Somebody get John Elway on the phone, because he has a deal to close — unrelated to football.
Model Samantha Hoopes was a guest on “The Domenick Nati Show” Thursday and was asked which athlete or celebrity she’d want to date.
“I don’t know. I kind of have more girl crushes than I do guy crushes. But guy wise? I would date … John … he’s an old guy now — he’s not playing anymore.”
When asked if she meant John Elway, Hoopes said yes.
“By far. I think he’s a gentleman. I’m going retro.”
It’s pretty stunning to hear a 26-year-old call a 56-year-old her crush, but that was the case.
Hoopes was also asked about a celebrity she enjoyed meeting the least and said Colin Kaepernick.
“That’s the only one I can say that was a little weird to me,” Hoopes said. “There was catering out and he couldn’t eat half the stuff on there because there was a sauce on the chicken. I was like ‘whoa, you can’t even have the sauce? This is kind of intense.’ I get it’s for his job, but still, a little sauce one day is not going to kill you.”
Well, given that Kaepernick is a professional football player, you have to respect his commitment to his diet.
And maybe Hoopes is trying to make it happen with Elway after not having any luck with this basketball player.
After a season that saw the Denver Broncos go 9-7 and miss the playoffs in an attempt to defend their Super Bowl, the expectation is that general manager John Elway will make big moves to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
At least, that’s what Denver cornerback Chris Harris is expecting to see from Elway when free agency opens up.
“After the season hopefully everything starts to get rolling,” Harris told reporters, via Conor Orr of NFL.com. “Once free agency comes you know Elway is going to make some splashes. I’m excited to see who he brings as a part of the team.”
There is one splash the Broncos might make, but a lot of hurdles have to be cleared before it gets to that point. That said, Elway won’t be satisfied with how his team performed in 2016. Harris may not be wrong.
The Broncos executive vice president and general manager sent a tweet in response to a fan who doubted the selection of Trevor Siemian in the 2015 draft. It has since been deleted, but the internet never forgets.
Hang on. Did John Elway really just @ this dude who questioned him a year and a half ago? Hahahaha pic.twitter.com/Q6ab2XO4C2
Siemian is still a work in progress, but he performed very well on Sunday and is making Elway look like a very smart man. Apparently, Broncos fans have to be careful with the criticism. Elway never forgets.
Brock Osweiler had a terrible night in New England on Thursday, and his former employer couldn’t help but notice.
Broncos general manager John Elway threw a bit of shade at his former quarterback in an appearance on KOA radio Friday.
“A lot of times those deals you don’t make are the best ones,” Elway said when asked about the performance, via Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk.
“Obviously it was a tough night for Houston last night and — but things move on,” Elway continued. “You try to make the best decision when you have to make it. Excluding last night, we really felt good with the way everything’s fallen, the way we went into camp, and we’re really excited with the guys who are playing the position for us now.”
Osweiler and the Broncos did not have the cleanest parting of ways. At least on Elway’s end, there is clearly no love lost. It might be a stretch to say that the Broncos are delighting in Osweiler’s troubles, but they’re probably feeling plenty justified in not allowing themselves to be dragged into a high-priced bidding war for his services.
John Elway wants Trevor Siemian to know that a few bad throws won’t cost him his job.
The Broncos general manager was clear that Siemian, recently named the team’s starter, had made the job his own.
“Trevor is the guy,” Elway said, via Jeff Legwold of ESPN. “We have a lot of confidence in Trevor and believe that he can do the job. It’s Trevor’s job, but he’s not going to be looking over his shoulder. He’s got a lot of support. Trevor earned the job. I’m excited about it. I’m excited to see him play and I think we’re in good shape there.”
Siemian will have rookie Paxton Lynch behind him, a player who has made strides over the course of the preseason. It seems clear, though, that the Broncos are putting their complete trust in Siemian. He has impressed in preseason, and the team clearly wants him to feel confident and secure in his role.
Can the Denver Broncos be successful with Mark Sanchez or Trevor Siemian under center? The answer, according to John Elway, is yes.
