Greg Penner: Broncos would have closed roof for AFC Championship Game

The Denver Broncos’ new stadium is still years away, but owner Greg Penner is already imagining an alternate universe — which seems to go against what was initially shared by the team.

In comments made Wednesday, Penner confirmed that the Broncos would have likely closed the planned retractable roof at the soon-to-be-built Burnham Yard stadium had it been in place before Sunday’s AFC Championship Game against the Patriots — a contest played in single-digit temperatures with an inch or two of snowfall during the fourth quarter. Denver’s playoff run came to an end as the team’s offense flailed in the conditions and with a backup quarterback.

“You all saw the weather this year. It was fantastic. I mean, until the last game,” Penner said. “The NFL does have guidelines or rules around the home team selecting or choosing what they’re going to do with their roof and when they can open or close it. So we’d obviously comply with that. In this case, we would have likely closed it ahead of time, given both the temperature and the potential precipitation.”

It’s a big shift from the initial framing of the roof discussion. When Penner first floated the idea of putting a lid on Broncos football at the NFL Owners Meetings last March, he presented it more as a revenue play — a way to attract the Super Bowl, Final Four, and major winter concerts to Denver. The focus was on making the Mile High City a year-round big-time events destination, not on changing the conditions of Broncos games.

But Penner was quick to downplay any competitive implications from Sunday.

“That being said, who knows that would have had any outcome on the game either way,” he said. “This would have been more around just what was going to be good for the fans.”

The Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group announced Burnham Yard as the preferred site for their privately-funded stadium in September, with a target of kicking off the 2031 season in the new venue. Head coach Sean Payton publicly backed the retractable roof concept the day after that announcement, calling Penner and his wife Carrie “extremely good with a vision.”

The coach at the time added, “We wouldn’t want to confuse a closed roof with changing how the altitude affects you. I just think the elements are important.”

The stadium project is now moving through preliminary design work with architects, and Penner says the community outreach process has gone well so far.

“Damani Leech, our team president, has been leading that outreach,” Penner explained. “Lots of questions, lots of interest. We’re listening. That’s what this period is about — taking in that input and thinking about how that’s going to impact our plans.”

The owners are working through conversations with city council members toward a community benefits agreement, which Penner acknowledged will require threading the needle on plenty of strong opinions.

“When you take on a project of this scale, there’s going to be a lot of different opinions, and we’ve got to take those in and then come up with the right solution,” he said.

One of those big opinions is what to do when there’s weather. Penner said in the past that the team would indeed close the roof for extreme situations, but was Sunday one of them? Here in Colorado, cold temperatures and 1.8 inches of quickly developing snow didn’t even elicit the plows until later that evening — nor were there any serious weather alerts preventing travel, just a warning of the cold by the NWS.

Maybe for the Pasadena-raised Penner, extreme means something different to him. At any rate, it seems unlikely the NFL would even allow the Broncos the option to play a game of the magnitude of Sunday’s outdoors in anything but pristine conditions, if they have the chance to dome it. And Penner is about to give the NFL that option.

Broncos Country has long braved December and January elements at Mile High; the prospect of climate-controlled playoff football represents a seismic cultural shift. The frozen tundra mystique has long been part of the Broncos’ identity, running parallel to the Orange Crush — but after watching their team fall short in frigid conditions on Sunday, the man who owns the orange and blue might be warming to the idea of warming up, and that’s a shift from what was originally pitched to the fanbase. The owner wants fans to be comfortable, but in this situation — does Broncos Country want that?

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