So Payton got creative, as multiple people who saw or heard about the meeting recalled, and instead played a clip from the movie “Rudy” as Rothstein’s introduction.

“Ppl (sic) loved it,” one person in the building texted The Post.

Rothstein had no old tape, indeed, because his playing days ended back in Section VIII high school football in Bellmore, N.Y. He pivoted immediately to something different. In 2009, while studying at the State University of New York at Cortland, he asked new offensive line coach Eric Jendryaszek if he could help out as a student assistant. At the same time, SUNY Cortland’s football program was implementing a new technology called

Then-head coach Dan MacNeill told Jendryaszek that he’d learned one of his assistants had already learned the software before even arriving on campus.

“It was frickin’ Evan,” Jendryaszek recalled.

“Frickin’ Evan,” nearly two decades later, exists as a near-invisible public figure around Dove Valley and Empower Field since advancing from Detroit to New England to Denver. He did not want to be interviewed for this story. He has no biography on the Broncos‘ . And yet his mind, as one Broncos source told The Post, was “very impactful” in the team’s sterling 11-2 record in one-score wins in 2025.

Second-year receiver Pat Bryant echoed the sentiment, asked how important Rothstein was in Denver’s close-game run.

“Very, bro,” Bryant told The Post. “When we do two-minute drills, situational, Sean (Payton) kinda steps to the side and lets Evan go to work. He’ll turn around, ask Evan questions. We come in here, we watch film on it, (Evan) will tell us what we did wrong.

“So, he’s basically like another offensive coordinator, for our situational football.”

Three coaches on Denver’s staff spoke to the entire team consistently in 2025. One, of course, was Payton. One was senior defensive assistant Joe Vitt, who speaks on Saturday nights before game day. And the other was Rothstein, who goes in-depth each week on situational and late-game mechanics.

“He’s been a tremendous asset, and almost like an air traffic controller on gameday where — his mind, it����ap racing with timeouts, and clock and situation,” Payton said in late July.

In Denver, Rothstein is indirectly part of a growing fraternity across the NFL, as the league has gradually come to recognize the value of analytically minded coaches who operate in “game-management roles” on game days. Every head coach across the NFL, as Ravens game-management coordinator Charlie Gelman told The Post, has some right-hand resource they trust in such a role. Some are in front-office research departments; most are buried on coaching staffs. All, though, are generally tasked with spitting out algorithmic data that help inform a head coach’s decision-making around fourth downs, two-point conversions, timeouts and beyond.

Rothstein is a unique case in a unique field, a coach who has worked hands-on under Jim Caldwell, Bill Belichick and Payton and who is also a “math wizard,” as Caldwell put it.

“He’s an extremely bright individual,” Jendryaszek said. “If it wasn’t for his passion for football, he could be building rocket ships.”

And before long, Rothstein — or one of these fraternity members across the NFL — could take the analytics revolution from their play-caller’s ear to their own call-sheet.

“I don’t want to speak for Evan, but guys who – I’m assuming like, Evan and myself, and some of these guys that are more on the coaching side, we’d all love to get to that point where we’re calling plays one day,” one NFL game-management specialist, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Post. “I think it’s trending that way. I think we’re getting more and more coaching responsibilities every year. I think it����ap either going to take a special head coach to give that opportunity, or a special ownership.”

“I think one of us just has to find a way to prove it, and get that first job.”

Gelman, who was hired as Baltimore’s game-management coordinator this offseason after spending three years in a similar role in Indianapolis, began experimenting with football analytics in the seventh grade. As a student assistant at Duke from 2018 to 2021, he built a win-probability model that the football program eventually adopted as its own. And after spending a year in Baltimore interfacing with then-Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, Colts head coach Shane Steichen called about a job opening.

The problem, of sorts: Gelman was a not-so-grizzled 24-year-old at the time.

“I was scared that they would think I was too young,” Gelman said. “So I grew out a full goatee, just to look older.”

It worked well enough to land him the gig as Steichen’s game-manager in Indianapolis, where Gelman came to understand his job in simple terms: maximize win probability. Utilizing the programming language R, he has built models that use decades of data from NFL games, take commands and output tangible recommendations for late-game situations. On gamedays, Gelman’s program spits out 116 individual sheets of recommended decisions — game managers still need analog charts given the — depending on specific down, yardage and distance.

“I think around the league, we all think very similarly,” Gelman said. “The question is just — how do each of us go about our businesses in our different, unique ways?”

Caldwell, the former and head coach, learned from four years overseeing Rothstein that the game manager has algorithmic processes for late-game decisions that “no one else does,” as Caldwell said. He would not reveal state secrets. But Rothstein’s process dates back to his time at SUNY Cortland, where he used the DVSport film program to create “logic statements” to predict and analyze opponents’ play-calling tendencies based on formation, down and distance.

Jendryaszek explained that Rothstein would present a team’s usage of a “Trips” formation, with three receivers aligned on the same side of the field. Rothstein could explain their tendencies for strong-side runs. Or weak-side runs. Or five-step drops. Or quick-game looks. Or categorize those tendencies by down and distance. And he built this all, Jendryaszek marveled, from scratch.

“He just kinda built that out as an 18-, 19-year-old, which was crazy,” Jendryaszek said. “No one was asking him to do it. He just loved that aspect of it. And he even started to work on his own playbook, back in the day.”

Once Caldwell arrived in Detroit in January 2014, he began to sit down with Rothstein, who had been with the Lions for two previous seasons as a special-teams quality control coach. Every single night, through that winter, spring and summer, Caldwell and Rothstein kicked around potential game situations and ideas for how to approach them. “Go find out why we should make this decision,” Caldwell told him, “instead of this.”

Rothstein would take 10 to 15 years of recent NFL data, Caldwell said, and analyze the correct answer. And he would communicate clearly, in Caldwell’s ear, on Sundays.

“Let me put it this way,” Caldwell said, speaking on Rothstein’s impact. “All you need to do is look at — I think Denver had, how many one-score games they won … a bunch, right? Take a look at us in Detroit.”

The Lions had a .563 win percentage in Caldwell’s tenure with Rothstein from 2014-17 — and a .595 win percentage in one-score games, according to The Post’s research.

“Besides our quarterback, who was great, obviously, Matthew Stafford, it was because of the conserving time, or eating up the clock,” Caldwell said.

