A sign of Broncos Country’s enthusiasm: the best preseason attendance in a decade

One barometer of the state of Broncos Country has always been the no-show count at home games.

And thanks in part to the longstanding tradition of home fans booing whenever the no-show number is announced, the team has continued to announce the number of unused tickets at each game, making the Broncos the last team in the NFL to make such figures public.

In the preseason, the no-show count is typically far in excess of what you expect in the regular season. The quickly-forgotten results and the paucity of repetitions for the starters have long ensured more than a handful of empty seats.

But when one looks around the NFL and sees venues that are half-empty or even more sparsely populated — as was the case for the Aug. 14 preseason opener at Atlanta — the Broncos’ relatively robust throngs for the August slate bear mentioning.

Thus, it was notable that the Broncos’ average in-person preseason attendance of 64,665 was the highest actual preseason average attendance in a decade, since the team averaged 67,649 for its two preseason games six months after its Super Bowl 50 win.

The raw total actual attendance of 129,329 for the two preseason home games was also the highest such figure since 2016.

Of course, that decade-ago preseason was peppered with the spice of a starting-quarterback derby among that year’s first-round pick (Paxton Lynch), veteran acquisition Mark Sanchez and returning backup Trevor Siemian, who ended up winning the job and guiding the team to a 4-0 start and eventually a 7-3 record before a late-season fade that augured the club’s descent into what would be seven-consecutive losing seasons.

This year, there was no such roster intrigue. Just the building buzz of a team with Super Bowl expectations — and, it would seem, a roster built to achieve them.

ALSO OF NOTE FROM THE BRONCOS’ PRESEASON ATTENDANCE

The no-show rate for the Green Bay game — 12.2 percent — was calculated by Broncos data to be the best on record in team preseason history from the years of attendance data it possesses. (Some no-show counts have been lost in the breeze of history, as official NFL gamebooks have not featured unused-ticket counts since 1996.)

The average no-show count for the preseason was 9,659 — a significant improvement from the previous five seasons:

• 2025 (one home game): 11,943
• 2024 (two home games): 15,313
• 2023 (one home game): 15,324
• 2022 (two home games): 12,689
• 2021 (one home game): 19,496

Consider this: Last year in the regular season, the no-show average was 851.

If these Broncos live up to their billing, one would hope for a lower number this year — as long as the weather cooperates. Last year, every regular-season home game saw a kickoff temperature of at least 60 degrees, which had never happened before in club history.

After all, in the words of Chuck Tanner, manager of the 1979 World Series-winning Pittsburgh Pirates, “You can have money piled to the ceiling, but the size of your funeral is still going to depend on the weather.”

And you can have a team pushing for the Super Bowl, but if there’s a snowstorm — as was the case for the 1987 regular-season finale, just three weeks before the Broncos won their second-straight AFC title — you’ll have an attendance estimated at 37,500, leading to a no-show count of 38,689.

(Special thanks to Broncos media-relations staffer Tyler Gorse for his assistance with the data for this piece.)

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