Culture
Among the stakes when Falcons, Broncos meet Sunday: Elliss family bragging rights
As the Denver Broncos prepared to make their third-round pick in the NFL Draft in April, they were ecstatic to see Jonah Elliss’ name still on the board.
Denver coach Sean Payton said earlier this season that the team had a second-round grade on the pass rusher out of the University of Utah. They believed he had the tools to be a Year 1 contributor on the edge, a need enhanced by a spring injury to the prior year’s third-round pick, Drew Sanders.
There was only one problem. Selecting two picks ahead of the Broncos were the Atlanta Falcons. Their general manager is Terry Fontenot, who previously worked in the front office of the New Orleans Saints during nearly all of Payton’s 16 seasons as the team’s head coach. And on Atlanta’s roster was a linebacker named Kaden Elliss, Jonah’s brother and a seventh-round pick of Payton, Fontenot and the Saints in 2019.
“I turned to George (Paton, Denver’s general manager) and I said, ‘Terry’s going to draft the brother; I know it,’” Payton said this week. “They drafted another player and then we were excited, obviously, to make our selection.
The Falcons selected Washington outside linebacker Bralen Trice, who suffered a season-ending ACL injury in the preseason, with the 74th pick. Two picks later, the Broncos took Jonah Elliss.
Payton’s phone immediately buzzed with a text message. It was Kaden.
“I won’t tell you what it said,” Payton said with a laugh, “but I would say the exposure with Kaden really helped us understand the football mindset as it pertained to the next pick.”
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Kaden Elliss didn’t spill many details of the exchange, either.
“(I was) just, ‘You got a good one,’” the Falcons linebacker said. “Other things were said, but it is what it is. I’m just so excited he’s in Denver and with Sean (and) a good staff out there. We’ve got family out west so it’s a good spot.”
Two weeks after the draft, the NFL’s schedule was released and a date for an Elliss family reunion was born. On Sunday, when the Falcons visit the Broncos in a matchup of two teams trying to take another step toward the playoffs, Kaden and Jonah will face each other in the NFL for the first time. Both play defense — Kaden as a starting inside linebacker who leads the Falcons with 88 tackles; Jonah as an outside linebacker who has carved a role in the pass-rush rotation and has two sacks — so there won’t be any direct clashes between the two brothers.
Unless …
“We may find a way to sneak in a special teams matchup,” Kaden said.
Atlanta linebacker Kaden Elliss leads the Falcons with 88 tackles through 10 games. (Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images)
The brothers are two of five Elliss family members who have reached the NFL. Christian Elliss is linebacker for the New England Patriots and Noah Elliss is a defensive tackle who spent time during the past two seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles and is a free agent. Along with Kaden and Jonah, they are believed to be the only set of four brothers to have played in the NFL. Jonah said Friday he wouldn’t be surprised to see Elijah Elliss, a freshman defensive end at Utah, join the family’s NFL fraternity in the coming years.
“Can’t help but know an Elliss,” Falcons coach Raheem Morris said this week. “There’s a million of them.”
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Their father, Luther Elliss, played 10 seasons in the league as a defensive tackle. The first nine came with the Detroit Lions, who drafted him in the first round in 1995 after an All-American college career at Utah. He played his final season, in 2004, with the Broncos, a fitting career end for someone who grew up in Mancos, Colo. Elliss later became a team chaplain for the Broncos, a role he filled during the team’s Super Bowl season in 2015.
This 1 pm slate is actually very funny because I just watched Elliss 55 try to sack Dak and then watched Elliss 52 try to cover Justice Hill and then I saw Elliss 53 step up to tackle Tony Pollard.
— Benjamin Solak (@BenjaminSolak) November 3, 2024
During Elliss’ lone season with the Broncos, it wasn’t rare to see the family’s full-sized van pull up to the team’s facility. Luther and his wife Rebecca have 12 children, seven of whom were adopted. With a family that size, competition was inevitable. Sometimes the fiercest races were the ones to the dinner table.
“We’d make up games. We’d play every game under the sun, every sport,” Kaden said. “Sometimes it was football. Sometimes it was soccer or random games we made up.”
Luther’s career served as a road map. Most of the Elliss boys didn’t play tackle football until eighth grade — Kaden snuck in seasons in fifth and seventh grade — but love for the sport that was baked into their collective upbringing grew quickly.
“My dad was obviously able to guide our work,” Kaden said. “So not only working hard but working smart, showing us where we needed to improve, what we needed to do if we wanted to make that step.”
GO DEEPER
Broncos rookie Jonah Elliss steadily improving his pass-rush plan
The matchup between the Broncos and Falcons on Sunday is full of familiar connections. Falcons safety Justin Simmons spent the first eight years in Denver after the team drafted him with a third-round pick in 2016. Thirty of his 31 career interceptions came in a Broncos uniform. He and his wife, Taryn Simmons, rooted themselves deeply into the Denver community through their work with the Justin Simmons Foundation, and the safety was named the team’s Walter Payton Man of the Year nominee three different times. He said this week he’ll be “a Bronco for life,” but his focus Sunday will be helping the Falcons get their seventh win.
“Practicing against him for years is one thing, but to get live bullets is going to be fun,” said Broncos wide receiver Courtland Sutton. “I jokingly told him, ‘Hey, bro, if you see me coming across the middle, just remember we’re friends.’”
Falcons offensive coordinator Zac Robinson, meanwhile, grew up in Denver. He was a Broncos fan whose family had season tickets. He later became a standout football player at Chatfield High School in the suburb of Littleton, Colo.
“Definitely, when I saw we were going to Denver, (my) family got excited,” Robinson said. “The atmosphere is tough to beat. Probably there and K.C. are the top two in the NFL. Looking forward to getting back home.”
Those returns will be special, but reunion games and homecomings happen every week in the NFL. A matchup of brothers, in one of their father’s home stadiums, with more than 30 family members on hand? Not so much.
“I played with one of my brothers in college, but this is obviously different,” said Broncos tight end Adam Trautman, whose locker is next to Jonah’s in Denver and who was previously a teammate of Kaden’s in New Orleans. “It was always competitive with me and my brother, and I’m sure that’s how they’re treating it, too.”
Broncos rookie Jonah Elliss (52) has 21 tackles and two sacks for Denver this season. (C. Morgan Engel / Getty Images)
The Elliss brothers aren’t taking Sunday’s opportunity for granted. But at the end of the day, it’s another competition in a never-ending string of them. Each year, usually during Fourth of July weekend, the family gathers for the Elliss Olympics, an event that spans multiple days and has a rotating list of competitions, from corn hole to board games. The event includes a trophy, emblazoned with the names of the winners, that resides at Luther and Rebecca’s home. Including spouses and close family friends, the competition can include more than three dozen participants.
Trash-talking is an inherent part of the spectacle. Jonah shared this week that he and his fiancée dominate the pickleball competition, a fact that rankled his older brother.
“I think the most someone scored on us in a game to 11 is three or four,” Jonah said. “We’re pretty good. We killed (Kaden). He did not like it.”
Most seem to agree, though, that Kaden sets the pace in the chirping department. So perhaps it’s no surprise the Falcons linebacker, who already owns a head-to-head NFL win over Christian when they met in 2022, delivered the parting words ahead of his matchup with Jonah.
“I’m 1-0,” he said of the Elliss matchups. “We’re going to make this 2-0 this week.”
(Top photos of Kaden and Jonah Elliss:
Todd Kirkland and Justin Edmonds / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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