According to The Post’s research of available NFL staff data, 17 of 32 franchises currently have some sort of front-office or coaching staffer in a specific “game-management” role; plenty more employ staffers who handle such responsibilities without an official title. The profession has expanded in the last decade, as Buccaneers director of football research Zach Beistline told The Post. And the effect is plain in 2-point and fourth-down utilization: the number of total league-wide fourth-down tries has nearly doubled from 2016 to 2025, according to The Post’s research.

The “really good game-management teams,” as one NFL game-manager told The Post, have even begun to start throwing challenge flags on previous plays in situations where they’d instead use a timeout — to capitalize on even a minuscule chance that an official might overturn a call.

“I think it����ap definitely shifted to like — every coach has someone they trust with this situation,” Gelman said. “Because it����ap a lot to think about. They need someone to be thinking one step ahead at all times.”

In Denver, Payton has Rothstein, who the Broncos head coach tried to hire in New Orleans in 2021 before Rothstein picked New England. And Rothstein, too, is widely respected across the league’s game-management community — within his own silo in Denver.

On Wednesday nights, a group of game-management coordinators across the NFL holds an informal Zoom call to discuss some of the league’s replay decisions from the previous week. It is done, as multiple game-management staffers told The Post, to help analyze officiating decisions and therefore inform individual challenge-flag decisions. No privileged information is shared. Except sometimes it is, and one NFL game-manager told The Post he likes to log on to “see what people let slip by.”

“Evan,” that game-manager told The Post, “does not make an appearance on those.”

Another smart decision, it seems, in a string of them in Denver.

“There’s probably not anything he can’t do,” Caldwell said of Rothstein. “I mean, I wouldn’t (be surprised) if he becomes a head coach one day. That����ap a possibility. And he’s capable. There’s no question about it.”

“Do they necessarily need the money? I don’t think so,” Marilyn Venard of Littleton, a Broncos season-ticket holder for seven decades, told me Monday when I brought up the concept of personal seat licenses, or PSLs. “If they want to keep happy fans, they wouldn’t charge it.”

Marilyn is one of those orange-and-blue lifers, the spine and soul of ����apountry. She’s had seats in the north end zone at old Mile High, and now Empower Field at Mile High, since 1965. She’s watched a chain of quarterbacks that runs from Jacky Lee and Mickey Slaughter to Bo Nix.

Venard didn’t hesitate to renew her season tickets for 2026 for $3,000, including parking. boasting an estimated net worth of $146 billion, it does raise eyebrows. And blood pressures.

“Let’s put it this way: I think paying for the privilege of paying them money is something I find a little offensive,” Steve Altman told me by phone Monday. He’s held season tickets at Mile High and Empower since 1987.

“And frankly, I think with this particular ownership group, with the money they have, doesn’t really need it. To me, it just seems a gouge on the fans’ side of that.”

In basic terms, PSLs are a one-time fee to pay for the right to then purchase season tickets. In Buffalo, for example, buying a PSL to the new Highmark Stadium grants you those “rights” for a 30-year span. Those licenses can be eventually be sold if the buyer surrenders their season tickets.

Prices vary by stadium and seat location, but the average minimum price point among 18 NFL teams that offered them last September was $2.744, according to PSLSource.com, a third-party marketplace. Per-seat PSL charges last fall on the site ranged from $50 to $50,000.

“Oh, gracious,”  Venard said. “Well, it’s a lot of money. I don’t think I would pay it.

“I understand that football organizations are charging that now, but my goodness.”

“Would that stop you renewing?” I asked.

“It would certainly take some thought,” she replied.

PSLs are a way for owners to defray big costs, such as stadium construction. They’re as much a part of the NFL lexicon now as Bill Belichick, and twice as soulless.

It’s the sort of scheme would set upon the denizens of Springfield, a gratuity to billionaires from the working class, a mandatory tip collected by corporate overlords. In entertainment terms, it’s a 100-drink minimum to watch the latest slice of low comedy served up by the Las Vegas Raiduhs.

With the Walton-Penner Group planning to build a new stadium privately at Burnham Yard, it’s been presumed for years that PSLs were coming to ����apountry, just as standard NFL practice. This past Saturday at training camp, team president Damani Leech said the quiet part out loud.

“It seems like it����ap a pretty likely thing to happen,” Leech told reporters when asked about PSLs, “but we haven’t made any formal decisions on that.”

All we’d humbly ask of Carrie Walton Penner and Greg Penner as they crunch the numbers is to keep Marilyn in mind. To keep Steve in mind.

And the hundreds of thousands of Broncomaniacs who sat through Paxton Lynch, Kendall Hinton and Lord knows how many snowstorms. The faithful who pack hills and metal bleachers on a scorching August day, because by God, they’d walk through Hell in a gasoline suit to see this franchise back in the Super Bowl again.

“I would (ask), ‘What do they really need the money for?'” Altman said. “I mean, are they interested in the Broncos purely as a business matter, or are they doing this because they want the pleasure of owning an NFL team? You’re talking about some of the richest people in the world.”

Given that the Broncos boast a ticket wait-list of more than 100,000, the market’s betting that if you won’t pay a cover charge, somebody else will. While the introduction of PSLs isn’t designed to purge the voter rolls, so to speak, it can have that effect — especially with older and less well-heeled Broncos faithful.

Altman understands why his season tickets in the 300 level cost $2,800 to renew. But he worries about losing ����apountry’s most loyal, about trading the folks who celebrate a touchdown with a beer and shot with, shall we say, more of your wine-and-cheese crowd.

“‘Would they really need (the PSL money)?'” Altman wondered. “The revenue they’ll get from the seats themselves, that’s pretty much all theirs.”

It’s a fair question. The Walton-Penner Group are the richest owners in the NFL, and it’s not close.

In fact, you’d have to add up the NFL’s second-ranked through seventh-ranked owners’ net worths as of February ($126.6 million) to match or exceed the Walton-Penner Group’s clout. To put that number in more context, Rams owner Stan Kroenke, whose portfolio includes the Nuggets, Avalanche, Rapids and Mammoth, checked in at No. 4 on the NFL’s owners list tis past winter, with a reported net worth of $21.3 billion.

To them, the Broncos are a line item on a budget. To Marilyn? They’re family.

Losing her seats would meaning losing contact with old friends, losing a sense of of community. Venard went to Super Bowls with her neighbors in Section 323. To conference title games. Tailgates.

“And you do become a family,” Venard said. “At the beginning of the season, everybody hugs everybody, welcoming them back.”

Time and tide wait for no man, but she’d miss those hugs dearly. You can’t spell “unscrupulous” without “PSL.” You can’t spell “powerless,” either.

