Sean Payton huddled his team at the end of Wednesday’s practice and delivered welcome news.
Summer arrived a day early for the Broncos.
The veteran head coach for the first time since arriving in Denver in 2023 called off the last of Denver’s slated three-day mandatory minicamp and instead excused his team for the summer after a slate of Wednesday afternoon meetings.
Payton cited multiple factors in wrapping up the minicamp after two days rather than three, including the Broncos’ deep playoff run last season and also the fact that this week is the final in the club’s current locker room and facility.
“Itap unusual because there’s a lot of packing, a little bit more than normal when you’re moving into a new facility,” Payton said.
Indeed, when the Broncos return from summer break and report for training camp late next month, they will do so to the gleaming new headquarters across the field from the building they’ve been in since 1990. The initial move-in may not happen exactly on the initial schedule of this weekend after a subcontractor died at the construction site Monday night. Work was still paused while Denver practiced Wednesday, which is nearly done and with training camp more than five weeks away.
Payton said even in a normal year, he likes to have something fresh ready when players return for training camp.
“I like the idea of always coming back to something new,” he said. “Pretend it wasn’t that new facility — we’d have new signage or try to create (something new).
“Here, we’ve been slow to even talk about putting things up in the hallways because you don’t know which ones are getting the traffic. For all of us, I’m sure there will be some quirks.”
Payton also cited the Broncos’ deep playoff run during the 2025 season as the reason for finishing a day early. Thatap been a consistent factor in how the coach and his staff have conducted this offseason.
They reported for Phase 1 — Payton’s always consists of six weeks of just running and lifting — two weeks later than any other team in the NFL. They held two weeks of OTAs rather than the maximum three. Then two days of minicamp instead of three.
In total, Denver was on the field for eight days this offseason between OTAs and minicamp. Thatap about as few as possible for an NFL team these days.
“It was the most amount of days we’ve been in the building for the regular season, so there’s a balance there,” Payton said. “I think itap just about trying to read the team. We have a lot of things that we have to get to and a lot of work to do.
“Fortunately, I think we’ll be coming into training camp pretty healthy. There will be some guys that are here (this summer) training and working on rehab.”
Before OTAs even started, inside linebacker Alex Singleton said he felt like the defense was weeks, months or years ahead of other teams because of the extensive continuity among the group.
Quarterback Bo Nix on Tuesday said he felt like his offense was further along than it had been this time of year in either of his first two seasons despite the fact he’s missed most of the offseason program while rehabbing from a pair of ankle operations.
“I thought it was a great couple of weeks of work,” right tackle Mike McGlinchey said Wednesday. “Itap always hard to tell, especially from an O-line and D-line perspective when you’re just hanging out in t-shirts and stuff. I think we all have a really good understanding of what we do. Obviously there wasn’t a lot of roster turnover this year moving forward. Having the experience that we have in the building and playing together for as long as we all have is a good thing to keep building on and starting on a higher point than each year before.
“If you’re not improving, you are getting worse in this league and I think we took steps to improve from OTAs last year to training camp to the whole season. Then we played last season, the (17th) game was better than the first game and thatap the goal this year as well. We have to be better in training camp than we were in OTAs and so on and so forth.”
The next step can wait for a few weeks. The Broncos will decamp for a few weeks of mostly rest and relaxation, then reconvene in the final week of July to start the long march toward what they hope is once again championship contention.
“I like where we’re at,” Payton said.
