As members of the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group made their way onto the SoFi Stadium turf hours before their newly-acquired Broncos faced off against the Los Angeles Rams, they did so amid festive vibes.
It was Christmas Day, 2022, and the NFL’s newest ownership group had a standalone game against a familiar opponent.
Literally.
Stan Kroenke, Rob Walton’s cousin by marriage, owns the Rams along with several other sports franchises — the Nuggets and Avalanche in Denver among them — and built what is, to date, the crown jewel of NFL stadiums.
Stan and his wife, Ann Walton, greeted Walton along with Greg and Carrie Penner on the field after holiday celebrations and before the first meeting of their football teams.
The day quickly spiraled for the Broncos and their new owners, though, from family Christmas to a bitter Welcome to the NFL moment and a franchise-rattling embarrassment.
In many ways, that 51-14 blowout set in motion the events that led to Penner hiring Sean Payton. It set the table for a foundational reset of the club’s football operation and a string of decisions that put the Broncos back on their feet much sooner than most expected. Under Payton, the Broncos have returned to being postseason regulars and, in January, they came within perhaps a Bo Nix ankle injury of playing in the Super Bowl.
As the Broncos and Rams prepare to meet Sunday night at Empower Field, the first game between the clubs since that day late in 2022, Denver has pulled astride Los Angeles on the football field. More impactful in the long term, however, is the reality that these ownership groups, bound by blood, are set to square off across conferences, across professional sports, and across Colfax Avenue for years, decades, and likely generations to come.
The Christmas Day ’embarrassment’
Justin Strnad knew this one was different.
Even in a league driven by parity and a weekly raft of close games and dramatic conclusions, blowouts still happen. Itap part of every sport and the NFL is no exception.
Losing by 37 on Christmas, on national television to a team owned by your owners’ cousins and playing with a backup quarterback who had been with the club for three weeks? That is not a frequent occurrence.
“I remember that day just getting on the plane and being like, ‘Dude, that was bad bad,’” Strnad told The Post.
Indeed it was. It also turned out to be the final straw for head coach Nathaniel Hackett.
The Broncos, at 4-11, flew back to Denver as a snowstorm snarled travel across the country. Greg Penner had planned to wait until the end of the season to decide whether to give the rookie head coach a second season. That seemed unlikely, given Hackett had been hired before the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group bought the team and the season had gone off the rails quickly, despite the blockbuster acquisition of quarterback Russell Wilson and other marquee signings like Randy Gregory.
Still, Penner is a notoriously disciplined decision-maker and he had no reason to expedite this one. Until Christmas Day.
Not only did the Broncos get blown out, but they melted down on the sideline. Teammates scuffled. Microphones caught guard Dalton Risner yelling at backup quarterback Brett Rypien. Running back Latavius Murray told The Post recently that he got into it with Risner, too.
Gregory had missed 10 games due to a knee injury and returned for one game, but was reluctant to play on Christmas due to knee soreness. He was cleared and made active against the Rams, however, so he set about protesting. Gregory drew two personal fouls and spent most of his 11 snaps clearly trying to instigate fights with Rams players before finally succeeding after the game ended.
Hackett left his postgame news conference and walked back to the locker room with his shoulders slumped and hands stuffed in his pockets, eyes locked on the ground in front of him.
Perhaps by then he knew. Murray certainly did.
“When you’ve been around long enough, you definitely kind of know that, man, there’s certain games, certain moments where you’re kind of like, ‘Damn, man, this could be the end of it for him,’” he said. “I saw it in London when we came back with the Raiders and Dennis Allen was let go when we got whooped up pretty bad in London.
“Sometimes an owner, it can be a game where itap just like, enough is enough.”
That night, Penner arrived at that very conclusion. Diligence and patience gave way to anger and resolution in the span of an evening.
Hackett was fired the next morning.
One day later, Penner called the loss “an embarrassment to our organization” and said he hadn’t gone into the week thinking about making a coaching change but that “after the effort that we put forward on Sunday and some of the things that were going on off the field, we just felt like it was time to make a decision.”
The text
Around that very time, Murray texted his old head coach, Sean Payton.
The veteran running back says now that he felt bad that Payton construed the text as being delivered before Hackett was fired. Murray remembers sending it after arriving back in Denver, not from Los Angeles.
Regardless, the veteran back — a rare stabilizer that fall for the Broncos after Javonte Williams’ gruesome early-season leg injury — couldn’t shake the idea that Payton was just what Denver needed.
He wasn’t the only one, either. In fact, he said he reached out to Payton with Wilson’s encouragement.
“Russ is assuming he’ll be around and I’m thinking I would love to be back, especially if Sean gets the job,” Murray said. “So I reached out to him and I said, ‘Hey, my quarterback out here would love to have you.’” Wilson himself called Payton a “genius” after a late-season game when discussing head coaching candidates.
Payton’s response to Murray: “Be careful what you ask Santa for.”
