Woody Paige: Winning ways would help justify Broncos’ posh new HQ
The Broncos’ ownership will build a lavish headquarters to be completed in 2026, but will they build a winning team by then?
Oddly enough, the construction cost of $175 million is approximately the same amount that the Penner-Walton Group will pay for Russell Wilson and Sean Payton from 2024 to 2026.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, “the very rich are different from me and you.’’
But, first, can the Broncos beat the Bills, who have Von Miller, Denver’s last Super Bowl MVP, and Josh Allen, who could have been the Broncos’ quarterback?
In 1990, after the Broncos had played in three of the previous four Super Bowls and lost all, the late Pat Bowlen moved the franchise’s command center, offices, locker room and practice fields to a 25-acre site in Dove Valley southeast of Denver.
The Broncos’ record that season was a shocking 5-11. (The next season, the Broncos lost to Buffalo in the AFC Championship). The team wasn’t pathetic again until 2010, when a guy named Josh McDaniels was head coach. What happened to him? The Broncos finished 4-12. They have won only five games in three seasons since — in 2017, 2019 and 2022.
During the Broncos’ formative years in the 1960s, American Football League two, three and four victories were commonplace.
The bargain-basement franchise’s original office was stuck in a half-moon, aged World War II Quonset hut, prefabricated from corrugated steel, a third of a mile from old Bears Stadium, the former city dump. Today, the structure still sits silently at 2060 Clay St., and the 75,000-seat football spaceship can be seen in the distance.
Under Lou Saban, a one-man Broncos band, the team relocated north off Valley Highway (Interstate 25) to 5700 Logan St., which had a modest one-story brick building for coaches and staff and, across the street, a shoddy, shabby locker room, one practice field barely 100 yards long, two pieces of weightlifting equipment outside in the elements, a surrounding wood fence and a parking lot with one tree and inadequate spaces for the players.
This is where the Broncos of 1977 advanced to their first Super Bowl and John Elway, the No. 1 pick in the NFL who was traded to Denver, showed up in 1983 and wondered what he had gotten himself into. The office, the locker room and a small section of the field remain.
Sean Payton focusing on ‘more touches’ for rookie receiver Marvin Mims
Finally — FINALLY! — seven years later, No. 7 and the Broncos, with Bowlen enticed by a booming business park’s developer, went south to fancy new digs worthy of a professional football team, and another seven years later, No. 7 and the Broncos won their first Super Bowl, then their second the following season.
One arrested Broncos player who was jailed at the Arapahoe County detention center could view the nearby practice fields from his cell. Planes constantly flew in and out of the private Centennial Airport. Kids played soccer matches across from the headquarters named in honor of Bowlen’s father, Paul D. Bowlen. The Broncos’ indoor fieldhouse facility, named in honor of Pat, was finished in 2014. The strength and conditioning complex includes every type of weightlifting equipment, an injury recovery room, therapy pools and cryotherapy chambers. The main building has the Broncos’ three championship trophies on display, expansive locker rooms, a deluxe dining room, meeting rooms and a mammoth auditorium with movie theater screens, offices for the owners, assistant coaches, the 12 permanent (ha) and interim head coaches of 33 seasons, more than 150 other executive and employees and, last year, a quarterback and his staff.
Principal owner and CEO Greg Penner said months ago the headquarters would undergo another major renovation. After he and his wife, Carrie Walton Penner, and team President Damani Leech visited several other NFL and NBA franchises, it was decided, and announced Tuesday, that construction of an unrivaled Walton/Penner-funded, futuristic-fashioned facility “to foster a championship environment,’’ Penner promised, would begin in the spring and open before the ’26 season. An architectural rendering by the company responsible for Coors Field was revealed.
To simplify, the ambitious colossal project looks like Broncos Utopia instead of Dove Valley.
The Broncos better beat everybody and win several more Super Bowls.
Next up: a new stadium.
But, first, the Bills.
And the Broncos should buy the Quonset hut-hut-hut and move it to the new paradise palace as a reminder.
Improved Broncos get to show their stuff in two straight nationally televised games