Nobody wears a $10-million hat the way Deion Sanders wears a $10-million hat. But 2026 is the year his Buffs must show, to borrow a beloved Texas idiom, that they’ve got the cattle, too.

“No one knows football is a results-based business more than a man that played cornerback in the NFL at the level that Deion did,” told me by phone Friday. “And so that’s the reality of the situation. This is a pivotal year to continue to show proof-of-concept, and that they have gotten the right people in place now, and they are going to get back to building towards the heights that felt more attainable at the beginning of Deion Sanders tenure.”

Coach Prime knows how to blow it up. This season — and, perhaps, ultimately, his era in Boulder — will be judged by how well he puts things back together again this fall.

The Buffs are the Big 12’s biggest mystery again. New coordinators. New “Go-Go” offensive system. New go-to wideouts. New defense, pretty much. New athletic director. Last fall’s 3-9 mark has ticket sales flagging and fans flustered.

Another losing season stacked up next to the last one will raise more of the types of questions Sanders doesn’t especially like to hear. Three losing campaigns out of four while practicing a win-now roster-building philosophy is a tough sell to CU athletic director Fernando Lovo. It’s a harder sell to alumni who are wondering, aloud, if the Prime Effect was the Travis and Shedeur Effect all along.

“Whether it’s knowing someone’s salary as a player, or (when) know salaries of those of us in the media, anytime people know the number, and it’s big, they’re going to expect a certain level of output because of that,” Golic continued. “It comes with the territory. And again, going back to his playing days. I’m sure there’s no one better suited for that kind of external pressure than Deion Sanders.”

How much pressure depends on your pocketbook. Sanders has four years remaining on a contract that pays him $10 million this fall and $11 million in ’27 and ’28. CU would owe the coach at least $33 million if the school tried to buy out his contract in 2026. That number falls to $25.5 million in 2027; $17.25 million in 2028; and $9 million in ’29.

On one hand, Coach Prime costs too much to be on the hot seat. On the other, he costs too much not to be.

“We better win. That’s going to be the surprise,” Sanders told reporters at Big 12 Media Day earlier this month. “That’s the surprise. We better win. We’re going to win.”

With a new and widely-respected offensive coordinator joining the staff in Brennan Marion, and a slew of impact portal gets such as wide receivers Danny Scudero and DeAndre Moore, plus linebacker Gideon ESPN Lampron and defensive back Boo Carter, the Buffs are going back to the well of what worked in 2024: Surround a returning QB (Shedeur Sanders then, Julian Lewis now) with older, proven impact players — proven at the Group of 5 level, at least — at high-skill positions who’ve won at smaller schools. CU’s record will probably depend, mind you, on how well the Buffs’ offensive and defensive lines gel, same as it ever was.

Yet the world remains, to put it kindly, unconvinced. A preseason writers’ poll during Big 12 Media Days slotted CU to finish 15th among 16 Big 12 programs. Even if the seat under Sanders isn’t especially warm now, it would be if the Buffs posted a mark of 4-8 or 3-9 again.

, Sanders scored a 3.1 on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being hottest. That 3.1 score was up a whopping 2.77 points from the preseason “hot” number of 0.33 at this time a summer ago.

In fact, Sanders’ bump of +2.77 points was the third-largest of any Power 4 coach, trailing only Shame Beamer of South Carolina (+3.2) and Dave Aranda of Baylor (+2.8), with old friends Bill Belichick at North Carolina (+2.0) and Steve Sarkisian of Texas (+2.2) not far behind.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that Prime’s CU teams have been their best with their collective backs against the wall — Buffs versus The World, with Vegas favoring The World by 6.5. They made keyboard warriors eat their dust at the start of ’23 and in ’24. But what happened in ’25, particularly with absolute decimations at the hands of Utah and Arizona, embarrassed alums and frustrated administrators who were getting Karl Dorrell flashbacks from a $10-million coach.

Hiring Sanders flipped Ralphie’s tent from proud, provincial and irrelevant to big, national and an ESPN/Disney darling. But when things veer off the rails, divides within that mighty tent have flared up — particularly on social media, between lifetime Buffs and Prime fans who are here to run with the coach, not Ralphie. Whenever the former blames Sanders, the latter blames the university and says Boulder should consider itself lucky he showed up. It’s an arranged marriage in which some of the in-laws don’t hide their trust issues during a crisis.

“It’s just such a strange, strange time,” former Buffs great Chad Brown told me once.

Lovo, meanwhile, has to keep everybody rowing in the same direction instead of pointing fingers or raging with their thumbs on Xwitter. Wish him luck. For the first time since Sanders’ hiring, CU season ticket renewals are actually down — and not insignificantly.

After a 98% renewal rate prior to 2023, 2024 and 2025, Buffs officials told The Post that 78.4% of available season tickets had been re-upped as of this past Thursday afternoon. CU reported 20,411 season tickets renewed, a dip from 23,987 at about this time in 2025.

Now that figure also comes with some context: The Buffs made 3,000 more season tickets available in 2025 to meet demand from the massive spike in interest from 2022 to ’23 (14,915 under Dorrell to 20,606 in Sanders’ first year) and ’24 (21,128).

CU is going to sell 20K in season tickets for four straight years after going a decade (2013-2022) without ever hitting that mark. And yet, a drop of 20% is a drop of 20%, and one of the first tangible repercussions of last fall’s struggles.

It’s also a sensitive topic for an athletic department that was reportedly on track to close the books on the ’25-26 fiscal year with a $27-million deficit. While CU expects sales to pick up again early next month, a dip of 3,500 season tickets hits Lovo where it hurts most — in the wallet.

While season-ticket prices vary, if you’re losing a customer paying, let’s say, an estimated $750 per season and multiply that times 3,500, that’s a potential ticket-revenue loss of some $2.625 million just from that pool. CU’s season-ticket parking prices vary, but assuming $300 per parking pass and 2.5 customers per pass purchased, if you’re short 3,500 paid customers per season, that’s another $420,000 out of the Buffs’ coffers.

Which means, all told, if that 3,500-ish gap continues, it’s fair to assume CU could be short somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 million in revenue just from season-ticket drop-offs alone, potentially. The Buffs reported $24.03 million in football ticketing revenue during the ’24-25 fiscal year, the most recent NCAA report made public.

“I think that’s kind of the natural process of how things go,” Golic mused. “You’re coming off a down season. And so now for Deion Sanders in this program, they get to go back out there and have the great challenge of, ‘All right, let’s give them something to get excited about. Let’s give people a reason to get out here.'”

