ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — As Broncos players attended the team’s annual Kickoff Luncheon presented by U.S. Bank and Arrow Electronics, the regular season’s start seemed closer than ever.
In just 17 days, the event’s emcee, Dave Logan, will be back in the radio booth, calling the first moments of the Broncos’ season, and the players will be in the spotlight on “Monday Night Football.”
“I’m ready to play real football,” guard Dalton Risner said after the event. “… This has been a grind of a training camp, man, and we’ve gotten a lot of great work in. So I’m ready for it whenever. If it came tomorrow, let’s rock and roll. I might want two or three days to make sure I got everything right, but I think we’re all ready for it. We’ve done everything, we’re prepared. We also have to game plan for these guys, and that’s going to start after this last preseason game, get the roster set, a lot of things that have to happen. But, dude, we’re ready to play, bro. And Russell [Wilson]’s created that urgency. Russell’s had us ready to play for a few weeks now, [Head Coach Nathaniel] Hackett’s had us ready to play. I think that’s a good sign.”
As the starters have rested throughout Denver’s preseason slate, players like Risner and Justin Simmons are itching to prepare for Week 1’s prime-time battle with the Seahawks. And even though there’s an extra week between the final preseason game and the season opener, the countdown is on for when the players put on the pads in Seattle.
“Me, I wish it was coming a little sooner,” Simmons said. “That’s the competitor in me. … Me personally, I wish Monday night was tomorrow and we were just getting ready to suit up and go play. But like I said, there’s still a lot of stuff defensively that we need to work out and get some kinks worked out and ironed out. But I’m excited, it’s going to be great.”
While there’s still game-planning that must be done during the break before the first week, there’s also an energy and urgency that the team feels,…
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