday designated as Alzheimer’s Awareness Day, the Broncos and the Bowlen family encouraged fans to swap out the orange in their attire for purple, and five children from the family — Annabel, Brittany, Christianna, Johnny and Patrick — returned to the UCHealth Training Center to greet fans for several hours as they helped raise donations in support of the Alzheimer's Association.

“It’s really incredible to see fans show up in their purple,” Brittany Bowlen said. “It means they actually looked at the schedule for training camp and knew that we were dedicating today to the Alzheimer’s Association and raising funds for my parents and all the other people that are suffering from this terrible disease.”

Fans showed their support in a multitude of ways, whether in the way they dressed, the donations they made or in the small gestures they made in telling the Bowlen children what their dad meant to them.

“It’s also hard because my dad recently passed away,” Annabel Bowlen said. “This day is [hard] but we are showing that we are strong and this is a way to raise money so things like this won’t happen.”

It made the day more difficult, but the personal connection to all the fans made it all the more memorable.

“It definitely feels more personal, and it’s really nice to see all the families here,” Johnny Bowlen said. “You see the kids playing and you see everyone having a great time, and it really brings joy to us and to kind of share those moments brings us back to our family and brings us together too, which is great.”

In raising donations for the Alzheimer’s Association to continue the support for those fighting the disease, the children said they hoped their father’s impact on the community would endure.

“I’m happy to turn it into a positive or help do that because that’s what my dad would want,” Christianna Bowlen said.

Patrick Bowlen Jr. echoed her statement, saying, “He wouldn’t expect this much support, but he’d be extremely proud of everyone and extremely happy for everyone.”

The executive director of the Alzheimer’s Association’s Colorado chapter, Amelia Schafer, said that the Bowlen’s impact on their work goes well beyond funding, though.

“It’s been huge. Alzheimer’s still has a great stigma, so many people still don’t talk about it,” Schafer said. “In 2014, when Mr. B came out and talked about it, that very day we got calls from people saying, ‘I wasn’t ready to talk about this. Now I’m ready to even tell my family about this.’ It’s been huge for the Alzheimer’s community, and it’s been a great partnership. The Broncos are just the most amazing partner for us.

“… It’s been a five-year partnership that honestly every year we see awareness about the disease and funding for the disease grow. And for a disease like Alzheimer’s, which sorely needs a cure, a prevention or a treatment, it has been truly a game-changer for us and for the families living with this today.”

Broncos Camp Day 4 report: Juwann Winfree turns heads By Andrew Mason DenverBroncos.com July 22, 2019

Rookie wide receiver Juwann Winfree made catch after catch during the first three days of training camp, and that continued Sunday morning, as he punctuated his day with a grab of a short pass from Drew Lock that saw the quarterback fling the football under a pass rush and set Winfree up perfectly for plenty of yardage after the catch.

Denver's quarterbacks can trust Winfree -- and Denver's cornerbacks can trust him to be a difficult matchup. He's already caught the eyes of the secondary's resident Pro Bowler.

"Fifteen [Winfree] is nice," cornerback Chris Harris Jr. said. "I see him every day catching a lot of balls, having great routes. He's stronger than a lot of people would think as a young receiver. I like 15's game."

When Winfree learned of the praise, he beamed.

"That's huge to me, man," he said. "That made me smile, just because I've grown up watching these guys. When I got here, I always thought I could succeed at this level, but actually finally doing it, working and being able to compete against these top guys, going against the ones, it's providing a lot of confidence for me, and it's improving my game just going against him."

Winfree has already learned an important lesson: You can't get away with shortcuts at this level.

"When I come to the line, I've got to slow the game down so much more now, because there's little things that you could get away with at the college level, but now I can't," he said. "So when I'm here, I've got to be patient at the line, take my time and scan the whole field."

So far, so good.

TAKEAWAY TOUCH CONTINUES

The tip drill was in play for the defense Sunday. It intercepted rookie quarterback Drew Lock twice -- with the picks for Will Parks and Dymonte Thomas both coming off of deflected passes.

Parks' seven-on-seven interception of a pass intended for rookie tight end Noah Fant gave him two consecutive practices with a pick.

"He's out here going crazy. I can't say anybody who's having a better camp than him right now in the backfield -- other than Justin [Simmons], Justin's having a good [camp]," Harris said. "But 'Philly' has been amazing every day.

"It's going to be hard to keep these boys off the field. I feel like we're loaded at safety."

That ample depth includes second-year veteran Trey Marshall, who forced a fumble from tight end Austin Fort. Linebacker Joe Jones recovered. "After he caught the ball, he didn't really tuck it," Marshall said. "He was holding it loose, so I just came in and punched it out."

Marshall's strong day did not end with the forced fumble. He delivered one of the strongest hits of the day, rushing forward through the gap to stop running back Khalfani Muhammad in the backfield during a team period.

NOTES:

... Quarterback Kevin Hogan had some flashes, including a touchdown pass to Fant that saw him thread the needle past two defenders. Fant had position in the end zone to make the grab.

Later, Fant was able to turn upfield on a pair of passes in the right flat, allowing him to use his separation to rip off gains that would have covered at least 20 yards under game conditions. He also tacked on extra yardage after a reception by barreling through cornerback Isaac Yiadom.

Fant also nearly tacked on a second touchdown reception during a red-zone period late in practice. Fant motioned to the right, lined up inside and then found a gap in the zone, but as Flacco threw, defenders closed and the pass fell incomplete.

... Fangio's desire to mix and match and give players chances against higher levels of competition continued, as he inserted undrafted rookie quarterback Brett Rypien with the No. 2 offense against the first-team defense for one period late in practice.

"A lot of teams only have three quarterbacks in camp. We have four," Fangio said. "We are getting a fair amount of reps out there as it seems. Some days he's going to get more than others. That's just the way it goes, but I like Brett."

After taking a sack when Von Miller and Bradley Chubb exploded off the edges, Rypien settled in, hitting Brendan Langley and Kelvin McKnight.

The pass to McKnight saw Rypien stand in the pocket and deliver the ball despite pressure from DeShawn Williams, who closed on him as he prepared to throw.

"Brett, I think, maybe, he's got a future," Fangio said.

... With Troy Fumagalli not seeing team-period repetitions as he recovers from a hip injury, rookie tight end Austin Fort continued to see first-team repetitions.

"He's catching some balls. I think he's getting better," Fangio said. "He's a guy that kind of established himself here early that, ‘Hey, this guy's a prospect, not just an off-the-street guy.' We'll see. We have hope, but it's early."

... Rookie wide receiver Trinity Benson also continued to rotate through the lineup, seeing a handful of first-team snaps once again.

... The wide receivers and defensive backs went against each other in one-on-one work for the first time in this year's training camp. There were some notable moments. Parks broke up a pass intended for DaeSean Hamilton. Lock had a well-placed pass to Fred Brown near the sideline. And Tim Patrick made one of the best individual plays of the day with a back-shoulder reception of a long Flacco pass.

But Fangio offered caution to avoid making too much of the drill, which usually favors the offense.

“To me, one-on-one's a teaching drill. It's really not football," he said. "I tell a story and it's a true story. In all my years as a coordinator, I've never watched a one-on-one drill -- I'm assuming you're alluding to wide receivers and DBs -- I've never watched it in person nor on tape because if you watch that drill, you'd be afraid to call man coverage."

... The offense eventually got going, but lurched from the blocks slowly, with two false-start penalties during its first period of practice.

"Both sides had [penalties] early. That's something that we just must eliminate," Fangio said.

'Perfect complements': OC Rich Scangarello has seen a duo like Lindsay and Freeman before By Aric DiLalla DenverBroncos.com July 22, 2019

Rich Scangarello has seen this running back duo before.

Phillip Lindsay and Royce Freeman may have made names for themselves in Denver, but they also remind the Broncos’ new offensive coordinator of two running backs he coached in Atlanta in 2015.

The Falcons’ Tevin Coleman and Devonta Freeman possessed different skill sets that worked in favor of an offense that led the NFL with 34.1 points per game the year after Scangarello left Atlanta.

And while Lindsay and Freeman aren’t the same duo as Coleman and Devonta Freeman, they play to each other’s strengths in similar ways.

“Royce and Lindsay are perfect complements,” Scangarello said Sunday. “It kind of reminds me of Tevin Coleman and Devonta Freeman in Atlanta. They [have] different skill sets, they’re both talented in their own way, they’ll both be able to [use] their strengths so they can be the best players they can be. Royce is big, he’s physical in pass protection. That’s a big deal in the NFL, that durability that comes with it. As far as running the football in the scheme, they both can do it. One’s just probably going to do it with a little bit more physicality and the other’s going to make you miss.”

Lindsay, who rushed for 1,037 yards and scored 10 total touchdowns as an undrafted rookie, was part of the allure that drew Scangarello to Denver.

“One of the great things about coming to Denver that really excited me from the day I walked in the door, there are very few players in the league like Phillip that have the ability to win a one-on-one matchup at any time,” Scangarello said. “I think that the easiest matchup to create in the NFL is the halfback on a linebacker, and that’s what we try to do in this offense a lot. I think he has that gift and that ability and those traits, so [I'm] excited to try to do that and try to force defenses to put a DB on him and open up other players.”

And that’s before you add in Freeman, who had all five of his touchdowns in the first eight weeks of the season.

“He’s just a physical dude,” Scangarello said. “He’s smart, he’s instinctive and I’ve enjoyed coaching him so far.”

Together, they can make Denver better.

“They’re both different, but they both can do the same things in different ways,” Scangarello said. “But you don’t want Lindsay, a smaller guy, to take A-gap pressure from linebackers on a regular basis. To be able to share the load and put those guys in position to do something they can do better, that’s our job.”

THE VALUE OF 1-ON-1’S

The Broncos’ wide receivers and defensive backs faced off in one-on-one drills on Sunday for the first time, but Head Coach Vic Fangio wasn’t watching.

The 33-year NFL veteran made it clear he has little use for that type of drill.

“To me, one-on-one is a teaching drill,” Fangio said. “It’s really not football. I tell the story — and it’s a true story — in all my years as a coordinator, I’ve never watched a one-on-one drill. I’m assuming you’re alluding to wide receivers/DBs? I’ve never watched it in person nor on tape. Because if you watched that drill, you’d be afraid to ever call man coverage. It’s a drill. It’s a teaching drill. And that’s the way I look at it.”

Fangio said one-on-one drills between offensive and defense linemen contain “a little bit more realistic stuff” and that he watches those drills on occasion.

Fangio’s staff, though, still has use for the drill.