Another bowl-less campaign would only sap the local juice and accelerate the bleeding. If that’s not incentive enough for Sanders to get this ship turned around, it soon will be.

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Not a knock on the big lug. Honest. The hoops wonks on The Grading The Week staff had nothing but pleasant exchanges with Val while he was a member of the Nuggets — a curious calendar year that came to a curious end this past Wednesday when the franchise waived him.

By doing it when they did, yes, Stan Kroenke and Josh Kroenke got $10 million in guaranteed salary off their books, leaving a $2-million cap hit that they’re likely to spread out over the next three seasons.

And sure, the Nuggets’ problems are largely accounting ones now. The franchise is reportedly aiming to stay below the NBA salary cap’s second apron, a hard-ish cap that freezes future draft picks, wipes out mid-level exceptions — and could leave KSE stuck with paying more than $200 million in taxes on top of projected player salaries in the $210-240 million range.

Valanciunas’ Nuggets era — C-minus

To that end, cutting Big Val was the easy part. While the 6-foot-11 Lithuanian was easily the Nuggets’ most skilled backup to franchise icon Nikola Jokic since Mason Plumlee left for Detroit in December 2000, he was probably the slowest Joker backup of the bunch, too. The former Denver center often looked painfully out of step last winter when facing the West’s best teams.

In three late-season tussles versus Oklahoma City from February-March, when the Thunder were actually trying, Big Val, per NBA.com, posted Net Ratings — points scored per 100 possessions versus points allowed — of -31.0, -120.2 (!) and -62.1. In three matchups against the San Antonio before April 10, when the Spurs were trying, Big Val’s Net Ratings were +13.0, -71.8, and -20.9. In four regular-season tussles with Minnesota, Big Val’s Net Ratings were, in order: -4.7, +13.1, -34.4, and -71.4.

That explains, at least partially, why the big man’s court time fell precipitously late last season. Valanciunas averaged just 13.3 minutes per game in February. That number was down to 8.6 minutes per game in March.

Val was one of the reasons the Nuggets didn’t go off the rails without the Joker for a month this past January. But he’ll also turn 35 next spring.

A year ago, the idea of Val and Jokic on the floor together as dual, pass-savvy, physically strong big men made Nuggets Nation’s eyes light up at the possibilities of creating matchup nightmares. In reality, the Denver coaching staff dealt with the nightmares as smaller, faster opponents knew they could probably blow by either one, if not both, whenever opportunities arose.

In no blueprint does Valanciunas, even at age 34, fit with remits of “getting younger” and “getting more athletic.” Even if those two demands are also front office code for “getting cheaper.” The Nuggets’ next cuts, you have a feeling, will be much harder. And more painful.

Tootle’s Colorado legacy  — A

Denver lost a good man and GTW lost a friend recently when former Regis Jesuit and Colorado Mesa football great Jeff Tootle passed away late last month at the age of 63. An NAIA All-American linebacker who went on to play for the New York Giants, Tootle had tackled a run of health-related issues in recent years. But battles to overcome his leg, heart, and prostate never dulled his spirits, his sense of humor, or his love for his family. Jeff’s medical bills were extensive in recent years, and a GTW tip of the cap to those who have already pitched in to help his survivors with impending funeral costs. If you’d like to assist, there’s

Here are two QB1 stat lines, four years apart:

• Signal-caller A: 29 passing TDs, 12 interceptions, 93.3 passer rating and a 10-7 record as a first-year starter

• Signal-caller B: 22 passing TDs, 13 picks, 92.5 passer rating and a 10-7 record as a first-year starter.

QB “A?” Nix as a rookie in 2025. QB “B?” Mac Jones’ debut NFL campaign in ’21 under Belichick.

So before you get all misty-eyed about the notion of Sean Payton subletting the Broncos’ head-coaching job for a few years so that The Hoodie could pad his career stats, take a deep breath. Then ask Jones about what playing QB in the 2020s under Belichick, a 70-something Belichick coaching on fumes, felt like for a young quarterback trying to find his feet.

“So, at first, Bill was going to call the (offensive) plays,” when asked about 2022, Mac’s second season under Belichick. “Which, I was like, ‘All right, this is kind of fun. Let’s see how this goes.'”

It went south. Our old pal Josh McDaniels had been Jones’ personal QB whisperer during the latter’s rookie season in 2021. Only when McDaniels parlayed that into a head-coaching gig with the Raiders before the ’22 season, the wheels came off. Belichick divided offensive coordinator duties between longtime assistant Matt Particia, who’d primarily been a defensive coach, and Joe Judge, who was working with New England’s special teams.

The Pats slipped from sixth in the league in points scored in 2021 to 17th in ’22. Jones shattered, the way this league can crush a QB if the fates are unkind. Mac still hasn’t quite put everything back together again, even after a rookie season that was eerily close to Nix’s numbers in 2024.

“I think that really affected me,” Jones continued. “I felt like, if I could have just built on the year before, it would’ve really helped me and everybody on the team …

“We didn’t know who we were going to hire. And I was a little worried about that … you could kind of see it trending, and I was just a second-year player, so I didn’t really say much, or do much. But Brian Hoyer was the backup, and he was kind of like, looking at me, trying to keep me in it. But we were kind of like, ‘This is not going to be good.'”

It wasn’t. It wouldn’t have been any good in Denver, either.

We mention this because the other big Belichick news of the past week had a distinctly Denver flair. ESPN.com scribe onto the interwebs a few days back. Only there were massive swaths of the tome that left you saying to yourself, ‘What the expletive was Payton thinking?’

Sunshine Sean is a living, breathing NFL savant. Wickersham’s dive was a cinematic stroll through a beautiful, if sometimes twisted, football mind. But this little passage was just …weird:

“Payton and (Bill) Belichick go back decades, forged by mutual respect — and mutual trauma from working under (Bill) Parcells. When Belichick and the Patriots divorced in 2024, Payton considered presenting Broncos owner Greg Penner a proposal for the ages: Hire Belichick as head coach until he reached 15 wins, enough to break Don Shula’s career record of 347. Payton would temporarily step down to assistant head coach and run the offense, then move back after Belichick became the all-time leader. In the end, it was too complicated — and maybe too fanciful.”

That’s not genius.

It’s madness.

Payton’s affection for the Hoodie isn’t just real — it goes back decades. When Sunshine Sean was hired in New Orleans, he dug into what made Belichick’s Patriots so dominant.

“We spent a great deal of time looking at New England,” Payton told NOLA.com in 2021.