Murray relayed the same message about Payton being the Broncos’ answer to general manager Geroge Paton and to Penner himself, too.
“I wasn’t doing it selfishly, but when they were talking about culture and details and all those things, I love other coaches, but being around Sean, I just knew,” Murray said. “I just couldn’t see him being in any situation or any position and not changing it to that way.
“He just is that guy.”
A Payton turnaround
Payton, of course, became the Broncos’ guy several weeks later when Denver completed a trade with New Orleans for his rights.
It wasn’t because Murray lobbied for him, of course, but the veteran back hit the nail on the head in terms of his evaluation. Penner wanted experience throughout the hiring process. Jim Harbaugh would have provided that and it was a testament to how impressive DeMeco Ryans was that Penner was drawn to him strongly despite Ryan’s status as a potential first-timer.
Payton was hired in late January 2023. The ensuing overhaul has been from the studs up — and it has worked.
Since the day Payton arrived, the Broncos have turned over the roster, wiggled out from under Wilson’s massive contract extension, found an apparent long-term answer at quarterback, built one of the deepest rosters in football and made the playoffs the past two seasons.
From Week 1 of the 2023 season, the Broncos are 33-20 in the regular season. The Los Angeles Rams during that same stretch? 33-20 in the regular season. Both teams finished as runner-up in their conference last year. They are each off to 1-1 starts this year and opened the season with poor performances, but they are each expected to be power players and Super Bowl contenders going forward.
“Obviously, the culture change that Sean brought when he got here was radically different than what we’d had,” said Strnad, a Denver fifth-round draft pick in 2020 who played for Vic Fangio and Hackett before Payton. “The accountability, the discipline that is instilled in everybody — in this program, the way Sean runs it, if you’re not on your Ps and Qs, you’re going to stick out like a sore thumb. He’s done a great job of changing it.”
Payton, of course, wasted little time engendering change. Ironically, Murray wasn’t offered a contract to return in 2023 and Wilson lasted just one year.
Murray’s departure stemmed from age rather than fit. But Wilson and Payton didn’t work together and many others lasted a year or less. The Broncos cut Gregory and veteran OLB Frank Clark within weeks of the 2023 season opening. Jerry Jeudy, Justin Simmons and many others were jettisoned, too.
“When you say stop progress, itap in every sense of the word,” Payton said on a podcast with Jason Garrett about players who don’t help a turnaround. “The calories burned on them, etc. And there were a number of them in the first year. A number. Way too many.”
The Broncos played the reset game aggressively, which included absorbing Wilson’s $85 million in dead cap space. Payton and Paton identified players they believed fit, stockpiled them and then locked them in contractually. Now the club has one of the highest continuity rates in the NFL and many of the players who bought into Payton’s way in 2023 are still around.
There are 10 on the 53-man roster today who made the initial 53 in 2022 under Hackett: Strnad, Garett Bolles, Courtland Sutton, Quinn Meinerz, Luke Wattenberg, Pat Surtain II, Nik Bonitto, Eyioma Uwazurike, D.J. Jones and Alex Singleton. They are all starters, along with Jonathon Cooper, who is currently on the commissioner’s exempt list.
Upon his arrival, Payton told the players that he and his coaches would judge them based on what they saw going forward rather than on any preconceived notions.
“Thatap something that is actually true when he says that,” Strnad said. “I feel like you hear coaches say that a lot. A coach will get a new job somewhere and they’re like, ‘Oh, everyone’s at zero.’ Really, though, they want their guys and people don’t really get a fair shake. Honestly, I had those thoughts when Sean got here of, like, am I going to get a fair shake in training camp? And I’ll say, these guys, him and (defensive coordinator Vance Joseph), they really go by what they see.
“Itap shown with who has been kept here, signed here and brought in.”
If Payton wins another Super Bowl, the first line of his football resume will forever say that he was the first coach to win one with two different clubs.
Even if he doesn’t, however, among the enduring parts of his legacy will be that he took two different wayward franchises and built them into winners. He took over a team in New Orleans coming off a three-win season and the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, and quickly built it into a contender, leading the Saints to their first and only Super Bowl trophy after the 2009 season.
“There’s a very clear and precise type of player that we look for with him and we don’t really compromise on that,” said Denver’s offensive line coach Zach Strief, who has been on Payton’s staff here from the start and before that played 12 years for him in New Orleans. “You put enough of the right types of people in a building together and your culture will build itself.”
That culture has already shown through this year when the Broncos bounced back from getting blasted by Kansas City in Week 1 to beat a quality Jacksonville team last weekend.
“Itap why a lot of these players are here from a make-up standpoint,” Payton said after beating the Jags. “They’re not here for the wins. They’re here for some of the bumps that we know are going to come.”
A broadening board
In the more than three years since Payton was hired, the Broncos have found stability in their football operation.
Penner oversees Payton and Paton and this offseason gave them matching five-year contracts through 2030.
