Boy, this is a busy day …
Less than two hours after announcing the signing of one former Detroit Lion, Denver brought another one-time Lion aboard, signing wide receiver Edell Shepherd to a contract.
Terms were not disclosed.
Shepherd was in Lions camp last year before being waived on Aug. 28. He spent the subsequent season out football.
As the league year and free agency began, the Denver tenures of two Broncos starters ended.
Wide receiver Javon Walker and weakside linebacker Ian Gold were both released on Friday afternoon, one day shy of two months after a frustrating 2007 season that saw both grapple with knee injuries.
BRONCOS TV: MASON ON WALKER, GOLD:
Gold’s injury sidelined him for most of the Week 15 loss at Houston and all of the last two games, during which Jamie Winborn took his place. Walker, meanwhile, finished the season on the field — with two receptions in each of the final three games — but knee problems took their toll, necessitating surgery on Oct. 19 and a recovery that limited him to spot duty upon his return to the field over a month later.
Walker seemed to foretell the future the day after the regular-season finale, when he said “No,” when asked whether he saw the team as a good fit for him.
“What it boils down to at this point is I’ve got to go where the best fit is for me,” he said during a rambling question-and-answer session that occasionally saw him lapse into the third person.
Javon Walker, Dec. 31, 2007:
“Wherever Javon’s talents can be used at, I’ve got to go to where the best fit’s for me.”
Microfracture surgery on the ailing knee is a possibility, Head Coach Mike Shanahan acknowledged at his season-ending press conference in January.
“There’s talk of a microfracture somewhere down the line,” Shanahan said then. “It could be two or three years from now; it could be four years. We just don’t know.”
Reports are also rampant that the Broncos have retained two of their unrestricted free agents — defensive end John Engelberger and tight end Nate Jackson.
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Dove Valley is neither car dealership nor franchise sit-down eatery, so there are no “Employee of the Month” plaques adorning the walls of Broncos headquarters.
If there were, Rod Smith’s name might be the only one on them for the last 14 years.
It’s not that others haven’t worked diligently to ensure Broncos success. It’s not that others haven’t at times provided just a little more on the playing field than the Broncos’ beloved No. 80.
But Smith came to set the example. His perfect attendance for offseason workouts was the stuff of legend. It might take a few years for Smith to become Ring of Fame-eligible, but his name and jersey number might find a home in the team’s strength and conditioning center, thanks to a baker’s dozen years of 100 percent attendance that would often leave rookies and newcomers a tad awestruck.
“Even when he was on the practice squad, you could see the desire and the determination that he had to be good — to be great,” tight end Shannon Sharpe said in 2003. “And he worked every day. There was no job that he wouldn’t do. They put him at wide receiver, he’d take all the reps on scout team and he was always the opposing team’s best receiver, and he got better, and he worked at it.”
Rod Smith’s hip hasn’t improved in the two months that followed his brief practice-field foray in late October.
It’s actually gotten worse.
“It feels worse than it ever did before I had surgery,” Smith said Friday. “So pretty much it is not healed. It’s not healing at all. I’ve been through different procedures and been up to Vail several times trying to figure out a way to get it right, and it doesn’t feel right. I took the last six weeks off. I really haven’t worked out or anything, and it feels worse. I wake up in the morning, and I can feel it. I sit down, and I can feel it.”
A second snowstorm in three days blitzed through Dove Valley and the Front Range on Thursday. The first one didn’t affect the Broncos’ work one iota. The second one, however, forced them inside — and not to the nearby South Suburban Sports Dome, which was booked for a youth event.
With the Broncos’ usual inclement-weather option scrapped, they had to settle for working inside the team’s conditioning facility, on a field that is regulation width but is barely 30 yards in length.
“It was more of a walk-through, obviously,” Head Coach Mike Shanahan said. “But I think we got done what we needed to get done.”
The practice was the Broncos’ first inside the truncated indoor field at their facility since Week 16 of the 2006 season, when a near-blizzard kept the team at their facility.
“A bubble (at team headquarters) would be nice today. I was going to fight those little kids off today over at the bubble down the street, but I decided not to,” Shanahan deadpanned.
The weather not only forced the team inside, but postponed the scheduled audition of punters. That will now take place Friday.
“We had a hard time getting those punters in,” Shanahan said.
While the team’s search for a new punter stalled like a low-pressure center over the Texas panhandle, the progress of Jay Cutler did not, as he returned to full practice Thursday after missing Wednesday’s work with a sore knee.
“He’ll be ready to go (Sunday),” Shanahan said.
Wide receiver Javon Walker also returned to full practice, while Ian Gold, Daniel Graham and Brandon Stokley were sidelined.
There’ll be no Brandon Stokley or Ian Gold tonight, but Daniel Graham is among the Broncos’ 45 active players.