“(Belichick has) always been someone who’s been a bit of a mentor, someone that I feel I have a good relationship with. That started, really, with the respect factor and what he’s been able to accomplish … to have the staying power that he’s had is obviously remarkable.”

Fine. Whatever. Still loco. Too many alphas. Too small a space. Even if Payton’s turtoring/shielding his QBs as some sort of “deputy coach/offense,” when the buck stops at Wild Bill’s desk, nobody is ever truly safe. Also, the screens. So, so, so, soooooo many screens.

Payton began 2026 as the No. 3-highest-paid coach in U.S. sports, with a reported average salary of $18 million per year — only the Chiefs’ Andy Reid and the Giants’ John Harbaugh bettered him, at $20 million apiece. (When Sportico ranked the top-50 coach salaries in the country, CU’s Deion Sanders ($10.8 million) checked in at No. 34, while Belichick’s $10 million from North Carolina landed him at No. 37.)

It wouldn’t be fair to the Penners, who invested in Payton for him to reset the culture and make it his own.

It wouldn’t be fair to the players, who signed up for one Super Bowl winner, only to get baited-and-switched for another.

It wouldn’t be fair to the league’s record book. Or to the legacy of Don Shula.

It wouldn’t be fair to ����apountry, who grew to detest Belichick and his Pats as a cheating rival for decades — a feeling that bubbled into hate after he foisted his chum McDaniels upon our fair populace.

And it wouldn’t be fair to Nix, who became the quarterback, after almost a decade of false hope and false starts, to lead a proud franchise out of the wilderness.

“(Bill) took (the offense) over, and we kind of didn’t know where we were going,” the former Pats QB told the ‘Bussin” crew. “There (were) three people in the meeting — who stands up to talk to the offense? They didn’t really know.”

Some scenes are best left on the cutting room floor, some things better left unsaid. the Broncos don’t have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses anymore. Mac or otherwise.

“It makes no sense to me to make, at this point in time, a decision that no one can ascend or descend,” the Rams athletic director told The Denver Post recently. “That’s irresponsible.”

Our conversation had turned to the Protect College Sports Act, which could soon be up for a vote in the Senate. And, specifically, its impact on “Group of 6” schools such as CSU.

Weber likes a lot of what’s in the bill. Save for Section 205. If the Protect College Sports Act becomes law, it could lock in conference membership at the highest level of college sports as is. The musical chairs at the top of the NCAA food chain would come to a screeching halt.

Section 205 of the Protect College Sports Act, as written, prohibits collegiate conferences that generate at least $700 million in revenue from merging with one another or adding new members.

The Big 12, ACC, SEC and Big Ten are all expected to meet or exceed that benchmark in the  ’25-26 fiscal year.

“If you look at the attributes of (our) university as a whole — 34,000 students, 277,000-plus alumni, strong academics, , great college town, great facilities, all that stuff,” Weber stressed. “We look just like a Big 12 school. That’s exactly (a) Big 12 school, right?”

If not, it’s pretty darned close.

“Now we have to consistently deliver better on the athletics leg of that stool,” Weber said. “But it’s certainly something that we want to make sure we keep in our sights. And we continue to work toward the opportunity (that’s) there for CSU to ascend.”

Weber’s not trying to stick the Rammies’ cart before any horses, just to be clear. He’s just learned, post-COVID-19 pandemic, that universities would be nuts to burn any bridge with a bigger payout on the other side of the gorge.

CSU isn’t exactly walking gingerly into its Pac-12 phase on Wednesday, either. Jim Mora, plucked from a successful run at UConn, is now the highest-paid coach in the newly reconfigured conference ($2.4 million), with higher expectations to match. Canvas Stadium is getting a new rug for the first time in about seven years. Moby Arena has a new court coming. Last month, during the university’s annual “Day of Giving,” athletics raised $1.5 million in donations over 24 hours. Weber said his first “Giving” two years ago brought in $67,000.

“There have been some things that maybe somewhat quietly, maybe some not somewhat quietly, (that) are, I think, pointing towards some real momentum,” Weber said.

Including, he added, his new league.

“The huge thing that’s going to help us going into the Pac 12 (is that) every single one of our games is on linear (platforms),” the CSU administrator said. “That’s massive … the opportunity for us to compete and have people watch us, that’s where the value comes … eyeballs matter.”
Rivalries matter, too, even with television networks pulling the strings for college sports behind the scenes and chucking geography out a sixth-story window. Weber made a point of preserving the Wyoming series as a non-conference enterprise, but Air Force looks to be in the rearview mirror. And we’re still three years away (2029) from a renewal of the Rocky Mountain Showdown with CU.

“I know (Buffs athletic director) Fernando (Lovo), actually, from (his time at) New Mexico,” Weber said of the new CU boss. “We have not had a conversation around the future of the Showdown … we’ve talked about other things, we haven’t talked about that yet … It’s not a, ‘No’, it’s not a, ‘I’m not interested.’ Literally, we just haven’t talked about it yet.”

In the meantime, he’s hoping the conversations in Washington continue about Section 205 of the Protect College Sports Act.

“(We’re) serious about the work that we’re doing. We’re serious about our move to the Pac 12. We’re serious about the future of the Pac 12,” Weber said. “(But) if you lock in membership there — that is, I think, problematic for a whole lot of people. There are members in those conferences that are not there by intent.”

Realignment since 2021 has made for strange bedfellows all over the map — the four former Pac-12 powers snatched up by the Big Ten; Stanford and Cal, bastions of the Bay, in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Yet the new Pac-12 is a particularly curious marriage of oddball brethren.

The football membership, in particular, is rooted in provincial programs that were snubbed by the Big Ten, Big 12 or ACC (Washington State and Oregon State) during their latest acquisition phase, or “big” mid-majors (Boise State, Fresno State, CSU) that never quite made the cut to join the big boys, despite repeated pitches.

“That sort of an approach (in Section 205) has the possibility of harming what really is our core mission of higher education,” Weber continued. “It’s groundbreaking research, and it’s educating our youth. And if we look at it through that lens, if you are consolidating athletic, and therefore marketing, power within a relative few, it’s not unreasonable to think that you could be challenging the educational research missions of a whole lot of schools, right?”

Although 205 at present feels more specifically targeted at the largest football brands in the ACC (Clemson, Miami, North Carolina), several of which have been, or will be, on the radar as potential SEC or Big Ten additions. Let’s put it this way: If the Buffs got an offer to join the Big Ten next week, you couldn’t get them to Columbus or Ann Arbor quick enough.