“You’re out there singing a capella,” Defensive Coordinator Ed Donatell said. “There’s no rush. You’re right out there. The quarterback can see his target the whole time, so that’s a little bit of stress on you. What I try to do with our guys is I try to get them to play it straight during that period. Don’t try something out of the ordinary. Use it as a time to work on your trade and don’t listen to the cheering if it doesn’t come out your way. We just want to really dial in on our skill and improve, because that’s about as hard as it can be for us.”

And in the office, Donatell makes sure the clips aren’t shown in meetings in which Fangio is present.

“I just don’t tell him about it,” Donatell joked. “If we watch that drill, he said, ‘I’ll never call it.’”

EVALUATING FLACCO

Joe Flacco has never thrown more than 27 touchdown passes in a season, and he’s gotten to 25 on just two occasions. He’s also broken the 4,000 yard mark just once.

But Scangarello said he doesn’t think those are numbers are indicative of the quarterback’s skill set.

“We’ve got to go out and do it and put it together, but I’ve just got a lot of respect for Joe,” Scangarello said. “I don’t think the numbers truly reflect the player he is — I never have. …. He’s got the kind of ability that allows you to push the ball down the field. He’s tough in the pocket. I think there’s a misconception that he’s not athletic. I mean, you guys [have watched] the guy run around and escape the pocket the last few days. He’s probably more athletic than any guy I’ve been around — Matt Ryan, those guys. He’s got fluidity and he can move. I’m excited. It’s not going to be easy, but we’ll see where we can take it. But I think there’s a great foundation there.”

FANT MAKING STRIDES

Fangio said Fant caught his eye “a few times” during Sunday’s practice as the first-round pick hauled in several passes and added long runs after the catch. Scangarello has also seen the rookie make strides, especially since the team donned pads for the first time on Saturday.

“It’s the NFL,” Scangarello said. “The game’s faster. We’re asking him to do a lot because we know what he’s capable of. It’s not just him learning the offense, it’s also him learning the nuances of the things we know he’ll excel at. And so that adds to the learning. The fortunate part is we have a few extra practices … to get him going a little bit. He’s a quick learner. He’s got a skill set, and he can do just about anything. I’ll say this, I think one of the things that was most undervalued [about] him coming [out] of the draft that we felt very strongly about is I think he’s an excellent run blocker in this zone system. I’m excited about that. The pads went on, and he’s really shown very, very well.”

WHO’S THE RETURNER?

Special Teams Coordinator Tom McMahon said he needed to “control the guys that are really in that battle” for the team’s punt return position. That means ensuring they get live reps over the course of five preseason games.

That begins against Atlanta on Aug. 1.

“If [the Falcons] punt nine times, we’re going to have nine different punt returners,” McMahon said. “I guarantee it. I guarantee that — a different guy out every time. We’re going to try them all out. We have to find that guy. And you don’t know who it is. You look at [Darius] Jennings last year in Tennessee. Who knew who that guy was? And look what he did. He’s a star. So we’ve got to find the star.”

Jennings averaged 31.7 yards per kick return and scored a touchdown for the Titans in 2018.

BIGGEST SURPRISE

Through four days of camp, Scangarello thinks third-year offensive lineman Elijah Wilkinson has been the biggest surprise for his unit.

“He’s lost weight, and he’s very athletic,” Scangarello said. “[A] great scheme fit. I just like the way he works out here. I think [Offensive Line Coach] Mike Munchak’s done a great job bringing out his skill set and really helping him develop. I think he’s a good football player. I think he’s a guy we’re very happy about to this point.”

Wilkinson has appeared in 21 games in two seasons with the Broncos. All seven of his career starts came in 2018.

Jake Butt gets 'day off' from practice as he returns from injury By Aric DiLalla DenverBroncos.com July 22, 2019

Head Coach Vic Fangio and the Broncos gave tight end Jake Butt a day off from practice on Sunday as he works back from a torn ACL.

“We thought he could use a day off today,” Fangio said. “He’d gone three days in a row. So [it’s] just normal work back into play from the operations he’s had.”

Linebacker Justin Hollins (hamstring) also missed practice, as he spent portions of practice working with trainers.

“He tweaked his hamstring a little bit,” Fangio said. “We knew he was going to be out today. Possibly will practice tomorrow, but not sure.”

Tight end Troy Fumagalli (hip) remains day to day and did some work early in practice.

Wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders, meanwhile, continues to do work before the 7-on-7 and team periods of practice.

“It’s a slow but sure process,” Fangio said. ‘He’s out here working early [during] practice with guys. They take him in and do some more cardio with him where he doesn’t have to pound on the ground. Everything is good so far. He’s where we expected him to be and even a little bit more.”

Wide receiver River Cracraft (muscle) and linebacker Todd Davis (calf) also missed practice.

Annual NFL Training Camp Tour Begins—And It’s Already In Jeopardy By Peter King Football Morning in America July 22, 2019

I have led my football column with girls softball, and written way too many words about the death of my dogs, and the death of my brothers, but I must say this: I have never written about a “Jeopardy” contestant. And I certainly have never met my column subject at a Jack in the Box restaurant a few bounce passes from Jerry Tarkanian Way, 10 minutes west of the Las Vegas Strip.

James Holzhauer has had that effect on people over the past couple of months. We’re here because this Jack in the Box has a Coke Freestyle machine. (God, I’m old.) This machine has the diet grape soda Holzhauer loves, and he goes back for two refills in an hour. He’s a pretty simple man, ever after his 15 minutes of fame. It’s a placid hour for Holzhauer here, which has become rare for him. Holzhauer never was noticed, even in his adopted town of Vegas, till his magical two-month run on “Jeopardy,” when he won $2.46 million in 33 episodes. He started getting recognized in Prague, Barcelona and Lisbon because of his hot streak on the game show that’s been alive since before man walked on the moon. (True story: “Are you the Jeopardy guy?” he got asked on his European vacation in June. Several times.)

No one before or since ever won $100,000 on a “Jeopardy” episode. Holzhauer did it six times. He treated money unemotionally, and he had no fear about betting big at all times. Well, until his last bet, but there’s a story there, and I’ll get to that.

The NFL noticed.

“James Holzhauer? He’s awesome,” Aaron Rodgers told NBC’s Chris Simms recently. The Packers quarterback watches “Jeopardy” nightly.

The praise was cool for Holzhauer when I told him, but hardly overwhelming. “Aaron’s one of the best players ever on ‘Celebrity Jeopardy,’ for those who don’t watch,” Holzhauer said. “I know he’s a fan of the show. I’m a Bears fan though, so …”

The Lead: Holzhauer

As training camps open in full this week, I’ll detour to Holzhauer for a bit. You also come along on my tour of the new Raiders stadium in Las Vegas, with cool images from NBC Sports videographer Annie Koeblitz, then take you with me to Denver, for two days of Broncos training camp.

There’s a football element to Holzhauer, which is mostly why he’s in this space. He’s a big football bettor, and he’s so good at it that he’s got limits of how much he can put down on his bets at most Vegas sports books. So we talked “Jeopardy,” but we talked a lot of NFL too.

“If I had to pick a team or two to make it to the Super Bowl, win the Super Bowl, the boring answer is the Patriots and the Rams,” he told me, sitting a table away from an octogenarian couple. They were nibbling at chicken sandwiches before noon Sunday. “Everyone knows these guys are the best teams out there. But if you’re looking to invest in a futures ticket, I would say that the big thing to avoid is look away from the teams that have all the hype surrounding them. I can’t believe we live in a world where the Cleveland Browns are the most hyped team in the preseason. But I would say they’re probably the single worst bet to win the Super Bowl right now.”

Whoa.

Another story … I sat across the aisle from CBS broadcaster Andrew Catalon on my flight from Denver to Las Vegas late Saturday afternoon, and told him I was headed to Vegas to chat with Holzhauer. When I got off the plane, one of the Delta flight attendants said she overheard our conversation, and she was a big “Jeopardy” fan, and thought it was so cool that I’d have a chance to speak to him.

“Tell James we miss him,” the flight attendant said.

Apparently. The premier of “America’s Got Talent,” a pretty popular TV show, was seen bv 9.7 million viewers in late May. A week later, the climax Holzhauer episode—when he lost to a Chicago librarian in his final “Jeopardy” show—drew 14.5 million viewers. That’s more than watched a scintillating Chiefs- Broncos Monday-nighter in Week 3 last year, more than watched Brady-Luck on a Thursday night in Week 5 … and almost twice the audience of the Ravens-Chargers playoff-implication game on Saturday night in Week 16. I couldn’t look away. My brother-in-law, who is not a “Jeopardy” fan, somehow got hooked during the Holzhauer run and watched so intently that he’d call or text us after most episodes. All of it blew Holzhauer away.

“A lot of things in my life have changed,” he said. “I really underestimated how many people are paying attention to Jeopardy and what’s out there. I figured, maybe one in five, one in 10 people would recognize me. But no, it’s everywhere, especially in Las Vegas. I think the city’s kind of embraced me which is good. There’s a lot of attention on me which can be good, it can be bad. Sometimes my daughter’s acting up in public and I really wish I could become anonymous for a few minutes.”

On the show, I thought it was interesting to watch Holzhauer play the board from the bottom, making the big bets first instead of working up from easy to hard. It was cool to watch him bet absurd amounts all the time. “It’s a lot easier when it’s me doing the work than when I’m watching a player fumble away my bet at the last second,” he said. “You get the idea that money comes and goes especially in this line of work I’m in. I’m a pro sports gambler. You have winning days and you have losing days. But you know if you’ve got the right strategy, you’re going to get it in the end.

“I started taking the online tests to get on the show about 13 years ago. If they had called me that first year, honestly, I probably would’ve just been another forgettable contestant. As time went on, it kind of felt like, ‘Hey wait a minute. I only got one shot at this, maybe I need to really maximize that one shot.’ Do everything I can right. Take a little time, do my studying, know what I need to know and develop a really good game plan going in and just think, How would a gambler approach Jeopardy to maximize his winnings? That was basically how I was playing up there.”

On the last show, Holzhauer did something that appeared to be wholly uncharacteristic. He went light on his “Final Jeopardy” bet. “A modest one [bet] for the first time!” host Alex Trebek exclaimed. I was stunned too. I just figured, This guy’s human. He wanted to go back to his normal life. He’d won enough, and it was time for someone else.

Nope.

“Certainly not,” he said, cradling his diet grape soda. “I certainly did not want to lose. I would still be playing if they let me.”

Here’s how it went down: Entering “Final Jeopardy,” Emma Boettcher had $26,600, Holzhauer had $23,400 and Jay Sexton, the third contestant, had $11,000. If Holzhauer bet it all and won, Boettcher could beat him. He knew that. She knew that. She was really smart. He knew that too. So he set his sights on making sure no matter what, he would beat the third-place guy. Holzhauer bet $1,399 and America gasped. Well, America in the King living room, at least.