The Broncos VP and general manager told Tom Pelissero of USA Today that between the rest of their offense and their defense, they’d be fine.
“The good thing is we’ve got a good enough team around them,” Elway said. “We’ll be able to run the ball, and we won’t throw them out there and say, ‘You guys have to go win this.’ Do your job, make good decisions and keep the team in position to win. And that’s really all we’re asking of that position right now.”
Elway and the Broncos understand that they don’t have an All-Pro signal caller. They also understand that they don’t need one. For all the talk about Peyton Manning’s final Super Bowl win, he didn’t perform at a high level in 2015. Neither did Brock Osweiler, and they won the thing anyway.
Elway continues to maintain that there is no frontrunner in the quarterback competition.
The relationship between Brock Osweiler and the Denver Broncos seemingly went south last year when the team benched Osweiler in the second half of its Week 17 game against the San Diego Chargers. From there, Peyton Manning took over for good and led the team to a championship.
The move obviously worked out, whether the Broncos won because of Manning or in spite of him. As a competitor, Osweiler was understandably upset. For whatever reason, general manager John Elway was caught off guard by how disappointed the young quarterback was.
“I can understand that he didn’t want to sit down and have Peyton come back in that San Diego game, but it wasn’t the fact that Brock was playing bad,” Elway told Nicki Jhabvala of The Denver Post. “We needed a change of something. So I was a little surprised just how he seemed to be a little bent out of shape about that. But he had an opportunity to make a tremendous amount of money in Houston, and for us, it just didn’t fit.”
It became clear from the start that Denver wasn’t going to pay Osweiler the money he was seeking, but Elway’s comments make it seem clear that a strained relationship had something to do with that. In all liklihood, Osweiler saw what all of us saw — that Manning was one deep pass away from a career-ending injury and that he simply wasn’t the same player anymore.
Still, Manning’s football IQ is invaluable in a playoff situation. Even if he couldn’t make throws anymore, he still understood the game enough from a situational standpoint that he was an asset. The Broncos weren’t willing to risk Osweiler’s inexperience being exposed.
It sounds like, while he definitely has some catching up to do, Lynch remains a factor. The team has been pushing Siemian pretty hard, so his chances shouldn’t be understated either. Sanchez, however, remains the most experienced option. Conventional wisdom would seem to favor him, though that could well change.
The contract standoff between Von Miller and the Denver Broncos went public during the week, and Miller is not happy about it.
In fact, Miller showed his displeasure by cropping general manager John Elway out of a photo he posted on Instagram from the team’s recent trip to Washington D.C. Miller’s post was a repost from DeMarcus Ware, who did not crop Elway out.
Sources told ESPN’s Adam Schefter that Miller cutting Elway out of the picture was no coincidence, with Miller said to be upset at both the negotiations and the fact that everything has gone public.
It turns out that the departure of Brock Osweiler caught John Elway off guard, too.
The Broncos’ VP and general manager told Bleacher Report’s Jason Cole that Denver anticipated retaining Osweiler even if Peyton Manning retired.
“Was it a big surprise that we were in that situation? Yeah,” Elway said of losing Manning and Osweiler in the same offseason. “Because I thought…we drafted Brock when we got Peyton because we didn’t know exactly what Peyton was going to be. But also, if [Manning] wasn’t in good shape, we were going to a guy who was going to be here for a long, long time. Now, that didn’t work out, so it was a matter of, you have to fix the issue.”
Elway outlined the team’s response to the challenge, reaffirming his faith in Mark Sanchez in the process.
“Well, the first thing we did is we got Mark and I feel good about Mark,” Elway said. “So by getting Mark—and we’re a lot higher on him than a lot of people are—so once we landed Mark and he was here, we felt better about the situation. It was a matter of bringing somebody in for competition. But of the guys who were out there at the time, there were no difference-makers. So why would I overpay for a guy who wasn’t going to be a difference-maker?”
That last sentence seems to be why Colin Kaepernick never became a Bronco. The team clearly liked him, but not at the price it would have taken. Instead they grabbed the ever-confident Sanchez as well as Paxton Lynch, who they are quite high on for the future.
