SISdatahub.com give players a “points earned” value which can be greater than 100 for a season if a player has a good season and can be negative is a player plays a lot but plays poorly.
Denver, CO
Denver Broncos tight ends and wide receivers were among the worst in the league in 2025
Bo Nix had the highest QB score in the NFL at SIS with a score of 142. NFL MVP Matthew Stafford was second with a score of 124. The best Bronco WR or TE was Courtland Sutton with a score of 15. Troy Franklin was tied for the worst score in the NFL with Konata Mumpfield at -9 pts earned. The Broncos actually had five receivers that got a negative score for the year:
- Adam Trautman -1
- Nate Adkins -1
- Trent Sherfield Sr. -2
- Marvin Mims Jr. -2
- Troy Franklin -9
SIS does not agree with PFR in terms of drops. PFR shows that Franklin had 4 drops while SIS shows him with 7 drops. PFR shows Evan Engram and Courtland Sutton with 8 drops apiece, while SIS only tags Sutton with 5 and Engram with 7. SIS shows that the Broncos had 39 total drops while PFR shows 42 so that is pretty close. SIS has the WRs with 16 drops, TEs with 10, and RBs with 13.
If you look at the total score for the WR group for every team in the NFL the Broncos had the third worst WR group score with a 14 and the second to worst TE score with a -1.
Only the Commanders had a worse TE group and only the Browns and Jets got less from their WRs according to SIS. This is pretty damning to the Broncos receivers especially when Bo Nix led the NFL in points earned (according to SIS). Imagine what Nix could do with some weapons at TE and WR.
It’s no surprise that the Seahawks and the Patriots had very effective TE and WR groups, but the paucity of value in the Bronco groups was a surprise to me. NGS and PFR grade out the Bronco receiver groups better than that, but I didn’t want to bury the lead.
The Broncos had the second most drops in the NFL regular season in 2025 with 42 – according to PFR. Only the Jaguars had more with 44. The Cardinals were the best with a drop rate of 2.6% while the Jags had a drop rate of 9.1%. The Patriot receivers were good at catching the ball, but dead last in YAC% and breaking tackles after the catch. This was on display in the playoffs for them.
Yards before catch (YBC) and after (YAC) are a measure of how accurate the passer is, but also how much zone vs man coverage a team faced. Generally you are going to get more YAC if teams play a bunch of man against you and less if you are facing zone very often. This is a result of the routes you use to attack one vs the other.
The Bronco receiver group was average at breaking tackles after the catch on the 92% of the throws that they didn’t drop.
Opposing defenses gave the Bronco receivers fairly large cushions and the Broncos had two of the best receiver in the NFL at getting separation, Evan Engram and Marvin Mims. Troy Franklin, Engram and Mims were all given 6.7 yards or more on average of cushion on every play. Franklin is hard to see if the full chart below. He is at 6.7/3.0 which you can see in the zoomed view. This data is from NFL Next Gen Stats.
Courtland Sutton and Pat Bryant are called out by color, but Franklin is buried under two other receivers with the exact same X,Y.
For those who aren’t sure, you want a receiver to get separation, but they have no control over the cushion they are given. That being said, if a receiver is fast, opposing DBs will generally give them more cushion to avoid getting burned.
Once older receivers lose their speed, their cushion generally shrinks. You can see this with DK Metcalf, Mike Evans and Davante Adams, but this can also be a sign that they faced some elite CBs in man coverage. Pat Surtain generally gives very little cushion as do many of the elite CBs in the NFL.
Among WRs with a minim of 17 catches, Mims was 16th of 115 in catch rate (tgt/rec) with a value of 72.5%. He also had the best passer rating among our volume WRs with a 95.4 which was a little better than Sutton. Bandy caught all four of his targets, but he only had 4. Only he and Lucas Krull finished the season with no drops, but they only combined for 8 targets. Nate Adkins had three drops on eleven targets, which is terribad.
Mims and Engram had the best (tied with Luther Burden) and second best separation in the league, yet were only targetted 127 times or on one of every five passes. There are a number of possible explanations for this.
First, Bo Nix possibly does not trust either receiver to make the catch. This could be true for Engram, but we know it’s not true for Mims as he has been targeted on some game-deciding passes from Nix. Another explanation is that both players were being used as “decoys” frequently AND the defense knew it. If the opposing DBs knew that Mims and Engram never got targeted on a particular route combo, there was no need to tightly cover them. Another explanation was that this level of separation was a way to bait Nix into bad throws that would either be picks or incomplete passes. If opposing DCs knew that Nix was not good at throwing a particular route (at least not yet), then they might bait him into throwing that route by telling the DB to allow separation. I will note that receivers with elite separation are rarely the most targeted on their team. Only two players with 3.8 yards or more of separation got 90 or more targets in 2025 – Khalil Shakir (95) and Dalton Shultz (106).
For reference, Marvin Mims led the league in separation last season with 5.2 yards of separation on average, and yet he was only targeted 52 times in 2024. Shakir got much sep and over 90 targets in 2024 (4.3, 100) along with Zay Flowers (3.9, 116).
Mims and Franklin have both been getting lots of separation over the past two seasons, but that has not translated into a large volume of targets or catches. This could be chalked up to injuries, but I think it is more of a function of the Sean Payton offense that uses deep routes to clear out the short routes that are safer and a surrogate for the run game.