Holzhauer: “Some people said, ‘Oh you know, you couldn’t even have covered Emma if she’d bet zero.’ I thought there was a very low chance she was gonna bet zero in this spot. Even though she had never met me before this episode aired, she’d heard that I was a 32-time champion. She knew she was gonna have to shoot for the stars to beat me which is why she went big on those Daily Doubles bets [in ‘Double Jeopardy’]. And I thought to myself there was maybe like a 5 percent chance she’s not gonna bet big enough to cover me if I go all in. What I really need to worry about is the situation where she misses and then I need to worry that the third-place contestant isn’t gonna be able to double up and overtake me. The small bet was the way to protect against that. If I had gotten it right and Emma had gotten it wrong, and bet zero, then oh well. She played poker better than I did I guess.”

I said: “As I look at the science of it, if you had bet your max, you could’ve ended up at exactly $46,800. She ended up betting $20,201. So she ended up with $1 more than you could’ve won at your max.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“By her getting that, there was no way you could’ve beaten her anyway,” I said.

“Exactly. And you know, maybe there’s some small chance that she says, OK, this guy’s a pro gambler, maybe he knows that I would do this so maybe I should try to outfox him by making a small bet. But you know, 95 percent of the time, the player in first is gonna make that big bet and you just have to react accordingly.”

Life goes on. And football betting goes on. One of the bets Holzhauer likes this year, and every recent year, is a futures bet on the two teams with the playoff byes. “If you dig deep into the numbers,” he said, “you can get an idea of which teams have the inside track at the bye weeks and the tiebreakers come into play. There are times where there’s a decent chance that two teams will end up tied for the second and third spot, but one team has the tiebreaker locked up and you don’t always see that reflected in the odds … The one seed, just by virtue of having to play only two home games, would win the conference about 35 percent of the time and make it to the Super Bowl. The two team makes it about 29 percent, and the three seed makes it like 11 percent. That’s just an enormous gap between the two and the three. At least the past five or six years, something like that, you keep seeing the one and two seeds advancing to the Super Bowl.”

One other thing: Bet on Sunday nights for the week ahead. “If they put the odds up for next week’s football games on a Sunday night, there’s not a lot of thought that goes into that,” he said. “But you give people a week to bet on this, the odds are going to be a lot more efficient.” Oh, and one other thing after that: Bet on college football. There’s not as much attention paid to those games. Before he got his last diet grape refill at the Coke Freestyle machine, Holzhauer told me about the time in his life when he was told he couldn’t do something. And damn if he didn’t sound like a undrafted rookie who’d been doubted, and then rushed for 1,000 yards or caught 80 balls. Seriously: This line coming up made Holzhauer sound like Broncos running back Phillip Lindsay, ignored in the draft and then rushing for 1,037 yards as a rookie, ninth in the league last year.

“This is kind of a thing throughout my life,” Holzhauer said. “When I was 10, I got the, You’re wasting your time studying sports statistics. When I was 20, it was, You’re wasting your time gambling, playing poker.’ When I was 24, it was, You’re wasting your time gambling on sports. Then when I was 30, it’s, You’re wasting your time studying for Jeopardy. I hope I’ve proven all these things wrong.”

Camp Stop: Denver

Von Miller is the key to the Denver season

Late in the first padded practice of the year for the Broncos, Von Miller lined up on the defensive left edge, outside rookie tight end Noah Fant. Miller, suddenly 30, has always had a get-off stance similar to Lawrence Taylor’s, one foot back, leaning forward, threatening the inside but usually going outside, so you have to respect both. At the snap, he beat Fant outside and charged at rookie quarterback Drew Lock; it would have been sack in real life, but you don’t sack the quarterback in training camp. Next snap: Miller dropped three steps back into coverage, then pivoted quick and cut to his left, velcroing himself to an undrafted wideout, Romell Guerrier, in the slot. Lock, nothing there to his right, threw incomplete to the left side of the field.

The second play is more important to the 2019 Broncos, strangely enough.

The new coaching staff, led by pass-rush maestro Vic Fangio, has set out to make a very good player great at all things. Last year, Von Miller was not. He was sloppy. He got called for three encroachment penalties in the first half against the Niners late in the season and got yanked by coach Vance Joseph. PFF rated him the 16th-best edge-rusher in the game (low for him), 57th in coverage and 127th against the run. Numbers don’t lie. Miller was not a complete player last year. That was a significant factor in the Broncos sinking from third in team defense in 2017 to 22nd last year—and the dismissal of Joseph. Poll 32 offensive line coaches, and Miller might still be the most respected edge-rusher in the game. But in an era when edge- rush is all-important, it’s interesting to note that Miller, in eight seasons, has never won Defensive Player of the Year.

So why am I talking about blanket-covering Romell Guerrier in the slot? Because Fangio and his respected outside linebackers coach, Brandon Staley, are building Miller from the ground up, fundamental by fundamental. They know he can rush the passer, and know he can be better even at that. But they know he has to be better at the other aspects of the game, because he’s the defensive leader of the team, and other players follow him. If Miller’s working his footwork and his drops and coverage early in training camp, and that shows up at nighttime when practice tape gets dissected in front of the team, well, then Bradley Chubb and Derek Wolfe and all the new guys are going to see that and they’re going to work to be perfect too.

After practice, I said to Miller I thought that coverage play was a good example of the re-made Miller— and the respect he must have for Fangio early on. “A hundred percent,” said Miller. “Just do the job you’re asked to do, coached to do, every play.” More Miller: “I got a great coach here, one of the best coaches I’ve ever had in my life. We have great leadership here but he’s an outside linebacker guy. He’s coached a lot of great ones. I wanna be his greatest product yet. It’s the little things, like coach Fangio says. When you really focus on the little things it turns into a change of game. It turns into a whole different athlete. I bought into that. I bought into my outside linebackers coach as well, Coach Staley. He stays up super late thinking about how to make me better … I can really appreciate that. I bought into whatever those coaching points that they give me.”

Like this one on encroachment/offside. Miller has liked to take chances at the snap to get a millisecond of an edge. A myth, Fangio told his team one day. We had 60 sacks with the Panthers in 1996 and we jumped offside four times all season.

“Every player is going to have an assignment and a technique on every play,” said Staley, a rising coach under Fangio who came from Chicago with him. “If you can master those two things, then your beautiful instincts can take over. What Vic has taught Von—and with Vic, you’re talking about the Bill Walsh of outside linebackers, he’s had Kevin Greene, Rickey Jackson, Pat Swilling, Aldon Smith, Ahmad Brooks, Khalil Mack—is, ‘These are parts of your game we think can get better. And it will lead to more for you.’ That’s not a knock on Von. It’s a compliment. There’s another gear he can get to. And to Von’s credit, he has had a refreshing humility about being coached.”

Said Fangio: “Von’s been excellent, receptive from the beginning.”

The Broncos, coming off the 11-21 Joseph era, have been harped on by Fangio about the little things. Denver was seventh last year in turnover margin in the NFL; excellent, really, considering the top six made the playoffs. But the offense stumbled all season, and the lack of discipline on both sides (30th in penalties) crippled consistency. You’d think a defense with the bookend rush of Miller and Bradley Chubb and a secondary led by the great Chris Harris Jr., could make up for that, but they were 22nd in explosive plays allowed. Fangio watched tape of the season and couldn’t believe all the defensive breakdowns.

Fangio, getting acclimated to Denver over the past few months, has been to a few Nuggets and Rockies games. He loves talking to other coaches. Atlanta Hawks coach Lloyd Pierce and his staff attended Saturday’s practice.

“The details of each sport need to be tended to,” Fangio said, asked about lessons from his baseball manager friends Bud Black and Joe Maddon, and those in other sports. “And there’s team organization, team morale, maintaining the structure of a team where the individual is promoted so much. I like watching all games. Seeing the other games just solidifies to me that fundamentals is what wins. In a basketball game, a guy doesn’t box out correctly, and the other team scores on a putback. Baseball, they miss a cutoff, a run scores, you lose by one and it’s a huge play. Fundamentals is ultimately what causes you to win and lose.

“I think the other thing, and this has really been the case with Von, is players want the truth. Joe Maddon told me: ‘If I tell the truth to a player and he doesn’t like it, he’s gonna be mad for a couple days. If I lie to the player and he figures that out, he’s going to be mad at me forever.’ And rightfully so. We’re in this business to make people better, not gloss over things.”

At practice Saturday, the Denver radio host/FOX broadcaster/former NFL guard Mark Schlereth looked out at Miller during practice on a broiler of a Colorado morning. “I’ll make this prediction: Von’s sack numbers will go down, but he’ll be a better player at everything, and he’ll open it up for other guys on the defense. Derek Wolfe could have a career year with Von and Chubb being better at the total game. Von is like the Matrix; the things he can do athletically are not of this world. But now what I think Vic has done is impress on him that there’s no more freelancing. If one guy on the defense freelances, he f—- us all. Plus, we have to get out of this business of equating sacks with total success of a pass-rusher. It’s nonsense. Von can get 12 sacks and be the best pass-rusher in the league—playing the right way, he opens it up for 10 guys to make plays, and for this to be a complete defense.”

It’s a balancing act for Miller, who told me he wants to break Bruce Smith’s all-time sack record. Interesting numbers:

-Bruce Smith, after his eighth NFL season, had 92 sacks entering his age-30 season. He finished his career with 200 sacks.

-Miller, after his eighth NFL season, has 98 sacks entering his age-30 season.

So Smith got 108 sacks after his 30th birthday. “That’s encouraging, definitely encouraging,” Miller told me—but he also said he, like Fangio, is not going to make proclamations. Miller has become friends with Smith, who came to Miller’s Pass Rush Summit this year and spilled everything he had for Miller.

Ask those who have played with Miller and those who coach him now, and they’ll tell you he likes to be coached, and coached hard. If Miller takes it all in, Denver will be far better on defense, and the pressure on Joe Flacco to lead an explosive offense will be lessened. Miller knows what’s on his shoulders. It’s only the pressure of the 2019 Broncos season. He’s okay with that. Just a gut feeling here: Miller’s smart; he majored in Poultry Sciences at Texas A&M and has a big chicken/turkey production facility in Texas. He had a good presence at the Kentucky Derby doing TV for NBC with Dylan Dreyer on the network’s pre- race show. He gets it, though, that he needs to keep the big thing the big thing.

“I do a lot of stuff good,” Miller told me, “but the thing I do best is play football.” Fangio’s counting on that.

Raiders Stadium

I toured the Raiders’ new stadium site Sunday morning and learned much about the difficulties of building a stadium in the heatbox of southern Nevada, and about the interesting wrinkles of this stadium. The structural steel is in place; in fact, when you drive north on I-15 from the airport, the specter of the stadium just to the west of the interstate changes the skyline significantly. It seems amazing that there will be football in this place in 13 months, but I was assured the stadium would be done in time for the 2020 season. Some 200 workers were on the job at 10 a.m. Sunday, as the temperature inched into the high nineties.