In the meantime, the so-called lesser schools in the Big Ten and SEC — think Minnesota, Ole Miss, Purdue, Vandy, Northwestern, etc. — see the Protect College Sports Act as a means to keep their powerful leagues intact. Sources told Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports recently that those conferences want provisions in the act that prevent an outside entity or broadcaster from cherry-picking the most-watched college football brands to form a national Super League or College Premier League. (An arrangement that might be beneficial for, say, CU and North Carolina, who hired “viral” coaches in Deion Sanders and Bill Belichick, in part, to enhance their television appeal.)

“Our opportunity to compete at the (FBS) level enables our ability to attract more people to CSU,” Weber noted. “‘People’ includes students, it includes faculty, includes a lot of people that make this enterprise go. And (the Protect College Sports Act) is going to be incredibly important to not just CSU, but a whole bunch of schools that would be in that bucket.”

Take a spin around the football internet these days and you will find yourself soaked by a deluge of mock drafts.

Make no mistake, though, NFL front offices do them, too.

Now, they are working with full scouting staffs, extensive visibility into injury and character questions, thousands of human hours of work put into setting the stage for the real thing later this month.

A year ago, perhaps not a single mock draft paired the Broncos and Jahdae Barron at No. 20. That led head coach Sean Payton to describe the wait as Barron fell through the teens toward them and, well, to mock the mocks.

“The mocks that you guys read for the last month, what do you want me to say?” Payton said then. “It����ap embarrassing sometimes, but it����ap entertaining.”

General manager George Paton last week said the Broncos had narrowed their list to seven or eight players they felt would be available at No. 30 before they traded that pick to Miami for star receiver Jaylen Waddle.

Projecting who will be there at No. 62, where Denver’s first pick now sits, is even more wide open.

That won’t stop us. And no apologies for any embarrassment caused, either.

Round 2, Pick No. 62: Georgia Tech guard Keylan Rutledge

In the Post����ap last mock draft, we slid back a few spots from No. 62 and selected RB Jonah Coleman.

This time around, we decided to stick and pick.

The result is decidedly not flashy but also feels like a realistic outcome for the Broncos.

Rutledge is widely considered a Day 2 player and is one of the better interior offensive linemen in this class. He played right guard in college — the Broncos are set there long-term with All-Pro Quinn Meinerz — but should have the versatility to play left or even center. Essentially, if he didn’t win a job over Ben Powers or make Denver reconsider going into the season with Powers on the roster, he’d be in position to slide in in 2027 or potentially back up multiple spots along the interior.

Offensive line, in general, is a sneaky need for the Broncos. They’ve got all five starters back from one of the best fronts in football, but general manager George Paton acknowledged at the combine that the team is wary of aging out too many players at the same time. Plus, all five players at the moment are on premium contracts.

Also considered: The dream was for tight end Eli Stowers to fall, but he went in the middle of the second round. Another tight end option and the pick at No. 62 in our first Post mock draft, Ohio State’s Max Klare, was still on the board. We passed to avoid too much repetition, but he looks like a potential fit in the second round. Also still on the board, among others: Arkansas RB Mike Washington and Mizzou linebacker Josiah Trotter.

Round 4, Pick No. 114: Oregon inside linebacker Bryce Boettcher

Trade: Broncos receive Nos. 114 and 197. Philadelphia receives No. 111.

The fourth rolled around and the Paton, sans ‘Y’, in the Post����ap drafting team emerged. We were hoping to move back from No. 108 to get an extra pick or two and, sure enough, found enough suitors to land a deal we liked. That trade with Green Bay involved moving back to No. 120 and the details are below.

Then the surprise popped up. Philadelphia wanted to move up and we felt good about sliding back just a handful of spots and still getting our guy. What was Howie Roseman thinking?

At No. 114, the pick is Boettcher from a school Denver is quite familiar with. He’s a physical player and a good leader who had 136 tackles for the Ducks in 2025 and contributed each of the past three seasons to one of college football’s stoutest defenses.

Denver’s had an active offseason at ILB, retaining Alex Singleton and Justin Strnad, releasing Dre Greenlaw and now moving Jonah Elliss inside. Still, here’s a young player who can be a special teamer early and a potential Singleton replacement down the line.

Round 4, Pick No. 120: Boston College offensive tackle Jude Bowry

Trade: Broncos receive Nos. 120 and 160, Green Bay receives No. 108

Is this draft scintillating enough yet? The Broncos have only drafted one offensive lineman on Day 2 in Paton’s five drafts so far — Meinerz in the 2021 third round — but now are up to two in this draft alone. Again, it����ap not an immediate need, but Bowry checks boxes the Broncos like.

Offensive line coach Zach Strief told The Post last fall, “We love guys that can anchor. If you don’t get bull-rushed in this league, you’re 80% of the way there.”

Bowry’s got good strength and he’s a good athlete. He’s got experience at both left and right tackle in college. Ideally, he doesn’t have to play right away.

In this scenario, though, Denver rolls into the summer with a pipeline that includes Rutledge and Bowry out of this draft, plus Alex Palczewski, Frank Crum, and Alex Forsyth. That����ap building to withstand the rigors of an NFL season and also preparing for a future in which the quarterback is no longer on a rookie deal and the front line must be cheaper — but not without some incubation time in one of the league’s best offensive line development programs.

Round 5, Pick No. 160: Notre Dame tight end Eli Raridon

Now things are heating up at the offensive skill positions. Teams across football have found ways to identify tight ends on Day 3 that end up making a real impact. Not everybody can land George Kittle, of course, but there are going to be quality tight ends from this draft class that don’t hear their name called until Saturday.

Raridon’s got a chance to be one of them. He’s enormous at 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds. He’s got a good blocking foundation to his game — though like most young players, he’s not a finished product — and he’s athletic enough to believe he’s going to be a good receiver, too.

Like it or not, Denver’s going to play Adam Trautman and Evan Engram a ton this fall. The Broncos trust Trautman and they’re hoping to get more from Engram as a receiver in his second season in the offense. Could a rookie tight end blow up that plan? In an outlier scenario, perhaps. More likely, a young player gets a chance to carve out a role as a rookie with the hopes that he blossoms late in the year, if injuries arise or in 2027 and beyond.

Round 5, Pick No. 170: Indiana running back Kaelon Black

Black fits the Payton running back threshold of “short but not small” at 5-foot-9 and 210 pounds. He’s a physical runner who was second on the national champs’ offense in carries at 180 behind Roman Hemby (230). Black averaged 5.6 per carry and, though he wasn’t used at IU in the passing game, he did have 44 catches and six receiving touchdowns his last two years at James Madison.

