Sports

The 1994 Heisman Trophy won by CU Boulder running back Rashaan Salaam, who killed himself in a Boulder park circa December 2016, has been sold at auction for $399,608.40. This total is reportedly the most ever for a Heisman, topping the cash paid for O.J. Simpson’s, among others. A likely reason for the high price was its now-former owner’s pledge to donate a significant portion of the windfall to research of CTE, a brain disease common among NFL players from which Salaam may have suffered.

The signs are already coming down on what used to be Sports Authority Field at Mile High; with the demise of the Englewood-based sports retailer giant in 2016, it was only a matter of time until the contracts ran their course and the stadium’s name became available again. The time has come, and the Broncos organization is wasting no time in wiping the slate clean once again.

Today, January 8, bidding begins on the 1994 Heisman Trophy awarded to the late CU Boulder star Rashaan Salaam, who killed himself in a Boulder park circa December 2016. Salaam’s brain wasn’t tested for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a brain disease associated with former football players, including sufferers who met tragic ends, because of religious reasons. However, a portion of the trophy sale’s proceeds is being set aside for CTE research.

Let’s face it: The Broncos had a tough year, and so did fans. With their first losing season since the McDaniels debacle — a tenure so brief and disastrous that it’s tough to rightly call it an “era,” the 2017 Broncos failed despite a strong roster of both experienced and up-and-coming talent. Was it Vance Joseph? Was it the loss of Wade Phillips? Was it just Elway stumbling?

Mayor Michael Hancock, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and other officials and business leaders in Denver have formed a committee to explore the possibility of bidding to host a future Winter Olympics or Paralympic Winter Games in the city that famously rejected the 1976 Winter Olympics as part of a citizens revolt detailed in a recent Westword feature article.

With the Denver Broncos’ 2017-2018 season a lost cause, not to mention an embarrassment to everyone concerned, interest in the team’s Thursday Night Football match-up against the woeful Indianapolis Colts was at who-gives-a-damn level. As evidence, note that the most passionate debate on Twitter following Denver’s 25-13 victory was whether the all-orange uniforms worn by Von Miller and company were incredible or idiotic.

After your Denver Broncos defeated the New York Jets 23-0 yesterday, December 10, messages from Twitter-using fans relieved that the team had finally broken its eight-game losing skid were countered by tweets ripping the squad for winning a meaningless contest and hurting the prospects for the best-possible draft picks next year.

Denver Broncos quarterback legend turned team executive John Elway received a plus-size amount of credit for the squad’s success during the Peyton Manning era, including two Super Bowl appearances and one victory. This goodwill largely protected him from criticism during the team’s slide the past two seasons. But no more. Twitter users absolutely roasted Elway during and after the Broncos’ completely humiliating 35-9 loss to the lowly Miami Dolphins on Sunday, December 3.

Watching Twitter during and after the latest embarrassing Denver Broncos loss, this time to the Oakland Raiders by a 21-14 score, turned into something of a sociological study. The reaction to quarterback Paxton Lynch crying on the sidelines after a combination of injury and ineptitude forced him from the game demonstrated just how divisive the sight of a man displaying emotion can still be in 2017.

The Denver Broncos’ 20-17 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals at home on Sunday, November 19, represents the latest low point in a season full of them. On Twitter, fans who’ve previously called for the signing of controversial QB Colin Kaepernick or (God help us) Tim Tebow and the firing of first-year head coach Vance Joseph reacted emotionally, expressing humiliation over the squad’s sorry performance, as seen in our top tweets roundup below.

What’s worse than your Denver Broncos getting blown out again following a humiliating shellacking by the Philadelphia Eagles last week? Losing to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, whose fans took to Twitter in the aftermath of a 41-16 annihilation at Mile High Stadium on November 12 to gloat in ways that make the defeat hurt all the more.