A few notes of interest:

- There are 1,700 construction workers on the job, working two shifts most days. The first shift starts at 5:30 a.m. and runs till mid-afternoon. The second shift starts at 4:30 p.m. and runs till about 2 a.m. Most of the concrete is poured at night and not in summertime months because it’s too hard to set when temperatures are into the low hundreds most days.

- The stadium will be domed by a semi-translucent roof and the playing surface will be natural grass. Lots of attention has been paid to the semi-translucent roof. Raiders owner Mark Davis wanted natural light to flow through the covering of the stadium, both for more outdoors-looking visuals and because he insisted on real grass. As with the Cardinals’ stadium in suburban Phoenix, the grass will slide in and out of the stadium on trays, and sit just west of the stadium. The experience in Arizona, and with so many golf courses that bake for five or six months a year here have left stadium management confident that real grass can be used year round in the building.

•I wondered how, for an early September 1 p.m. PT game where the temperature outside could be 108, the fans in large swaths of the stadium would be able to sit in comfort with the sun shining down on them. I was told 9,000 tons of cooling would help. The roof will also have other elements to block significant portions of solar radiation, and the seating areas should have temperatures in the seventies even with full attendance on the sunniest and hottest days.

•The Al Davis Memorial Torch, a 90-foot-high structure with an eternal flame that Mark Davis wanted built to honor his late father, the founder of the Raiders, is taking shape in the peristyle plaza on the east side of the stadium. That’s sure to be the signature TV shot in the early days of the stadium.

• UNLV will play its football games here too, as will the Las Vegas Bowl, and the city will push for a Super Bowl in the next round of bidding for the game.

Fans Roar About Camp

There is one defense for teams staying in their home facilities instead of opening up their training camps in nearby road sites, so fans can meet and greet players, and watch practices. “Because we’re so limited in the amount of time we can practice,” Denver coach Vic Fangio told me the other day, “I understand when teams say they’ve got to be able to have the ability to go inside in case of bad weather.” But, Fangio said upon the opening of Broncos camp, he’s an unabashed fan of opening camp to fans—and would be even if Denver didn’t have a state-of-the-art indoor facility.

Please, please, please—every NFL coach, every NFL GM, every NFL owner should read these words from Fangio:

“I think it’s good to have the fans out here. One of the things that has driven the NFL to it being the most popular sport in the country is that you let people come and watch practice, people that maybe can’t afford to go to a game, and maybe get an autograph from a player. Maybe a player shakes their hand or throws them a sweatband or a glove. You do that with a young person, you have a fan for life and football has a fan for life. There’s more to be gained by that than any advertising slogan or any commercial you put on TV. So I think it’s a good thing, and I’ll embrace it, the players will embrace it. I wish there could be more [fans] here. But I think about half or less of the NFL teams now don’t go to college campuses and don’t have the wherewithal to have people at their facilities to watch practices, and I think that’s a little bit of a negative.”

I think it’s more than a little bit of a negative. It’s a huge negative. These teams sealing themselves in hermetic jars in training camp might be good for controlling coaches and keeping all technology in place is bad for their brands and bad for the game, and very bad for connections with fans. I asked fans to share their favorite camp memories, and I picked these from a flood of emailed responses:

• From Titans camp: I coach a Special Olympics flag football team here in the Nashville area. Every year I take a small group of my players to a Titans camp. After practice in 2017, my group was allowed to go on the field and talk to any player that was still out there. Marcus Mariota was there so I decided to introduce him to my guys. The last one I introduced as our QB and joked that he had to wear a red vest when we practiced just like the pros. To that, Marcus replied, “Then you need this,” and proceeded to peel off his red jersey, autograph it and give it to my guy. An incredible moment for my players. —John Wilson, Nashville

• From Packers camp: Back in the early nineties, I was one of about 25 kids who showed up to two-a-days with the Packers to give players a ride on my bike. For my friends and me, that was our summer job. My favorite summer of “working” for the Packers was when I met Keith Neubert, a fringe tight end brought in for training camp. I let him ride my bike to and from practice every day. At the end of every practice, Keith would walk into the locker room and get me a cup of Gatorade for all my hard work. Every kid at practice lived for that cup of Gatorade. We all sat around after practice sipping our Gatorade like we just worked an eight-hour shift at the local mill. I still remember where I was when I found out Keith didn’t survive cut down day, sitting in my bedroom listening to the radio. The DJ announced the players the Packers were releasing, and unfortunately Keith was on the list. Just the day before, Keith had given me the Packers wrist bands he wore at practice along with a couple rolls of ankle tape. After that year, I would still give rides to players during Packers practice, but nothing beat that year with Keith. —Steve Rykoski, Green Bay

• From Broncos camp: It was the Broncos’ first training camp with Peyton Manning as their QB in 2012, and I was sitting in the front couple of rows on the grassy hill observing practice. During a break, Manning came over to our section and asked if anyone was thirsty. (Note to self: When Peyton asks if you’re thirsty, find a reason to be.) Everyone was pleading for Manning to pick them, and he walked over and reached over my head with a Gatorade bottle, giving a drink to a thirsty young fan—with a catch. Manning told the kid he had to chug it and put the bottle bottoms-up if he really wanted it. The kid, of course, agreed. He whipped the bottle up over his head and squeezed, and the cap came shooting off and water drenched the kid. Manning and everyone watching had a good laugh. The kid was a champ about it. Manning ended up giving him one of his wristbands for being such a good sport. He got to keep the bottle, too.” —Sayre Bedinger, Omaha

• From Jets camp: “I was with my family at Jets training camp at Hofstra in 1997 or 1998. We’re die-hard fans. I was 16 or 17. I was wearing my trusty Wayne Chrebet jersey, and he was my favorite player. Wayne’s from Jersey, and of course went to Hofstra, and my dad recognized his parents sitting in the bleachers. I stalked his parents around the complex for a while, building up the nerve to ask them to see if he could sign my jersey. I finally did it, and they could not have been nicer. I ripped the jersey right off my back, and gave it to them. They went and found him, and he not only signed it, but personalized it to me. One of the best days of my young life. I still have the jersey. I’m 38 now, and my wife accidentally washed it several years ago. The ink is pretty faint, but it’s still there. “To Brian, Best Wishes, Wayne Chrebet.” —Brian Adamowsky, Snohomish, Wash.

• From Steelers camp: For three straight summers, 1975 to 1977, I attended basketball camp at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, where the Steelers simultaneously held cap. So the $90-per-week fee (dorm and cafeteria meals included) was the best bargain ever, a dream vacation at the height of the Steelers Dynasty. Access to the players was unreal. We shared a cafeteria with the team, stayed in an adjacent dorm, scrounged the fields after practice for left behind shirts and equipment, and played games of HORSE in the gym with players. We had a mission of getting an autograph from every player in camp. Some players were elusive. Terry Bradshaw, in disguise, would have someone pick him up in a car behind his dorm and deliver him to the back of the cafeteria for lunch, a distance of probably 300 yards. But we sniffed him out and got his autograph, and he complimented us on our sleuthing abilities. One day Mel Blount lifted me up to his eye level and said, “You want my autograph little guy?” and happily obliged. Jon Kolb told us the team wanted him to gain weight by making him eat four ice cream sandwiches after each meal. We made a deal to take a few of those ice cream sandwiches off his hands each day. Basketball was secondary. By week’s end I had a full autograph book and stories I will never forget. —Gary Kissinger, Pittsburgh

• From Saints camp: The Saints had camp in Jackson, Miss., when I was 9 years old and my little brother was 7. We were so excited to have Saints training camp where we lived in Jackson. We went almost every day over our summer vacation. One day I brought a Joe Horn rookie trading card for Joe—a star wide receiver—to sign after practice, and when I finally got up to him he was so excited to see the rookie card. But he was hesitant to sign it, which confused us. This was the only trading card of himself that he didn’t have. So he offered to trade me his black Nike cleats for the card so he could complete his collection. As a 9-year-old, this was easy business. We talked, and he treated me like I was an equal which was so cool … especially at my age. —Alex Wilson, Jackson, Miss.

• From Vikings camp: I took my wife and daughter to Vikings training camp in 2015, when it was in Mankato, Minn. My wife was a Bears fan and unfortunately had been winning the battle to this point on where our daughters fandom was heading. This was the first time both my daughter and wife had attended with me. An Adrian Peterson high-five and an autograph by rookie MyCole Pruitt had my daughter hooked—she was a Vikings fan. My wife even left that day wearing a brand-new Vikings shirt she had purchased! Unfortunately for me, she got one look at safety Andrew Sendejo and said, “Who is that?!” She couldn’t stop staring at Sendejo the rest of the day. Thanks to AP, Pruitt and Sendejo’s physique, I converted the whole family that day! My daughter is now 10 and has her Stefon Diggs jersey she loves wearing on game days and jersey days at school. —Joe Allen, Watertown, Minn.

Quotes of the Week

I

“Based on the evidence presently available, the NFL cannot conclude that Mr. Hill violated the Personal Conduct Policy.” —The NFL’s ruling on Friday that Chiefs receiver Tyreek Hill will not be suspended after a case in which his 3-year-old son suffered a broken arm and Hill was heard on tape telling his fiancée that she should be terrified of him.

II

“He’s poised to be a Chief for a long time.” —Terez Paylor, former Chiefs beat man for the Kansas City Starand now of Yahoo Sports, reporting that the Chiefs are interested in signing Tyreek Hill to a long-term contract extension.

III

“Those guys set foot [on the moon] for us astronauts to keep striving and to be the best we can be every day.” —Denver pass-rusher Bradley Chubb, a space freak whose Twitter handle is “@Astronaut,” on Saturday, the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

IV

“He wants to be surrounded by people who love him and allow him to be himself. He’s here to play in front of fans who actually care.” —Cleveland quarterback Baker Mayfield, to ESPN.com, doing a not-so-subtle rip job on the Giants and Giants fans in defense of wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.

I mean, come on. I get defending your new teammate against all the evil monsters out there in the football world. But please. Enough with the it’s-everybody’s-fault-but-Odell’s.

That’s a good and enlightening story—by Mina Kimes—about Mayfield, by the way. That one quote is just silly.

V

“He’s a hard-throwing pitcher who doesn’t know how to pitch yet.” —Denver coach Vic Fangio, on second-round quarterback Drew Lock, who has started camp quite shaky.

The Profile

A new weekly look at a different side of an NFL person.

Solomon Thomas • San Francisco defensive end • Photographed in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Thomas’ older sister Ella killed herself on Jan. 18, 2018 in Texas, and he has since become a leading advocate for suicide prevention. Suicide numbers in America have increased every year since 1999. An average of 130 people a day (80 percent men) kill themselves; it’s the second-leading cause of death for people 10-to-34-years-old.