At Indiana’s pro day, Black reportedly ran 4.45 in the 40-yard dash and jumped 37.5 inches vertical. He’s taken a top-30 visit with the Broncos. Black isn’t a prototypical third-down back, but he could carry some of that load and would be an intriguing fit with J.K. Dobbins and RJ Harvey.

Round 6, Pick No. 197: USC safety Bishop Fitzgerald

In looking for safety depth, the Broncos here lean on the connection to USC in new defensive backs coach Doug Belk. Belk had Fitzgerald, an undersized safety, in his room for one year after Fitzgerald transferred from NC State.

Checked into the combine at 5-11 and 201 pounds and ran 4.55 in the 40-yard dash. He produced takeaways throughout his college career, with five interceptions in 2025 for USC and five combined in two seasons at NC State before that.

Denver’s got special teamers galore in its safety room behind starters Talanoa Hufanga and Brandon Jones. Fitzgerald could add to that and perhaps push toward more.

Round 7, Pick No. 246: North Carolina cornerback Marcus Allen

Round 7, Pick No. 256: Kansas wide receiver Emmanuel Henderson

Round 7, Pick No. 257: IPP outside linebacker Josh Weru

In the seventh round, as Paton said last week, teams are often trying to get a jump on post-draft free agency. If you don’t think you’re going to win a battle for a player or don’t want to risk a bidding war in the post-draft chaos, this is the time.

Denver’s had success recently in the seventh round, finding contributors in WR Devaughn Vele and OL Alex Forsyth, plus players with still-interesting development arcs in OL Nick Gargiulo and TE Caleb Lohner.

In this rendition, a trio of seventh-rounders begins with Allen, who is 6-2, ran 4.5 in the 40, and comes from a program now led by a coach Payton really respects: Bill Belichick.

Denver’s receiver room looks pretty darn full, but Henderson is a receiver plus a special teams asset. He’s a good returner — even if Marvin Mims Jr. doesn’t see an uptick in playing time, NFL teams have realized you need two good ones given the kickoff rule’s evolution — and can handle other duties, too.

Mr. Irrelevant? Try Mr. Freak. Weru hasn’t gone mega-viral like IPP classmate and defensive lineman Uar Bernard, but make no mistake, he’s a ridiculous athlete. The 6-4, 244-pounder reportedly ran 4.45 in the 40 and jumped 41.5 inches vertical at the HBCU showcase. He’s training with Javon Gopie, who also works with Nik Bonitto and trained Que Robinson last spring. Gopie told The Post recently, “I think he’d be a no-brainer fit in (the Broncos’ scheme).”

A few days back, One picked Wisconsin’s Luke Fickell, whom I’m amazed still has his job. Another took Lincoln Riley at USC. A third chose Deion Sanders at CU.

Pressure?

No question. That 3-9 doesn’t go away.

Hot seat?

Not the way Sanders’ contract is structured.

If terminated without cause, Coach Prime is owed 75% of all of his remaining base supplemental salary through 2029. Which means the Buffs would be on the hook for $33 million this year; $25.5 million in 2027; $17.25 million in 2028; and $9 million in 2029.

Boulder’s not a drinking town with a football problem. It’s a drinking town with an accounting problem.

CU has confirmed multiple reports that project its athletics department was, as of December, on a pace to finish the ’25-26 fiscal year with a $27 million deficit.

Sanders landed a $5-million raise a year ago. He’s slated to make about $10 million this season. That five-year, $54-million extension celebrates its first birthday in a few weeks.

Which begs the question: Was it worth it?

, only 13 FBS coaches at public schools were paid more than Sanders last year. Of that club, Brian Kelly was 5-3 when he was fired by LSU midway through the year. Mark Stoops went 5-7 and was fired by Kentucky after the season.

Among the coaches who collected the sport’s top 15 salaries last fall, only Sanders (3-9), Stoops (5-7) and Bill Belichick (4-8) had losing seasons. The latter was in charge of a college program for the first time. It showed.

But outgoing Buffs athletic director Rick George has been at this a long time. He should know better.

Why, 11 months after the fact, does it feel as if George was pretty much bidding against himself last winter when it came to Coach Prime’s services?

The Cowboys? Come on. Yeah, Jerry Jones is wacky enough to try anything once. But Sanders grasps the politics of an NFL locker room and the mindset of NFL veterans better than anybody. His approach wouldn’t land the same with grizzled adults.

ESPN? Maybe. That off-ramp is always there, though. Sanders is ratings gold, a TV master, and he knows it. Disney gave Pat McAfee a five-year, AAV deal of $17 million in 2023. The Mouse will pony up for personalities that bring eyeballs.

Another college, though? Not likely. It’s hard to picture many major collegiate athletic directors giving Coach Prime the power/perks/protection/political capital he covets. CU had an empty throne and a lonely, waiting crown.

Was it worth it?

George and CU didn’t really have a choice, did they? Not when it came to an extension. A hot coach always commands some gesture of good faith, even if it’s symbolic.

After last fall went so badly off the rails, the wiser play for the Buffs surely would’ve been to wait until this year to re-negotiate — to see what a post-Shedeur/post-Hunter roster looked like.

Or perhaps the school could’ve offered a 50% raise for 2025 after 2024’s 9-4 record, instead of basically doubling Sanders’ pay ($5.7 million two seasons ago) right from the get-go. Stagger those incentives.

Hindsight, alas, is for suckers and columnists. The Buffs, who open spring ball Monday, are full-speed ahead at pretending 2025 didn’t happen — so much so, in fact, that nearly half the roster, both coordinators and a chunk of the coaching staff are brand new.

For months, CU faithful wanted changes. Wise-cracking scribes wanted changes. Sanders listened. Or someone told him to listen.

Coach Prime replaced offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur with Brennan Marion — a move widely considered an upgrade, if simply for the fact that Marion isn’t Pencil Pat.

The more surprising turns came a few days ago. This past Tuesday, The Post’s Luca Evans, among others, reported that CU’s wonderboy defensive coordinator, Robert Livingston, was leaving the Buffs to join the Broncos as defensive passing game coordinator — largely the same position he’d held with the Bengals before coming to Boulder.

The plot thickened later in the week when CU confirmed reports that longtime Sanders friend and confidante Warren Sapp, who was elevated to defensive pass rush coordinator in ’25, had resigned from the program.

Sanders is on his third defensive coordinator and third offensive play-caller since March 2023. Ordinarily, $10 million is the kind of money a university typically pays for Saban-like stability — not volatility.

