At 10:02 a.m. on Wednesday, 2,057 citizens of Broncos Country roared.
That’s when Russell Wilson emerged from the tunnel, trotted past a gallery of a couple dozen media members and started jogging the length of the field toward the fans seated on the hill at Dove Valley. It was the first roar of the day; Pat Surtain’s arrival a few minutes earlier hadn’t earned one, neither had Courtland Sutton’s or Justin Simmons’ or anybody else’s.
Wilson motioned to the hill for more noise. He got it. Wilson ran to the edge of the crowd then turned back, dapping up 125 yards of front-row fans before he joined his team for the first drills of the season.
“That was pretty cool,” rookie linebacker Nik Bonitto said of the spectacle.
This was Wilson’s in-person introduction to Broncos Country.
Only one story mattered on the first day of training camp. It wasn’t the front-seven beating up on the depleted right side of the offensive line. It wasn’t Melvin Gordon joking about not loving life in the team hotel during camp. It wasn’t Quinn Meinerz explaining that he wants to avoid the spotlight and that’s why he’s not leaning into his nickname, “The Belly.”
The story was this: The Broncos finally have a superstar quarterback again and he was on full display for the first time.
From the moment Wilson arrived in a massive, matte-black truck that looked better-equipped for zombie hunting than driving from Cherry Hills Village to Dove Valley, he was the star of Wednesday’s show… as he will be every time the Broncos take the field for the next half-decade with any luck.
And he pulled up in that truck early.
Before 6 a.m., Wilson was already in his shoulder pads on the practice field doing a radio interview. Then he ran a walkthrough with his offense to make sure everybody was good to go before the first day—a practice for a practice.
“There’s so much extra stuff that you guys just have no idea about,” guard Dalton Risner said after the real practice. “This dude is always going above and beyond.”
Wilson is a quarterback to his core. From organizing extra workouts, to his smile into cameras, to the perfectly-cropped hair, to the two clean lines of classic eye black, to the way he preaches longform sermons to the media (except when he was asked if he was nervous before practice and he quickly jabbed “I don’t ever get nervous” and moved to the next question), to his pop star wife and kids who all wore his jersey to practice and will likely be a fixture throughout training camp, Wilson is a quarterback’s quarterback.
Some may call him cheesy.
“The preparation is the separation.”
“There’s 24 hours in a day. How do you choose to use them?”
“It’s a 365-day job.”
Some may call him corny.
“Any time you go into something new, you have two ways of looking at it.”
“If somebody says, ‘You have to do X amount,’ then I triple it.”
“Those guys make me look halfway decent.”
And maybe Wilson is corny and cheesy, but there’s no arguing that he puts a checkmark as perfect as his footwork into every box on the quarterback checklist. He dresses like a superstar quarterback is supposed to dress. He talks like a superstar quarterback is supposed to talk. He balls like a superstar quarterback is supposed to ball.
Russell Wilson isn’t the type of human he is because he’s a superstar quarterback.
Russell Wilson is a superstar quarterback because of the type of human he is.
“For me, it’s football, my family, and my faith,” Wilson said. “That’s truly about it.”
Straight from the superstar quarterback script.
But there’s an edge to Wilson’s game, too.
When Wilson rolled out of the pocket and straight into the arms of Malik Reed for what would probably have been a sack—and definitely would have been a sack for any Broncos quarterback in the past six years and maybe before—Reed told Wilson that he had the quarterback in his grasp.
“I’ve seen that plenty of times before, 5-9,” Wilson told Reed, according to Bradley Chubb.
(If there were two stories on Wednesday, which there weren’t, the second would be the heated competition Wilson and head coach Nathaniel Hackett are sparking up.)
Wilson isn’t wrong, though. Superstar quarterbacks make plays out of nothing and that exact play is Wilson’s trademark. The buzz on the media sideline (and probably up on the hill, too) was whether Wilson would actually have gotten out of that sack and hit Eric Saubert for the touchdown in a game situation like he did in practice.
Does he do that once every 15 tries? Once every two?
Broncos Country will find out soon enough.
But today was the start of a month-long honeymoon phase, during which Russell Wilson can virtually do no wrong. The Broncos found an oasis after six years in the middle of a desert and no mistake—not even a bold-if-not-misguided bullet through a tight window, off Jerry Jeudy’s chest and into Justin Simmons’ arms—will be cause for serious concern.
At least not until 6:15 p.m., seven Mondays from today. That’s when the high standards, set by Wilson himself, will kick in for real.
“We’ve got a championship kind of football team, and we are excited about that,” Wilson said. “The exciting part about that is now it’s time to just go show up and prove it.”
At the end of practice, Wilson went out just like he came in. He made his way across the base of the hill, before turning up the edge of the seating area where more fans were waiting. He signed autographs for dozens upon dozens of fans. The process took at least 15 minutes. He could’ve stayed another hour and there would still be more to sign.
At one point, Bradley Chubb snuck behind the yellow security rope and yelled for Russ and begged for an autograph, too.
“It was so cool to see the fans out here today,” Wilson said. “This is my first time and my first practice. I feel like it was my rookie year all over again, but I’ve got about 3,475 days of experience on top of it. It feels all brand new, but also something I’ve always dreamed of—just continue to do what I love to do. Every day, I get to focus on joy and loving the game I get to play. I’m grateful to be here. Thank you, guys, so much and go Broncos. Let’s ride.”