“If I can keep my sister alive through this work, that’s my goal. My main motivation in talking about this is to change the culture, especially for men, in mental health. We use phrases in society like, ‘Man up,’ or ‘Get over it,’ and we suppress real feelings. I want to tell people it’s okay to be emotional, it’s okay to be sad. Be who you are. You can’t push away depression; you’ve got to deal with it. You can’t cure depression with money. Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain showed us that.

“For a long time last season, I was in a dark place. [Niners GM] John Lynch approached me during the season and asked if I needed help, and I did. So often I felt like I was helpless, like I was running in sand. So I started seeing a therapist. I still see her. She’s taught me how to be a better version of myself, so to speak. How to grow. How to not have so much self-doubt. One of my messages is It’s okay to reach out. It’s okay to not be okay. It’s been huge for me.

“My teammates have told me they’ve been seeing a different side of me now. Now I feel more comfortable showing exactly who I am every day, no matter how I feel. Ella had such a passion for living, for giving. I think she would be proud of me. At least I hope she would.”

If you’re having suicidal thoughts or severe depression, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK.

Numbers Game

It was notable last week that the Madden NFL 20 game gave four players a near-perfect rating of 99: Aaron Donald, Khalil Mack, Bobby Wagner and DeAndre Hopkins. Donald is a no-brainer, Mack nearly one, Wagner as consistent a player as there is in football, and Hopkins—well, I dug into him a bit, and I love the honor bestowed by the Madden people. Hopkins is real, and he’s spectacular.

Let’s compare Hopkins to the all-world Julio Jones. The raw numbers paint a slight edge for Jones in 2018:

Jones: 113 catches, 1,677 yards, eight touchdowns, 104.8 receiving yards per game. Hopkins: 115 catches, 1,572 yards, 11 touchdowns, 98.3 receiving yards per game.

The deeper numbers, per PFF:

• Jones dropped eight passes. Hopkins dropped none, which, since PFF began keeping official drop stats in 2006, was the most sure-handed season by far a receiver has had. No receiver in the last 13 years has 110 or more catches and zero drops in a season.

• Hopkins saw a “catchable but inaccurate” pass thrown his way 46 times in 169 total targets (27.2 percent of his targets), and he caught 35—meaning he caught 76 percent of all catchable but difficult passes. Jones had far fewer “catchable but inaccurate” balls thrown to him, just 23, and caught 14 of them. That’s 61 percent of balls caught by Jones on challenging throws.

What does it mean? Hopkins had a tougher job catching balls from Deshaun Watson than Jones had in dealing with Matt Ryan, and Hopkins did a more efficient job on the tough catches than Jones.

So Hopkins had far fewer drops than Jones, and he made far more tough catches.

Case closed: The best wide receiver in football in 2018 was Hopkins, and the Madden game recognized it.

Factoidness

I

The ninth-leading rusher in the NFL in 2018, Denver’s Phillip Lindsay, still lives at home with his parents in Denver. I talked to him about it the other day, and he seems quite content with the arrangement. Hard to imagine there are many players with more self-assuredness and presence than Lindsay, the undrafted rookie in 2018 from Colorado who went on to rush for 1,037 yards last fall, more than Melvin Gordon, David Johnson and Alvin Kamara.

II

Robbie Gould is more accurate kicking field goals than extra points over his two years as a San Francisco 49er.

You can look it up: In 2017 and 2018, Gould is 72 of 75 (.960) on field goals, 55 of 59 (.932) on PATs.

Gould is truly one of the most underrated player stories in the NFL. He’s missed one of his last 56 field- goal tries (from 45 yards, wide right, into a 15-mph crosswind in Santa Clara last Oct. 7). He’s missed three field goals in his last 45 NFL games. I would argue that no kicker has ever been as consistent over a four- year run as Gould has been from 2015 to 2018.

King of the Road

I

I have been traveling for work for 39 years, and I had a first at the start of this camp tour.

Last week in the northeast, from Thursday through the weekend, was hell. Thursday was windy and stormy. Friday through Sunday had heat index temperatures between 105 and 110. So Delta flight 834, Laguardia to Denver, 6:05 p.m. departure, was endangered from the start.

Delay till 6:35. Delay till 6:50. Delay till 8:30. We boarded, and the uber-nice and courteous pilot twice came on and said we were in trouble and we were going to try to find a window to get out, and finally, around 8:25, he announced the flight was cancelled, and we would be flying in the morning. We queued up at the gate and got taxi vouchers from Delta, and I prepared to leave the airport to go home and wait for word on the Delta app for flight time Friday morning. Bummer. I really wanted to see the Broncos practice twice, but it wasn’t to be.

I told my videographer on the trip, Annie Koeblitz, I hadn’t eaten since noon, and I wanted to grab a quick bite in the airport before we left for the night, so she came with me and we got a bite at Crust in the D terminal. Midway through the quick bite, I get a ping on my phone, from Delta. The flight was now schedule for 9:50 p.m. I went to the gate, and someone in line said, We all got that, false alarm, we’re not going anywhere tonight.

So I went to finish eating. Then I got pinged by Delta again. Flight 834 is now boarding. Lord. So I went to the gate and sure enough, we boarded … and the plane was half-full at most. Turns out most everyone trusted Delta and Laguardia when told, Go home for the night. We’ll fly tomorrow. That never happened to me, a pilot telling us the flight was off and go home and we’ll see you tomorrow, and two hours later we’re in the air. I still have no idea what happened.

P.S. Landed in Denver at about 12:30 mountain time. Turned on my phone. Mets-Giants, 1-1 in the 14th. I pull up the MLB app and got the game on my iPhone. Waiting for bags, I saw Pete Alonso hit a solo shot in the top of the 16th. Pulling into the Hertz lot, I saw the Giants rally for two in the bottom of the 16th.

Bed, Marriott TownePlace Suites, 1:45 MT (3:45 on my clock).

Travel fever! Catch it! II

Las Vegas, Hertz rental car dashboard, 6:37 p.m. PT Saturday: 106 degrees.

But it’s a dry heat.

The Best. The Worst

What’s your best habit, Joe Flacco?

“My best habit is being disciplined, and showing my kids that being disciplined is really important, and showing them continuously that having discipline is a very important trait.

And your worst?

“My worst habit is I whistle. My wife can’t stand that. I’m in the car, and we’re singing along with the songs, and I’m piercing everybody’s ears by whistling. My wife really hates that.”

10 Things I Think I Think

1. I think this is what I cannot understand in the Tyreek Hill case. There is a broken arm suffered by his 3- year-old son, and there’s an accusation on a recording from his fiancée that Hill abused his son, and there is this quote from Hill to his fiancée: “You need to be terrified of me too, bitch.” There is a murkiness to it all, and we don’t know who is telling the truth, and the local authorities are not entirely forthcoming, and there is a he-said, she-said tinge to the entire story. But this entire episode is not worth some sanction by the league? Even if it’s only because of his ominous threat against the woman? How does Ezekiel Elliott get six games for his he-said, she-said domestic violence incidence and Hill skates because of his? I know nothing of the evidence. But the inconsistency of the two rulings, and of Hill getting nothing, cries out for an explanation. It just doesn’t feel right. At all.

2. I think the NFL is probably right in bringing back the culprit officials from the blown non-interference call in the NFC title game. Side judge Patrick Turner and down judge Gary Cavaletto are on the league’s 122-official roster for the 2019 season, and participated in the league’s season-opening officials symposium in Dallas last weekend. When I asked NFL vice president of officiating Al Riveron about the two men, and whether he or the league had considered replacing them or disciplining them for the blown call, he said, basically not at all—that they’re good officials, playoff officials, who had a good season and simply erred on a big call. Riveron: ‘Our officials are evaluated on every play. They’re judged on 15 or 16 [regular-season] games, 157 plays per game [on average]. Not only are they evaluated when they put a flag down, but when they don’t. These officials graded close to the top at their positions. We made a mistake [on the non-interference call], no doubt about it. Unfortunately it happened. But no, at no time did I consider not bringing them back.”

3. I think that’s the right call—but I would also say if they’re in the playoffs next winter, Turner and Cavaletto better have had near-flawless regular seasons this year.

4. I think that’s the first win of the season for Niners GM John Lynch, staying the course with kicker Robbie Gould (arguably the best kicker in football over the past two years) and convincing Gould to stay out west on a four-year contract. Gould, as you read, wanted to play only near his family in the Midwest, but Lynch and Niners worked at it and convinced Gould stay in San Francisco. At 36, Gould is a risk on a four-year deal, but there’s no way the Niners couldn’t go the extra couple of miles to sign their best offensive weapon over the last two seasons.

5. I think I wonder what the enlightened players in the Patriots’ locker room, particularly those like Devin McCourty who do a lot of work with social causes and the Players Coalition, really think of owner Robert Kraft cozying up to President Trump.

6. I think I get that Kraft is trying to moderate Trump—and he really is—but the optics of him dining with Trump have to reverberate in his locker room. And I get that Kraft has done a load of good things recently in the wake of the day spa fiasco in south Florida. He’s on the right side of sentencing reform. He’s been very supportive of linebacker Elandon Roberts after his incident with police this offseason. All that’s good. I just wonder what the players really think of Kraft’s ties to Trump.

7. I think I’d love to see you somewhere on my camp tour this summer. My current schedule of stops, beginning this week:

Driving portion July 25: Jets, Florham Park, N.J. July 26: Ravens, Owings Mills, Md. July 27: Eagles, Philadelphia. July 28: Panthers, Spartanburg, S.C. July 29: Falcons, Flowery Branch, Ga. July 30: Bucs, Tampa. July 31: Dolphins, Davie, Fla. Aug. 1: Jaguars, Jacksonville. Aug. 2: Saints, Metairie, La. Aug. 3: Travel/writing/sanity day Aug. 4: Colts, Westfield, Ind. Aug. 5: Texans-Packers joint practice, Green Bay. Aug. 6: Browns, Berea, Ohio. Aug. 7: Steelers, Latrobe, Pa.

Flying portion Aug. 11: Cardinals, Glendale, Ariz. Aug. 12: Raiders, Napa, Calif. Aug. 13: 49ers, Santa Clara, Calif. Aug. 14: TBD (Rams/Cowboys) Aug. 15: Seahawks, Renton, Wash. Aug. 16: Saints-Chargers joint practice, Costa Mesa, Calif. Aug. 17/18: Travel/writing days. Aug. 19: Chiefs, Kansas City.