CU just doesn’t have the money to buy out big mistakes. Or even little ones, frankly.

Was it worth it?

The Buffs remain a mandatory selection for TV executives, almost entirely because of Sanders. Although from mid-November 2024 to mid-November 2025, reported broadcast ratings for Buffs games had dipped 44%. Irrelevant football is irrelevant football, no matter who’s coaching it.

Enrollment of black students at CU-Boulder in fall 2025 was up 13.8% over fall 2024. Undergraduate enrollment and out-of-state undergraduate enrollment jumped in ’23-24. These are all good things. Football is a school’s best marketing front porch.

The Buffs reported $31.216 million in 2023 football ticket revenue to the NCAA; CU’s 2024-25 report, released last month, said football ticket sales brought in $24.026 million during the 2024 campaign.

The website Oddspedia.com recently . Assuming that’s reasonably in the ballpark, it would mean CU athletics lost $1.6 million off ticket sales during its final two home games of last season when compared to its last two home contests in 2024.

Meanwhile, the Buffs listed a departmental profit of $8.24 million in ’23-24. And all of that was before the House vs. NCAA ruling went into effect — which will account for an additional $20.5 million in expenses for student-athlete revenue sharing in ’25-26.

Was it worth it?

Ask us at Halloween. What limited history we have to go on says the Buffs, and Sanders, will be better this fall. For sanity’s sake, they’d better be.

Dahlen, a longtime front-office and personnel executive in the NFL, stood alone as the winner of the most Super Bowls in league history (seven) until Patriots head coach Bill Belichick surpassed him in 2017. Dahlen won five Super Bowls across a tenure of nearly two decades with the San Francisco 49ers, and won two more as the Broncos’ director of player personnel in 1997 and 1998.

Following quarterback John Elway’s retirement in 1998, Dahlen served as the Broncos’ general manager from 1999 to 2001 alongside head coach Mike Shanahan, as Denver went 25-23 in Dahlen’s three seasons at the helm. After his retirement, Dahlen remained in Centennial, where he passed away on Sunday, Palko said.

Palko remembered her grandfather as a “very quiet” man who didn’t crave the spotlight, but was an important figure in the background of a slew of championship teams. Around every Super Bowl, Palko posts a tribute on social media in remembrance of Dahlen’s career.

“I’m trying to keep sharing his legacy, because most people don’t know who he is unless they’re Googling, like, ‘Who has the most Super Bowl rings?'” Palko said.

Former Broncos Super Bowl-winning offensive coordinator Rick Dennison, who was on Denver’s staff for several years with Dahlen in the front office, remembered Dahlen helping steady the roster in the period after Elway’s retirement. Two seasons after the legendary quarterback hung it up, Denver went 11-5, as rookie running back Mike Anderson — a sixth-round-pick — was named the Offensive Rookie of the Year

“Between him being so quiet about his contributions, which were bigger than his voice, I guess – he was a real stable personality around there,” Dennison said of Dahlen. “He really kept things moving, and did his job without a lot of fanfare.”

Dahlen’s organizations went 7-0 in their Super Bowl appearances, across a career of over three decades in the NFL. Dahlen, a California native, was .

“He was a man of few words,” Palko said. “But he has a big legacy.”

But not for the reasons you might think. It was not a slap in Sean Payton’s face. There is no need to put the quarterback and coach on a couch and let them talk it out.

What played out this week is not an example of a feud, but rather just the opposite. It is the secret sauce of their relationship.

Spoiler alert: Payton is hard to work for, as a player and a coach. This is why owner Greg Penner likes him. Payton creates high expectations and holds people accountable, which is the fabric of his elite culture building.

But Payton cannot help himself. He is not a vibes guy. He is a mood.

He takes jabs at opponents, media members, and, yes, on occasion, his own players. Earlier this week, Payton said he thought a doctor found “a condition that was, like, predisposed” when evaluating Nix’s ankle. What he meant, according to those in the know, was that there was stress on the bone, suggesting a fracture was inevitable. This came on the heels of Payton’s joke falling flat after the win over Buffalo when he said he would not have drafted Nix had he known about his previous ankle issues.

Nix, who placed his recovery time at 4-to-6 weeks, pushed back. This is what he does. Remember the sideline shouting match with Payton during his rookie season? How about the multiple times he has yelled at his coach to hurry up with the play calls this year?

“He doesn’t really even know that,” Nix said of Payton’s reference to previous ankle problems. “But I think it����ap going to be good to get back to work, start from ground zero. Work from the bottom up, get back to training. And there is nothing really that concerns me, nothing that scares me going forward.”

Nix stands up to Payton. His position gives him stature, and it is appreciated in the locker room when Nix holds his ground with the coach. It is viewed internally as creative friction, the same back-and-forth that has defined the most successful partnerships in Payton’s career. He and Drew Brees had their disagreements. They came to understand each other, and their sense of humor.

There is a reason that Payton referred to Nix as Ferris Bueller as a rookie. The kid is not afraid to tweak the coach, to color outside the lines. Payton demonstrated the same tendencies as a young play-caller with the New York Giants.

Payton will pop off. And Nix, often with a smirk, will return the volley.

That trust and dynamic clearly did not exist in the Payton-Russell Wilson arranged marriage. Wilson never challenged Payton publicly until last year on social media over a perceived slight when Payton praised Giants starter Jaxson Dart.

Football is not played in an office cubicle. Tom Brady screamed at his coaches. Peyton Manning and Jeff Saturday went nose-to-nose. Payton gets under people’s skin. And Nix is not afraid to give it back to him.

This is their connective tissue, not evidence of a fissure.

Bad Bill: Bill Belichick was not elected into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. A few writers who did not vote for him explained his omission because of the process that pits coaches against senior players and contributors. The system stinks. But not voting for Belichick to relieve a backlog of candidates is flawed logic. Secondly, if Belichick was punished for Spygate and Deflategate, that would be understandable, save for this issue. The Pro Football Hall of Fame, unlike baseball’s, does not have a morality clause. Voters have not punished previous cheaters in this fashion, and definitely not a candidate with Belichick’s resume. Are they going to apply the same standard to Tom Brady? The worst part of the snub? Belichick will get in next year, meaning Mike Shanahan will have to wait another year, if not longer, before entering Canton.

Final thought: Nikola Jokic is back. The Nuggets went 10-6 in his absence, and with Oklahoma City returning to earth, there is no reason Denver cannot win the NBA Championship if healthy.