The ownership group has put more than $100 million into Empower Field upgrades, built a state-of-the-art team headquarters and training facility that opened this summer and identified Burnham Yard as its preferred site to build a new stadium and surrounding mixed-use district.
The Broncos are a rising power in the NFL.
They are also going to be seeing a lot of the Kroenkes, and not just at Thanksgiving.
Last year, Kroenke Sports and Entertainment announced plans for a massive development project around Ball Arena downtown. A matter of months later, the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group made Burnham Yard its preferred site. The proposed districts are separated, quite literally, by Metro State’s campus.
The districts are so close together that when the Broncos owners started buying up properties around Burnham Yard in 2024 using nondescript LLCs, at least one tenant with a business near the defunct railyard told The Post they figured it was Kroenke behind the torrent of purchases. In a development master-planning document filed with the city last year, KSE said its project could unite several neighborhoods, including La Alma-Lincoln Park, which is directly east of the Broncos’ proposed site.
The Broncos are hoping to have a stadium built and the initial phase of their district up and running by the 2031 NFL season, though there are still many hurdles to clear before they get the green light to start digging. Phase 1 of the Ball Arena plan is on a similar timeline and includes a hotel, a pair of apartment buildings and a roughly 5,000-seat concert venue. KSE, too, plans to develop River Mile, though company officials have recently said they consider it, for now, more of a long-term play, with their emphasis on the Ball Arena project.
Several people involved with, around and familiar with the pair of projects see an arms race brewing between the Penner Sports Group and KSE. While the districts are different in styles and density — KSE’s will ultimately be more residential-heavy, and Burnham Yard has more of an entertainment emphasis based on current plans — Denver has finite capacity and is capped in market size in a way that Kroenke was not when he built SoFi Stadium and the surrounding district in the Los Angeles area.
“These guys are smart,” said Brad Segal, president of Denver planning firm Progressive Urban Management Associates. “They’re putting hundreds of millions of dollars — billions — into these developments.
“But they’re either going to cannibalize and/or compete because there are limitations with the size of the market.”
Neither KSE or the Broncos made executives available for this story.
Fred Ortiz is the global director of sports and entertainment at the architecture firm HKS, which designed SoFi and also AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. In Arlington, there are multiple sports franchises that have built in close proximity to each other and largely coexist, he said, though with some scheduling conflicts and natural competition.
“There’s an arms race here,” Oritz said. “Is Kroenke going to take what he has infused into these other teams he runs, like with SoFi, for example, and whatap he learned from SoFi and how is that going to make its way into this development in Denver? Is he going to be the bully?”
Last summer, Sue Powers, the president of Urban Ventures in Denver, told The Post that she thought the Ball Arena and Burnham projects could be somewhat complementary but that they’d be watching each other to see what each did.
“I think they’re fundamentally different,” Segal said. … “What the Kroenkes are doing is extending the vitality of lower downtown across Speer and feeding on that. Whereas the Broncos are creating something from the ground up, really brand new.”
If nothing else, the families will end up competing for labor. With the initial phases of the projects on similar tracks, there is a whole lot of construction on deck over the next half-decade and beyond in, really, a fairly compact part of the city.
“Denver’s a big market, but at some point you’re labor constrained,” managing director at the real estate consulting firm RCLCO Erin Talkington, a stadium district expert, said. “When you start to think about the different trades and specialties locally that can work on that scale of venue, and when you’re building a couple at the same time, you start to realize that you have a good labor pool, but itap not infinite.
“And to get it all, you’re going to pay for it.”
America’s pastime and Denver’s future
While each group worked through the myriad steps toward breaking ground on their districts earlier this year, they also each added a new sport to their respective portfolios.
Penner Sports Group bought a 40% stake in the Colorado Rockies in April. Then, last month, Kroenke agreed to purchase the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, adding yet another piece to the family chessboard. PSG is just a partner to Rockies owner Dick Monfort for the foreseeable future and Penner has waved off any talk of what happens down the line, but from the moment they bought the stake this spring, questions have persisted about whether they may one day become the club’s controlling owners. Those questions aren’t going anywhere.
The Rockies represent the Penners’ first known foray into sports beyond football, whereas KSE owns teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, and the Premier League, as well as in other, lower-profile leagues.
It all represents substantial proliferation in a relatively short amount of time. Less than four years ago, the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group was the new kid on the NFL block, taking its medicine on Christmas Day in Southern California.
Now it’s a bona fide power in the NFL, both on the field and off. The Penners are undertaking a major project in Denver and have expanded to baseball, too. On the other side of every endeavor, some more directly than others, is Kroenke.
They are after the same championships in football and, soon, in baseball. They share fanbases locally, to be sure, but they will soon be after the same foot traffic on Denver’s western flank. They are both headlong into what is widely regarded as smart business these days in pro sports, but, as Josh Kroenke acknowledged in a video last year, it also amounts to a project rooted in the idea of legacy.
Such will be the case, if each side has its way, for a very long time on the Front Range.