We have a landing page for all the content too. We’ll have some fun along the way. I’m throwing out the first pitch at a Pensacola Blue Wahoos game in Florida on Aug. 1, and there will be other mayhem I’m certain. I’ll be assisted by videographers Annie Koeblitz, Nicole Granito and Kaitlin Urka of NBC. We’ll be videotaping for a four-part TV series beginning in August (details TBA) on NBC Sports Network. We already had good times in Denver and Las Vegas over the weekend, and I hope to meet as many of you as we can over the next month. The 10 teams I’ll miss … I hope to get to them later in the summer or early in the fall.

8. I think we will never see anything like this again: Tom Brady and Bill Belichick start their 20th training camp together Thursday. Coach and player, together 20 years, with 19 as premier coach and premier player. Amazing. What happens first—DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak gets broken, or some coach and QB last 20 years (or more) together?

9. I think there aren’t many frontiers that haven’t been mined for information in the pro football media world, but you’ll be seeing a new thing this month. Russell Wilson and a production crew, West2East Empire, covered in a three-part series Wilson and his receivers doing a pre-training camp “camp” near Wilson’s off-season home in San Diego.

I screened the first of three episodes, and it’s Wilson running his 13 teammates (most of them rookies or first-year guys) through workouts, meetings and basketball (D.K. Metcalf’s got a nice outside shot from the corner) on day one of the camp. Wilson knows he’s got a raw crew, and he tries, in one meeting that’s shown, to convey the urgency of off-the-field study. “Who are you studying [at your position]?” he asks. “If you’re not studying, you’re not learning.” If I were them, I’d be studying the retired Doug Baldwin, and trying to see what made him so good for so long.

10. I think these are my other thoughts of the week: a. So happy for my good friend Don Banks, hired by the Las Vegas Review-Journal as its NFL writer and columnist. What a great call. Nevada’s lucky to be getting a guy with great contacts and so much left to give. And to write. b. RIP, Mike Maser, Tony Boselli’s line coach for his Jaguars career. Maser was a good one. c. Podcast of the Week: “Silencing Science,” from the Reveal series, a weekly show from the Center for Investigative Reporting. It’s not pleasant to hear how we’re blatantly ignoring the changes to our climate, but it’s real, and this is an insightful look. d. You go, Dan LeBatard. e. Football Story of the Week: Kent Baab of the Washington Post on DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFLPA, as he heads into negotiating season with the league over a new CBA. “I’m kind of wired to be combative,” Smith tells Baab in a strong and real self-analysis. f. Story of the Week: An amazing tick-tock of the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and how close it came to completely collapsing during the dreadful inferno this year. g. TV story of the week: NBC’s Jimmy Roberts on “the troubles” in Northern Ireland, and how stunning it was to see the British Open played there this year. h. Investigation of the Week: Great Washington Post work by writers Joel Achenback, Lenny Bernstein, Robert O’Harrow Jr., and Shawn Boburg on the scourge of opioids in America.

i. What a damning piece. “The origin, evolution and astonishing scale of America’s catastrophic opioid epidemic just got a lot clearer. The drug industry—the pill manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers— found it profitable to flood some of the most vulnearable communities in America with billions of painkillers.”

j. Billions. With a “B.”

k. Imagine this: the pill industry shipped 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills across the U.S. from 2006 to 2012. How is it possible for an adult population of about 250 million to consume that many painkillers?

l. I don’t mind all the home runs in baseball. In fact, I like them.

m. I don’t mind all the strikeouts either.

n. Baseball’s a cyclical game. And when teams build stadia (Camden Yards and particularly the right-field porch at Yankee Stadium), you’re going to see fly balls by powerful men be home runs. I suppose the balls might be easier to hit for homers, which I don’t like. But the home runs themselves, unless they’re the pop-up variety that make a mockery of homers, don’t bother me much. Same rules for both teams. o. Boston has changed from an offense led by Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez to one keyed by Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts … and both of the latter might end up with better offensive seasons than Betts and Martinez, who battled for the A.L. MVP last year. p. Coffeenerdness: Whoa. I’ve found my training camp tour, afternoon-pick-me-up drink. It’s the Starbucks iced caramel cloud macchiato, with an extra shot. Had one at the Vegas airport Saturday. Perfect combo of a little bit sweet, a lot espresso. q. Beernerdness: Moped Blood Orange Witbier (New Image Brewing, Arvada, Colo.) was recommended to me Friday at a beer store near Broncos camp. Glad I found it. So fresh, with a hint of citrus and strongly hopped. Drank it while watching the sun set (hope you get to see that one on NBC Sports Network) in the foothills of the Rockies on Friday night.

The Adieu Haiku

Camp time. Forty-five days till Rodgers-Mack, and till LaFleur feels big heat.

Broncos Training Camp Observations: Early concerns and under-the-radar standouts By Ryan Koenigsberg BSN Denver July 22, 2019

“It’s like the guy that swings the sledge hammer out in construction,” Broncos head coach Vic Fangio said after the team’s fourth consecutive day of practice. “The first few days, he’s got blisters, and his shoulders are sore. By week two or three, though, he’s all good to go. That’s kind of what we’re working through right now.”

The Broncos, in Fangio’s estimation, are taking an important step in the process.

“I think the big thing that happened today is that guys are starting to get calloused,” he said, further explaining the metaphor. “One of the big things about training camp is you have to get calloused to play NFL football. I think some of that started to form today with it being the second day in pads and the fourth day in a row. These guys are getting calloused out there.”

Callous is also a good word for the way Fangio’s defense has treated his offense throughout those four days.

Sunday’s practice featured some unexpected breakouts and some stars making plays. Here’s what we saw during the session that lasted just over two and a half hours.

Flacco’s Frustration If once is chance, twice is a coincidence and three times is a pattern; four times in a row is reason for concern.

For the fourth consecutive practice, Joe Flacco and the rest of the Broncos quarterbacks were under constant pressure from the defensive front seven, forcing the signal-callers to run for their lives often and rarely get through their reads.

And for the first time, you could tell it frustrated Flacco.

After yet another play that ended in a “sack,” the starting quarterback finally allowed his shoulders to slump a bit as he put his hands on his hips and rocked his head back.

Later, during one of his last reps of a period, the play was blown dead again with multiple players in his face. As he jogged back to the group of quarterbacks, Flacco shook his head.

Asked if he noticed the frustration, Fangio said he did not, but added, “It’s the O-line’s job to build a nice fort for the quarterback to operate in. We’ll see how the fort-building goes after I watch the tape.”

The fort, as it appears, is sagging in some areas.

The good news for the Broncos is that they have a five-practice head start on the rest of the NFL, meaning that Wednesday’s practice would really be their first practice of camp in previous years. Because of that, this offensive line still has plenty of time to gel as they all get used to playing next to someone new.

With that being said, each day that sees immense pressure on the quarterbacks is a reason for concern, and seeing Flacco’s frustration on Sunday was reason enough to pull the benefit-of-the-doubt card away. It’s go-time now.

Noah Fort? Austin Fant? There’s a metaphor that myself and Zach Bye from 104.3 The Fan love to use in training camp, we call it “the alien.”

The premise is—if a football-knowing alien came down to practice with no pre-conceived notions about the players, they would think ______.

The truth is, if an alien had been at the first four practices of this year’s camp, it would think that undrafted rookie Austin Fort was the tight end that the Broncos drafted in the first round.

So far, it’s Fort who has been the premier tight end with a four-letter last name that begins with an F, and while I wish I could tell you it’s because he has just been phenomenal, that’s not quite the truth.

Fort has been impressive, no doubt, making plays for all four quarterbacks in most practices, as he’s capitalized on each opportunity, but the problem is that Fant has set a low bar.

In two of the first three practices of camp, Fant was forcefully reminded by a teammate that he needs to finish his runs after he makes a catch, and he’s simply struggled to be consistent on the field, despite making some really nice plays, especially in the red zone.

To my eyes, it appears Fant may have come into camp a bit out of shape. He seems to be winded after each rep or drill, and it’s hard to be consistent if you’re tired.

If that’s the case, it’s a bit of good news and bad news. The good news is that, presumably, once he gets into football shape, some of the negatives will subside. The bad news is that a rookie really has no business coming into camp out of shape.

Again, that’s just what it looks like to me. We’ll, of course, keep a close eye on the first-rounder as camp goes on.

Under-the-radar standouts It’s at this point in camp that you start to say, “Man, that (insert number here) guy just keeps making plays.” So let’s give those guys some credit here in the observations.

You’ve, of course, heard of Austin Fort at this point, but here are some other under-the-radar guys that have stood out so far.

Devontae Jackson, RB, West Georgia If you can spot little 5-foot-7 No. 48 out there, you’ll see him scooting all over the place.

The undersized back has a lot of burst and has some fancy footwork out in space.

He’s got an uphill battle ahead of him as he attempts to make the roster in somewhat of a crowded running back room, but he’s got the goods.

Mike Purcell, DL, Wyoming Speaking of former Wyoming Cowboys standing out, defensive lineman Mike Purcell, an undrafted free agent in 2013, is making his prescnece felt early.

Purcell is a local kid out of Highlands Ranch who has really flashed some nice ability to get into the backfield from his position on the interior. It’s been hard not to notice No. 98, and he has familiarity with the coaches.

“He’s just been a tough guy for us,” said defensive coordinator Ed Donatell. “You see every time we put in the scheme, we like having him around. He’s here to build depth and improve himself every time. Over the years, every time a guy goes to a camp, they have a chance to improve a little bit. And those guys have made teams. We really respect the way he works and the way he’s dialing up and giving everything he has again.”

Trinity Benson, WR, East Central For a speed guy from a small school, Benson isn’t as small as you might think.

Standing a six-feet and 180 pounds, Benson has a bit of length to go with his speed.

“He’s fast. He’s quick. He’s elusive,” said Vic Fangio. “If he can become an NFL receiver, meaning operate efficiently so those skills can surface, maybe we’ve found somebody.”

If you aren’t sure, that’s a compliment from Fangio.

Khalfani Muhammad, RB, Cal Khalfani isn’t new around here, having spent time on the team last year, but this is his first camp as a Bronco.

It’s abundantly clear that Muhammad, who at 5-foot-7, 174 pounds is the smallest player on the team, has plenty of burst. The second-year back is a menace in space and doesn’t get caught once he’s in open space.

If he can show that he can pick up a blitz, he could have the chops to stick around as a third-down guy.

Other notes Drew Lock had his first mistake-filled day, as he threw two interceptions on tipped balls, neither of which were good decisions. Kevin Hogan bounced back a bit from his three-pick performance on Saturday. DeMarcus Walker got into the backfield a couple times on in practice, including once against the first- team offensive line. Things got a bit more chippy out there as the defense was as aggresive as we’ve seen them, having a hard time laying off of hits. Even Joe Flacco was contacted at once point, which got a rise out of the coaches. Dre’Mont Jones made some plays on the interior, showing his ability to get in the backfield.

