DENVER — T.J. Ward would run through Jeremy Maclin again for Carrie and Greg. Happily. Sore knees and all.

“You guys are really lucky to play for the Penners,” the former Broncos safety, enforcer for the Super Bowl 50 champions, told me recently. “You know your owners are personable when they come up (and say), ‘Here’s my email. If you need anything, hit us up.'”

So he did.

“I met them a few times, actually,” Ward said of Carrie Walton Penner and her husband, Greg Penner, the first family of Broncos Country. “They were great. Great couple. Great family.”

And you wonder why we want them to buy the Rockies?

Happy Week 1, kids. The Broncos’ defense of the 2025 AFC West title begins next Monday night in Kansas City, Mo. Bo Nix looks fine. Davis Webb is calling plays without Sean Payton calling him names (so far).

Thanks to Jonah Coleman, the orange and blue suddenly has more good tailbacks than carries to feed them. The Sack Pack is back, Jack, even if John Franklin-Myers isn’t. It’s Super Bo or bust.

Lombardi Trophies are usually won from the top down. Smart owners set the bar, then leave the football people alone to try and clear the blasted thing.

Look closely at the last 10 Super Bowl winners. Judy Allen in Seattle. The Hunts in Kansas City. Jeffrey Lurie in Philadelphia. The Kroenkes in Los Angeles. The Glazers in Tampa. Robert Kraft in New England.

With the Penners, the Broncos aspire to have the best of everything — team offices, training facilities, stadium– in order to be the best, every year. That stuff trickles down. It permeates.

“Oh, 1,000%,” ex-Broncos safety Justin Simmons noted by phone. “I came in, unfortunately, when Mr. B. (former Broncos owner Pat Bowlen) was declining in his health. But I could feel the family vibe. I felt included. I felt a sense of importance in 2016, and it wasn’t just because I was a draft pick.

“As the years went on and we were trying to figure out ownership, and all the things in between, it got messy at times. Some of those things got lost in the (ensuring years).”

Simmons, 32, retired this past spring after a nine-year NFL career, eight of which were spent with the Broncos (2016-2023). No. 31 was a darn good player, and an even better dude, stuck with trying to help carry some forgettable teams. During his Dove Valley tenure, Simmons was named an All-Pro four times and selected to the Pro Bowl twice. But until the Penners arrived in August 2022, what rested above him on the corporate chain of command, at times, really stunk.

The former Boston College star played for six different coaches, including interims, over his eight seasons here. What Simmons didn’t know when he was drafted in 2016 was that the Broncos were careening into The Wilderness Years. He didn’t know that winning a Super Bowl with an injured Peyton Manning and peak Von Miller in 2015-16 convinced management that anybody could quarterback the orange and blue as long as Miller and the No Fly Zone remained intact.

They were, to be kind, badly mistaken. A merry-go-round of “meh” signal-callers and blah coaches followed, and the Broncos averaged 9.9 losses per year during Simmons’ tenure with the franchise.

But No. 31 could also tell you exactly when that spinning slowed down and eventually came to a dead stop. Not long after the Walton-Penner Group purchased the Broncos four Augusts ago, the safety and Broncos punter Brandon McManus, two of the most tenured members of the locker room, were called into new CEO Penner’s office for a meeting.

“Hey, give me a rundown … you guys are longest-tenured players here,” Penner told Simmons and McManus in 2022. “Give me a list of things that people have complained about.'”

For starters? Small locker room. No family room. No individualized nutrition plans. No sauna.

“(Penner) said, ‘This is so helpful,’ didn’t give us any backlash,” Simmons recalled. “I’m super-appreciative of that conversation to this day.”

The proof is in the buildings. Broncos Park Powered by Common Spirit, the team’s brand-new HQ, features a state-of-the-art training room with pools, sleep pods, a hyperbaric chamber — and a sauna.

“In their first year, (the Walton-Penner Group) put in a whole new grass field at the end of the season, and we weren’t even in the playoffs,” Simmons marveled.

“You could just tell the type of people they were. You always see success as an organization, in my opinion, when you have people who lead like that.”

The best NFL franchises almost always are the ones that get it right at quarterback and at head coach first. But the perennial contenders are also the ones that don’t skimp on the margins. Or to accountability.

From 2018 through 2022, the Broncos were an NFL club locked in a contentious custody battle, rotting at the summit. The Battlin’ Bowlens, heirs to Mr. B., schemed and leveraged against one another as if tussling for Red Keep’s Iron Throne.

Meanwhile, The Bowlen Trust — a trio of former CEO Joe Ellis, team counsel Rich Silva and Denver attorney Mary Kelly — ran the Broncos like a committee of substitute teachers. Underwhelming signal-callers came, failed, and went. Uninspired coaching hires did the same.

Most ownership groups come in and take big swings. Great ownership groups are the ones that can course-correct swiftly, and efficiently, when those swings are obvious misses.

Bad NFL clubs — the Browns of now, the Bengals before Marvin Lewis showed up — are reluctant to move off of whiffs at coach and QB. Not here. Nathaniel Hackett and Russell Wilson quickly gave way to Sean Payton and Bo Nix, despite the costs.

“You see how some of these owners deal with their players,” Ward continued. “As commodities. Or capital. (With the Broncos), you have owners that treat you like people, are empathetic to what you’re going through — not only as a person, but maybe your family, all those type of things.

“Yeah, they want to win. Everybody wants to be successful. But there’s a certain way you treat your people, treat your employees. And I think that creates better business, at the end of the day, to get better players to want to come in and play for you.

“I grew up a Niners fan. And at the time (they were owned by) the DeBartolos, (and) they treated players completely different — and that’s why, at that time, they were winning. You start operating like that, providing the best resources for your players, the best training, the best facilities, travel — that stuff results in wins. If you try to shortcut everything and treat your players like items on the shelf, you’re not going to be very successful.”

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