Graham, who was listed as questionable, was seen testing out his sprained ankle about three hours before kickoff and will be in uniform just 11 days after suffering the high-ankle sprain at Houston on Dec. 13.
Joining Stokley and Gold on the sidelines will be wide receiver Taylor Jacobs, fullback Mike Bell, guard Isaac Snell and defensive ends Larry Birdine and Paul Carrington. Darrell Hackney is inactive, but in uniform as the No. 3 quarterback.
Matt Prater will make his Denver debut, as will safety Roderick Rogers, who was called up from the practice squad last week.
For San Diego, the following players are inactive: Charlie Whitehurst (third QB), Paul Oliver, Lorenzo Neal, Anthony Waters, Roman Oben, Jamal Williams, Malcolm Floyd and Scott Chandler.
Off to to the field, but before I go, some odd press-box sights from the open-air setup here at Qualcomm Stadium …
There’s a guy in a Santa Claus suit eating dinner in the row behind me. Mercifully — and for the sake of decorum and hygiene — he removed his beard before consuming his victuals. He looks about like Seinfeld’s Kramer as Santa Claus — quite trim and a tad unkempt, in no way looking the part. If he was sprouting anti-capitalist propaganda and explaining the absence of delicatessens under Communist rule, he’d perfectly mimic Kramer.
… There’s a baby-changing station in the men’s room here in the press box. I reckon that legally such setups have to be in place at all lavoratorical facilities in municpally-funded stadiums, but the next infant I see carried through a press box will be the first.
Matt Prater wants to become a better field-goal kicker. Jason Elam has handled those duties for the Broncos since 1993.
You’d think that combination of circumstances would leave the incumbent thinking that an embargo on tips and tidbits about the craft would be advisable. But that isn’t the case with Elam.
Prater wants to learn, and Elam is more than happy to oblige, which is reason No. 732 why the longtime Bronco is one of the highest-quality individuals to pass through the Broncos locker room, whether it’s located on the north side of Denver off Logan Street or in the windblown high prairies of the southern suburbs.
Prater knows he needs the help; his 1-of-4 performance on field goals for the Falcons in Weeks 1 and 2 helped lead to his release in spite of his splendid work on kickoffs, which included a 75-percent touchback ratio and an average of 71.3 yards a kick.
As Paul Ernster returned to the Broncos and Matt Prater got his first kicking work in Wednesday, increasing the Broncos’ complement of kicking specialists to a trio, one question lingered — a query that would be rapidly answered at Head Coach Mike Shanahan’s press conference:
What was the reason for Todd Sauerbrun’s release?
Was it because of matters away from Dove Valley or his performance on the field, with his struggles in getting kickoffs inside the Houston 10-yard-line at Reliant Stadium six days earlier?
According to Shanahan, the decision was entirely because of what happened on Dec. 7 as he was arrested for simple assault on a taxicab driver, and not because of anything on the field.
“I told Todd if he had any problems that he was going to be released,” Shanahan said Wednesday in the opening moments of his press conference. “I wasn’t really going to share that with you, but I decided to after he came out and made a couple of comments yesterday.
Among the Broncos, only Champ Bailey found his name on the Pro Bowl roster, which was announced Tuesday afternoon at just after 2 p.m. MST.
For Bailey, it’s his eight consecutive Pro Bowl roster appearance and fourth as a Bronco, which gives him the third-longest streak of successive Pro Bowl nods in franchise annals, behind Steve Atwater and Shannon Sharpe.
Safety John Lynch saw his streak of three straight Pro Bowls snapped.
Wide receiver Brandon Marshall and defensive end Elvis Dumervil were also thought to be possible Pro Bowl selections, but did not see their names on the list. Marshall ranks fifth in the AFC and seventh in the NFL in receptions and receiving yardage, with 86 catches for 1,136 yards so far this season, including 21 receptions and a pair of 100-yard games in the last two weeks.
I’m not going to remember exactly where I was when the Broncos were officially eliminated from postseason consideration on Sunday afternoon. Truth be told, I’m not even sure I recall it right now. I was in the midst of errands, dashing around the southern half of the Denver metropolitan area and finding out how the rest of the world spends its autumn and early-winter Sundays. I reckon, therefore, that I was somewhere along Yosemite Street near the sprawling Park Meadows shopping complex, or perhaps on Lincoln Ave. to the south.
But I had been listening to or watching the Chargers’ 51-14 rout of the Detroit Lions as I skedaddled from one stop to the next, so I’d long since reconciled myself to the fact that no Lions rally was going to happen. The game started before the last of the early duels had been completed and seemed to pass out of doubt’s purview somewhere about the time the Miami Dolphins posted their first game-winning score of the year.
Thus entails the overuse of the word “meaningless” in the next seven days, in television, in newspaper copy, in blogs, in message boards, in evening-time chatter over an egg-nog latte at Starbucks.
This notion has always rankled me.