The Broncos say talk to Arapahoe County. Arapahoe County says talk to the Broncos. South Metro Fire says rules are rules.
New owners. New coach. New staff. New camp. No longer can you roll outta bed on a Tuesday and decide at half-past 9 in the morning that you feel like driving over to Dove Valley before lunch to see if your secret fears about Elliott Fry are somehow justified.
Sean Payton’s inaugural training camp will ring a few more firsts: (free) ticketed entry for fans — no more than four tickets per fan account — and a cap of 3,000 visitors per practice.
Now it turns out that last number was always the designated capacity for the facility — insiders say that, like holding, local officials in the past generally chose not to call the Broncos out for occasionally stuffing the hill. The first weekend practice of Nathaniel Hackett’s Club Med ‘22 last July drew 7,121 into a space that’s reportedly only supposed to house about half that number.
So, yeah, safety comes first, even if it safety turns out to be one giant buzzkill. Especially as training camp provides one of those rare low-cost entry points that bridges kids to players, interactions that deepen the bond between the most popular team — in spite of its on-field foibles — along the Front Range and one of the most devoted fan bases in all of North American sports. Surely, we told the new Grading The Week staff, there’s gotta be some middle ground here, a solution that gets more eyeballs up close to the Broncos for nada or next-to-nada while also getting the county off of Greg Penner’s backside.
So, being the corporate humanists we are, the powers decided it might be fun to lock the GTW boys in a conference room with a live moose until they came up with a viable solution. They solved that bad boy in three minutes flat.
Broncos camp days at Empower Field — A.
It can’t be done this summer, obviously, but once renovations don’t create a conflict, let’s go big — and let’s move some Broncos camp practices back to Empower Field.
And by some, maybe a handful. Maybe just the Saturday dates that bring in Broncos Country to the party in bulk.
What’s the harm? You open the lower bowl and allow tens of thousands more a chance to get up close with their heroes. You get players a chance to practice going through the motions at their home stadium before the real games begin. You’ve got more parking spaces and a gameday traffic routine that everybody already knows, for better or for worse, by heart.
The die-hards can fight for that limited space on Tuesdays at Dove Valley. Weekends belong to families. And the more that can land even a tiny taste of The Sean Payton Experience up close, the better.
LeBron’s beef with Michael Malone – D+.
Forgive the GTW crew for giggling a little — OK, a lot — at the reports a few days back that LeBron James was, um, peeved that Michael Malone made fun of the fact that the King celebrated the Nuggets’ first-ever postseason series win over the Lakers — a 4-0 sweep in the Western Conference Finals — by hinting at retirement, therefore completely, immediately (and intentionally) sucking up all the oxygen from Van Nuys to Bangor during, at that time, Denver’s greatest basketball moment.
Malone and King James go back years — the former was an assistant in Cleveland when the King was still building his Cavs empire. Although frankly, Old Man ‘Bron should be spending more time focusing on the fact he went 3-for-19 on treys over the first three games of the conference finals and less about Malone’s retirement gags. The man speaks the truth. Occasional trash? With the best of ‘em. But mostly truth. And as long as you can back it up, brother, the floor is yours.
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