The “play” of the day came when Brandon McManus “intercepted” an out-of-bounds throw from Drew Lock and ran it all the way back for a touchdown, beating Emmanue Sanders down the sideline. The crowd had fun with that one.

Rich Scangarello sheds light on his plan for the weapon that “excited me from the day I walked in the door” By Zac Stevens BSN Denver July 22, 2019

Phillip Lindsay’s made a living on shattering expectations.

Yet time and time again, he’s all but forgotten outside of his loyal local fanbase.

Despite his 1,000-yard rookie season last year, many around the country have pooh-poohed his development and written him off as a nice, cute story. A one-year wonder.

Not in Denver. Not with his new boss Rich Scangarello.

“One of the great things about coming to Denver that really excited me from the day I walked in the door is there are very few players in the league like Phillip that have the ability to win a one-on-one matchup at any time,” Scangarello praised unsolicited.

“There are very few players in the league like Phillip.” That’s more like it.

And in terms of winning one-on-one matchups anytime, anyplace, Phil’s proven he’s just the man for the job.

That’s precisely what he did on Sunday during Denver’s fourth training camp practice.

During a goal-line drill, No. 30 was spread out to the right side. The play had one read and one read-only— get the ball to Phil ASAP. At the snap, Kevin Hogan quick passed the ball to Lindsay. After easily hauling it in, Lindsay had one man standing between him and the end zone.

You can guess what happened after that.

All it took was a quick shimmy and Phil was trotting into the end zone on his way to pumping up his Colorado crowd as they erupted for their hometown kid. It was a little Phil Lindsay shake-and-bake special.

“I think that the easiest matchup to create in the NFL is the halfback on a linebacker and that’s what we try and do in this offense a lot,” Scangarello said, singing beautiful music to Bronco fans’ ears. “I think he has that gift and that ability and those traits. So excited to try and do that and try and force defenses to put a DB on him and open up other players.”

You and Broncos Country both, Rich.

Not only will Lindsay be a weapon in these matchups, but he’ll be a decoy as well—forcing team’s to play into Denver’s hand. If opponents leave a linebacker on Lindsay, the choice for Flacco will be easy, Phil all day long.

If they do adjust and put a defensive back on him, then again, it’ll be easy, take advantage of that part of the field or player that defensive back was forced to come away from.

After one year, Lindsay’s already turned himself into a decoy, along with being a weapon.

But it’s not all going to be on Lindsay. Batman’s got his Robin.

“Royce and Lindsay are perfect compliments,” Scangarello said with excitement. “It kind of reminds me of Tevin Coleman and Devonta Freeman in Atlanta. They are different skill sets. They are both talented in their own way. Both be able to use them with their strengths so that they can be the best player they can be.”

On Sunday, “Scangs,” as some have nicknamed him, was spitting pure fire.

A Coleman-Freeman combo circa 2016 looked like nearly 2,500 yards from scrimmage and a whopping 24 total touchdowns. One year later, that same duo topped 2,100 yards from scrimmage with 16 touchdowns.

Not too shabby of a comparison to have.

“Royce is big, he’s physical in pass protection—that’s a big deal in the NFL, the durability that comes with it,” Scangarello elaborated. “As far as running the football and the scheme, they both can do it, one’s just going to do it probably with a little more physicality and the other is going to make you miss… They are both different, but they can both do the same things in different ways.”

The Broncos know this combo all too well from before their time with Royce and Phil.

In fact, one year after Scangarello spent a season with Coleman and Freeman in Atlanta as the team’s offensive quality control coach, the Falcons taught the Broncos this lesson in the most painful way possible.

Riding high as undefeated 4-0 reigning Super Bowl Champs, Coleman and Freeman nearly singlehandedly handed Denver their first loss on the season, while also putting out a formula on how to take down the champs.

On Oct. 9, 2016, Freeman and Coleman combined for 119 rushing yards, 167 receiving yards and two touchdowns for a mind-blowing 286 yards from scrimmage. All from two players in a single game.

While Freeman was the starter, the biggest asset Kyle Shanahan—who Scangarello models his offense after—had that afternoon in the Mile High City was Coleman, who he lined up, you guessed it, on linebackers all day long. The success was jarring—132 receiving yards on four catches and a touchdown.

That’s what Scangarello has in mind for Phillip Lindsay.

Despite topping 1,000 rushing yards as a backup for half the season last year, Lindsay only played in 42 percent of the team’s offensive snaps.

So the natural question that arises is, what gives? Why take the Colorado native off the field? “You don’t want Lindsay—a little smaller guy—to have to take A-gap pressure from linebackers on a regular basis,” Scangarello explained. “To be able to share the load and put those guys in position to do something they can do better, that’s our job. That’s what Royce brings. He’s just a physical dude. He’s smart. He’s instinctive.”

And Phillip? Well, he’s just one of the best in the league at making people miss.

Getting creative with Phillip Lindsay is key to Broncos offense By James Merilatt 104.3 The Fan July 22, 2019

The old adage in football states that a team has to run the ball in order to set up the pass. It’s a time- honored approach to the game that dates back to Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry and Don Shula.

In recent years, however, things have been changing in the NFL. Thanks to changes to the rules that tilt the advantage toward the offense, as well as the adoption of more college-based systems, more and more teams are taking the opposition approach. Football has become a past-first game, with running lanes opening up based on how successful a team can air it out.

If that’s the definition of “zigging” – with Sean McVay’s Rams perhaps leading the way in this evolution – the Broncos have chosen to “zag.” They’re turning back the clock a bit, sticking with the tried-and-true philosophy of running the football to set up the rest of the offense.

In part, this is based on necessity. Anyone who has watched the first four days of training camp can understand why Rich Scangarello wants his offense to dominate on the ground; they aren’t very prolific in the air.

For the most part, that’s due to personnel. With wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders on the sidelines for most of practice while recovering from a torn Achilles tendon, Denver’s young stable of wideouts have been called upon to make plays; by and large, they haven’t answered the bell.

This is most apparent in 7-on-7 drills, when there’s nothing happening in the trenches and success is based on being able to create separation against coverage. Repeatedly, Broncos quarterbacks are having to buy time by patting the football, rolling out or even scrambling because they don’t have a receiver open. It’s disconcerting to watch.

Again, this is against zero pass rush. And Denver’s QBs are still under “duress.”

On Sunday, the Broncos were in full pads for the first time during training camp and things were a little better. This is to be expected, as it allowed Denver to have a little balance to their attack.

Finally, the defense had to wonder if they were going to be facing a run or a pass. And being off balance just a bit prevented them from dominating quite as much.

Joe Flacco was able to connect with Courtland Sutton for a touchdown during red-zone drills, Kevin Hogan found Noah Fant for a score and the running backs showed some spark. It was a much-different offense, one that wasn’t as painful to watch as it had been in previous days.

And it was all because the Broncos were finally able to do what the offense is designed to do.

“The easiest matchup to create in the NFL is the halfback on a linebacker,” Denver’s offensive coordinator explained on Sunday. “That’s what we try to do in this offense a lot.”

Denver doesn’t have the personnel to dominate in 7-on-7 drills, especially against a defense like the Broncos boast. In that situation, when both sides of the ball know that a pass is coming, it’s going to be a lopsided battle.

But when the element of the running game is factored into the equation, things get different. And when one particular back is on the field, things change a lot.

“One of the great things about coming to Denver that really excited me from the day I walked in the door is that there are a very few players in the league like Phillip that have the ability to win in a one-on-one matchup at any time,” Scangarello added. “I think (Lindsay) has that gift and that ability and those traits. (I’m) excited to try to do that and try to force defenses to put a DB on him to open up other players.”

The Broncos have a lot of fine skill position players. They’re not bad. They’re not great. They’re fine.

But they only have two who have demonstrated the ability to be difference makers at the pro level – Sanders and Lindsay. Fant might get there someday. Sutton could eventually translate great practices into great games. But for now, it’s a two-man show.

So if the Broncos offense is going to be anything other than pedestrian this season, those two players are going to have to shine. And with Sanders being brought along slowly after injury, even more pressure falls on Lindsay.

Royce Freeman is a competent back, but the “thunder” portion of a “thunder and lightning” combination is the easy one to find. And Devontae Booker has proven to be a marginal NFL runner during his career.

“I think Royce and Lindsay are perfect compliments,” Scangarello said “They kind of remind me of Tevin Coleman and Devontae Freeman in Atlanta. They have different skill sets. They are both talented in their own way. They are both able to be used with their strengths so that they can be the best they can be. As far as running the football in the scheme, they both can do it. One is just going to do it probably with a little bit more physicality and the other is going to make you miss.”

That’s high praise, considering that the Falcons’ duo has been as dynamic as any in the league at times. To even approach that level, Lindsay is going to have to shine.

The difference maker, the player who can be special, is Lindsay. So finding creative ways to get him the football, by creating mismatches that his skill set can exploit, is the key.

That means lining him up on the outside as a receiver, forcing the defense to choose between trying to cover him with a linebacker or moving a defensive back off of another weapon. Either option creates an opportunity for Denver.

Scangarello’s offense has been much-maligned thus far in camp. But to be fair, he hasn’t gotten the chance to unveil what makes it click. At least not yet.

But on Sunday, a glimpse of what’s to come was offered. And there were reasons to be encouraged. Justin Simmons could get the biggest “Fangio bump” in 2019 By Cecil Lammey 104.3 The Fan July 22, 2019

I fully expect the Broncos to get a “Fangio bump” in 2019. What does that mean? Well, it means that the quality talent already on the roster will get a boost from their new head coach (and long-time defensive guru) Vic Fangio.

Any Broncos fan can admit that the talent on the defense was not coached to their full potential by former defensive coordinator Joe Woods. Fangio is going to call the defense in 2019 and he should know how to get the most out of the talent in the starting lineup. Perhaps the player to receive the largest “Fangio bump” this year is safety Justin Simmons. Could Simmons be the biggest benefactor from the hiring of Fangio? Let’s take a look.

***

Safety Special

Fangio has a long history of coaching great linebackers as a defensive coordinator, most notably the best LB corps in NFL history – the “Dome Patrol” with the Saints in the early ’90s. However, that’s not the only position that Fangio has had great success coaching. His defenses have produced great safeties, as well.

Last year with the Bears, Fangio coached Eddie Jackson to an All-Pro season. Jackson was a fourth-round pick for the Bears in the 2017 NFL Draft. He was known as a playmaker coming out of Alabama, but it was Fangio who got the best out of him. Jackson put up great numbers under Fangio in 2018, missing two games with a high ankle sprain.

Jackson had a whopping 15 passes defensed in 2018 and he intercepted six passes last year – taking two of those picks to the house for a touchdown. He was always around the ball and had the athleticism to make field-flipping plays once his hands were on the ball.