News that two-time Cy Young Award winning pitcher Roy Halladay had died on Tuesday, November 7, after a plane crash into the Gulf of Mexico shook the Major League Baseball community. After all, Halladay, who retired in 2013 after sixteen years of sparkling play for the Toronto Blue Jays and the Philadelphia Phillies, was widely considered a lock for the MLB Hall of Fame, and his reputation as a human being was just as impressive. But Halladay’s death was felt with particular shock in the Denver area, where he was born forty years ago and first came to the attention of scouts as a hurler for Arvada West High School.

You’ll have a hard time understanding the local sports pundits who predicted that your Denver Broncos would defeat the fast-rising Philadelphia Eagles during their face-off on Sunday, November 5, because they’ll be choking on crow feathers all day long. The final score of the contest was 51-23, but the actual game wasn’t that close. Moreover, the Twitter debate about who should start at quarterback for Denver as this already lost season moves forward focused less on whether Brock Osweiler, the man under center yesterday, is better than Trevor Siemian, the hurler he replaced, and more on which of them sucks harder.

In the wake of sex abuse coming to light in Hollywood and the media, victims of abuse in the sports world are coming forward. Jamie Naughright granted her first interview decades after Peyton Manning allegedly “placed his ‘naked butt and rectum'” on her face when he was a student at the University of Tennessee.

Yesterday, November 1, as expected, your Denver Broncos pulled downward-spiraling quarterback Trevor Siemian from the starting lineup in favor of Brock Osweiler, who was F-bombed on social media after leaving the team in 2016 and heavily ridiculed upon his return earlier this year following big-time failures in Houston and Cleveland.

City Park Golf Course course is neither Denver’s prettiest nor its most accommodating. The clubhouse is only accessible from holes one and eighteen, and the driving range doesn’t allow drivers. But like an old, comfortable sweater, it’s become my go-to course.

In the wake of a scandal involving movie executive Harvey Weinstein, who is accused of engaging in improper sexual behavior with more than sixty women, Jamie Naughright has granted her first TV interview in regard to previously reported allegations that former Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning “placed his ‘naked butt and rectum'” on her face when he was a student at the University of Tennessee.

During and after the October 30 Monday Night Football match-up between your Denver Broncos and the Kansas City Chiefs, which ended with a 29-19 KC victory, fans of the Mile High City squad vented on Twitter, with many of them directing their anger at first-year coach Vance Joseph. As you’ll see in our roundup of the most memorable tweets, the hashtag #FireVance has become a thing.

When the Boulder Valley Velodrome – a 250 meter outdoor cycling track with steep, banked turns – opened in Erie in 2015, it was the culmination of more than a decade of effort by its joint owners, Doug Emerson and Frank Banta. Now it’s for sale.

Your Denver Broncos knew their October 22 rematch with the Los Angeles Chargers was a must-win game after an embarrassing loss to the New York Giants and the angry tweet-storm that followed. But instead of reasserting their dominance over Philip Rivers and company, they laid their biggest goose egg of a generation. The Broncos’ 21-0 defeat in a nearly empty L.A.-area soccer stadium marked their first shutout since 1992, a span of a quarter-century, and prompted desperate fans on social media to call for current Denver signal-caller Trevor Siemian to be replaced by either the controversial Colin Kaepernick or the sainted but ineffective Tim Tebow, as seen in the Twitter roundup below.

Last week, after listening to pundit after pundit say your Denver Broncos had virtually no chance of losing to the injury riddled, 0-5 New York Giants on October 15’s Sunday Night Football, this longtime Men of Orange fan sensed disaster. For decades, after all, the Broncos have regularly sucked it up against inferior opponents they were supposed to pummel, especially in prime-time contests, for reasons of overconfidence, a lack of intensity, the assumption that phoning it in would be good enough under the circumstances, or a combination thereof. And damned if they didn’t do just that, falling 23-10 to the pathetic G-men in a game whose outcome unleashed one of the angriest Twitter storms in recent memory, as demonstrated by the collection of tweets below.

Thanks to a scheduled bye, your Denver Broncos didn’t play a game this weekend, and based on a telling conversation I overheard while eavesdropping yesterday morning, October 8, as reporters are wont to do, the Mile High City was nicer as a result.