On Saturday, I asked Fangio if Simmons could be his Jackson this season.

“(It would) be nice. I don’t know if he has Eddie’s running ability after the interception, but maybe he does. We’ll see.” Fangio said.

Could Simmons post similar numbers to Jackson in 2019? Under Fangio, he just might.

*** Budding Star

During the past few years, we’ve seen quite the development of Simmons and his game. Coming out of Boston College as a third-round pick in the 2016 NFL Draft, Simmons was known for his size/athleticism combination and high football intelligence. We’ve seen all those qualities during his career with the Broncos. Simmons has good size at 6-foot-2 and 202 pounds. While he’s not the fastest safety out there, Simmons makes plays and puts himself in position due to his knowledge of the game. He does a good job of diagnosing plays as they breakdown in front of him. He doesn’t bite on play fakes that often and is rarely fooled by looking at a quarterback’s eyes.

He played every snap for the Broncos defense last year and should once again put in nearly 1,000 snaps in 2019. Simmons has been a solid starter for the Broncos in the last two seasons, but he has yet to earn a Pro Bowl nod. That could change this year with the tutelage of Fangio.

***

Extra Motivation

Simmons is in the final year of his rookie contract and he’s set to be an unrestricted free agent in 2020. That should give him plenty of extra motivation to play at his best in 2019.

While I compared Simmons to Jackson above, he might get paid like former Bears safety Adrian Amos did this offseason. Amos was a solid contributor and not quite the All-Pro that Jackson was last year, but his play was enough to get a four-year, $37 million contract from the Packers earlier this offseason.

The safety position is one that is getting paid at a high level. In terms of annual average salary, Tyrann Mathieu ranks No. 1 with the $14 million per year he got from the Chiefs in 2019. It’s unlikely that Simmons reaches that level, but he could crack the top-10. Amos is the No. 8 highest paid safety in terms of annual average salary and that could be where Simmons ends up.

On Saturday, Simmons had two interceptions and looked fantastic, taking one back to the house. Each time he made a play, I kept thinking this is how he breaks out in 2019 and breaks the bank in 2020.

We’ll see if Simmons can continue to make big plays in practice and then take that to the field in the regular season this year.

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Summary

The Broncos defense is going to be elite again this season and there are several players who should have standout seasons for the unit. While much of the focus could go to the pass-rushers like Von Miller or Bradley Chubb, savvy football fans will not ignore the contributions of a guy like Simmons.

Fangio’s history suggest that Simmons could have a breakout season in 2019. He’s in a contract year and the safety position is becoming highly paid in this league with the way offenses have changed in recent years. Simmons has always had the smarts, length, athleticism and work ethic to be a star and we may see him at his best – because of Fangio getting the most from Simmons natural skill set.

If Garett Bolles fails, his replacement has started to emerge By James Merilatt 104.3 The Fan July 22, 2019

It was a sight that should’ve excited and terrified Broncos fans at the same time. During team drills at Sunday’s training camp practice, one moment conjured up both emotions.

On the play, Denver’s defense lined up Von Miller and Bradley Chubb on the same side. Putting two of the NFL’s best pass rushers together creates all sorts of nightmares for the offense, as teams can’t possibly double team both. So seeing this type of creativity, which was lacking last year under Joe Woods but promised this season under Vic Fangio, was a huge step in the right direction.

At the same time, it also created a situation where Garett Bolles was staring down the barrel of trouble. With no tight end on the outside, Denver’s left tackle was forced to deal with the dynamic duo on his own, having to pick up the right rusher and then block him effectively; those are two things that the former first-round pick has struggled to do during his first two seasons in the NFL.

Not surprisingly, the defense won this battle. That’s the good news. Miller and Chubb blew up the play, got to quarterback Joe Flacco, and created what would’ve been at least a sack and perhaps a fumble. Here’s hoping there’s more of that to come in 2019.

But, there’s also the other side of the coin. That’s the bad news. On the play, Bolles got confused as to who to block, let his man go free and watched as Flacco got shoved in the back, which would’ve been a monster hit in live action.

After the play, Bolles was involved in an animated conversation with Dalton Risner about the protection scheme. While no one could hear exactly what was being said, let’s just say that the rookie left guard didn’t seem to be the one who was confused.

Granted, this is one play. And to be fair, Bolles was put in a very difficult situation. But it’s not as though he won’t face those this season. As good as Miller and Chubb are, the Broncos will go up against teams who boast equally adept pass rushers; so Bolles has to be up to the challenge.

During his first two seasons, he largely wasn’t. The left tackle’s struggles, both with penalties and sacks given up, have been well documented. So 2019 feels like a last chance; if Bolles can’t get it done this season, especially with the Broncos bringing in the game’s best offensive line coach to help him, it’s most likely never going to happen.

Before a change could be made, however, Denver would have to have a better option. It’s easy to scoff at Bolles’ play, but it’s only meaningful criticism if an alternative is put forth.

On Sunday, Rich Scangarello did just that. Asked who has stood out thus far during camp, the Broncos offensive coordinator singled out Bolles’ backup.

“I’ll say Elijah Wilkinson, the tackle that was here the day we got here,” the offensive coordinator said. “He’s a very athletic and a great scheme fit. I just like the way he works out here. I think (offensive line coach) Mike Munchak has done a great job honing out his skillset and really helping him develop. I think he is a good football player. I think he is a guy that we are very happy with up to this point.”

That’s either meant to motivate Bolles, which would feel like a last-ditch attempt at this point, or it’s actually true.

Wilkinson has been working his way toward the top of the Broncos depth chart by doing whatever has been asked, by whatever coaching staff has been in charge. Undrafted out of UMass, the offensive lineman played in nine games for the Broncos in 2017. Last year, he appeared in 12, while getting seven starts, mostly at right guard.

But his versatility has been his best attribute, as Wilkinson has played guard and tackle, on both sides of the line. Now, he’s on the left side, working behind Bolles at protecting the quarterback’s blindside.

If the Broncos truly are that impressed with Wilkinson, then the clock is ticking much faster on Bolles than anyone expected. As Vin Fangio said after practice, the key to Denver’s offense is the line giving Flacco time to throw.

“It’s the o-line’s job to build a nice fort for the quarterback to operate in,” explained the head coach. “So we’ll see how the fort building goes.”

If Bolles isn’t ready to be a cornerstone to that structure, then the Broncos need to move on. And reading between the lines on Sunday, they might be ready to do so sooner rather than later.

Fans Come To Broncos Training Camp In Purple For Alzheimer's Disease Awareness By Michael Abeyta KCNC July 22, 2019

On Sunday at Denver Broncos training camp a lot of people showed up wearing gear from another team. They weren’t confused, they were wearing purple to raise money and awareness for Alzheimer’s disease research.

“We usually come out to training camp every year but we thought this was a good day when we found out it was for Alzheimer’s,” said Tania Nunley.

She and her husband Lloyd Nunley brought their whole family out in purple. Lloyd is a huge Broncos fan and has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. When they found out his favorite team is working to help stop the disease he knew he had to show up for support.

“We appreciate them even more than we already did,” said Tania.

The team handed out purple foam fingers, rally towels and beads while Brittany Bowlen and other children of late Broncos owner Pat Bowlen helped collect money for research. Pat suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

“There are a lot kind words that come from fans. Usually they say we are really excited for the season, we love your dad. We love this community thank you so much for doing this,” Brittany said.

While Broncos blue and orange still dominated the crowd, a little purple sprinkled in here and there reminded everyone of the team’s late owner and the thousands of others who suffer the same way he did.

“This day is hard, but we are showing that we are here strong and this is a way to raise money so things like this won’t happen,” Annabel Bowlen, another one of Pat’s daughters, said.

The Broncos are matching all donations to the Alzheimer’s Association Sunday, so if you want to donate you can donate online at dbron.co/alz.

Rich Scangarello sees Philip Lindsay and Royce Freeman as “perfect complements” By Mike Florio Pro Football Talk July 22, 2019

Training camp and the preseason bring plenty of questions, including whether and to what extent a given team will divide reps among multiple running backs.

In Denver, Philip Lindsay emerged as the top option a year ago, despite being an updrafted rookie. But that was with a different coaching staff. Now, with Vic Fangio running the show and Rich Scangarello coordinating the offense, Royce Freeman could be a bigger factor.

“I think Royce and Lindsay are perfect complements,” Scangarello told reporters on Sunday. “They kind of remind me of [Falcons running backs] Tevin Coleman and Devonta Freeman in Atlanta. They have different skill sets. They are both talented in their own way. They are both able to be used with their strengths so that they can be the best they can be. Royce is big, and he is physical in pass protection. That’s a big deal in the NFL — that durability that comes with it. As far as running the football in the scheme, they both can do it. One is just going to do it probably with a little bit more physicality and the other is going to make you miss.”

Still, it’s clear that Scangarello recognizes Lindsay’s unique skillset.

“One of the great things about coming to Denver that really excited me from the day I walked in the door is that there are a very few players in the league like Phillip that have the ability to win in a one-on-one matchup at any time,” Scangarello said. “I think that easiest matchup to create in the NFL is the halfback on a linebacker. That’s what we try to do in this offense a lot, and I think he has that gift and that ability and those traits. Excited to try to do that and try to force defenses to put a DB on him to open up other players.”

Last year, Lindsay had 192 rushing attempts, but Freeman had 130. Still, Lindsay averaged 5.4 yards per attempt, while Freeman was held to 4.0. It remains to be seen how the touches will be divided in 2019, but it’s obvious that Scangarello has faith in both guys, even if he may have a little more in Lindsay.

Von Miller working to become a more complete player By Darin Gantt Pro Football Talk July 22, 2019

Von Miller walked into Broncos training camp with the all-time sack record on his mind.

But new coach Vic Fangio also has him focusing on all the other non-sack things he can do for the team, and how that can make him even better than piling up stats.

Miller told Peter King of NBC’s Football Morning in America that he appreciated the work Fangio and outside linebackers coach Brandon Staley were putting in to make him a more complete player by stressing the fundamentals of things like pass coverage.

“I got a great coach here, one of the best coaches I’ve ever had in my life,” Miller said. “We have great leadership here but he’s an outside linebacker guy. He’s coached a lot of great ones. I wanna be his greatest product yet. It’s the little things, like coach Fangio says. When you really focus on the little things it turns into a change of game. It turns into a whole different athlete. I bought into that. I bought into my outside linebackers coach as well, coach Staley. He stays up super late thinking about how to make me better . . . I can really appreciate that. I bought into whatever those coaching points that they give me.”

Staley came with Fangio from Chicago, where the linebackers had 51 sacks the last two seasons, the third- most in the league.

But working with Miller on footwork and drops — and having him buy into it _ should have a carryover effect, as all the non-Von Millers on the Broncos roster see their best player going to new lengths to improve.