You would think that this would lead to low percentage of deep throws by Nix, but he was 18th of 44 QBs with 18.0% of his throws being deemed deep (15 or more yards from the LOS) by SISdatahub.com. Russell Wilson led the league at 26% while Dillon Gabriel had the lowest at 7%. Admittedly neither QB had that many total attempts (69 and 110). Among full time starters, Jared Goff had the lowest deep throw percentage at 8.9% while Trevor Lawrence had the highest percentage at 20.8%. Lamar Jackson had a really high deep throw percentage, but he only had 192 passes in 2025. Let’s get back to receivers…
The Bronco TE group was one of the least productive in the NFL. Only 33 of the catches by Bronco TEs went for a first down and only 3 were for touchdowns. The TE catch rate of 68%, yards per catch, first down rate, and TD rate on catches were also near the bottom of the league. While the TE groups 78 catches was only a little below average (89 TE catches), the Bronco TE group didn’t do much with those catches. The success rate on targets (60% of needed yards on 1st down, 40% on 2nd down and conversion on 3rd or 4th) for our TEs on their catches was also poor. Only Adam Trautman was above 50% at 74%. Engram and Adkins were at 44 and 45% and Krull was at 25%. Admittedly Krull only had 4 targets and 2 catches for 15 yards.
The Bronco TEs were also poor at blocking with 13 blown blocks and a blown block rate of 2.8% on run blocks. This data is from SISdatahub.com.
So the Bronco TE room needs an upgrade. They weren’t good blockers or receivers. Evan Engram has a cap number of 14 million for next season, with 10 million in dead money if the Broncos choose to move on from him. Adam Trautman is an unrestricted free agent, and I don’t want him back. He was essentially a blocking TE and he was not a very good one. He had the majority of the Bronco TE run blocking snaps and he was so bad at it that the Broncos brought Marcedes Lewis off his coach to be a run blocking TE. Lewis was actually terrible as a run blocker. Krull and Adkins are restricted free agents and could be brought back on the cheap by the Broncos.
The Broncos have all of the primary receivers from the past season under contract for next season. Sutton has a similar cap hit to Engram. Mims, Franklin and Bryant are all cheap because they are all still on their rookie deals.
Of course the Broncos could spend to bring in a free agent WR (or trade for one), but other than the drops, the WR room was fairly good but fragile in 2025. Mims and Bryant missed time with injuries during the regular season and Franklin was lost to injury in the playoffs. Having to rely on Lil’Jordan Humphrey to make catches in the AFCC was not in the plan for the season, but he took 74% of the offensive snaps in the AFCC. While he was only targeted three times during the AFCC (with one catch), having to rely on the 6th-string WR in the biggest game of the season is on the front office. No team is going to win with a significant number of targets going to LJH and Elijah Moore. Moore had zero offensive snaps for the Broncos during the regular season.
Playing a game without your first string QB, RB and two of your better WRs is a big reason why the Broncos only scored 7 points in the AFCC. The lack of Nix was mentioned frequently, but the lack of JK Dobbins, Pat Bryant and Troy Franklin was also a huge contributing factor to the ineptness of the Bronco offense in the AFCC.
I also wanted to point out that you can have a great QB and a great OL, but if your running backs, wide receivers and tight ends are well below average, your offense will falter often.
Rocky Mountain sandhill cranes battle warmer conditions due to drought
Wildlife biologist Jenny Nehring and farmer Rob Jones talk about Sandhill cranes and their impact on the San Luis Valley.
DENVER — Zoos are of necessity big gulpers of water, a fact that has some zookeepers in the drying American West working to rapidly upgrade efficiency and reduce unnecessary irrigation or leaks.
Denver Zoo, formally known as the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance, has rapidly reduced its demands on threatened and declining water sources, including the Colorado River.
Among the upgrades is a sea lion water filtration system that allows most of the water to be cleaned and reused each time the pool is drained. That’s saving more than 8 million gallons a year, zoo sustainability director Blair Neelands said. “You can get in there, scrub it with a toothbrush and refill it with the same water,” she said.
Similar upgrades to an African penguin showcase reduced its water use by 95% by largely eliminating what’s sent down the drain. (Like a backyard swimming pool, though, these tanks sometimes still need to be drained and refreshed with new water to reduce mineral buildup.)
“The biggest thing for us is swapping from dump-and-fill pools to life-support systems,” Neeland said.
Another biggie is replacement of a 50-year-old water main with funding of about $3 million from the city. There’s no way of knowing how much that pipe had leaked over the years, but Neeland suspected it was more than a million gallons a year. The savings should become apparent as the zoo tracks its water use over the next few years.
Creating hippo-sized water savings
When The Arizona Republic visited in 2025, the zoo was on the cusp of eclipsing a goal to reduce its water use by half of what it had been in 2018. The zoo had used 80 million gallons in 2024, or about 219,000 a day, a 45% reduction in just a handful of years. Much of the savings had come in the form of smarter irrigation practices and use of drought-tolerant native plants where possible. The landscaping also pivoted to recycled “purple pipe” water from the city, which owns the zoo’s land, restricting potable water to areas where animals really need it.
“When people hear ‘recycled water,’ they get worried about cleanliness and hygiene,” zoo spokesman Jake Kubié said. “But it’s safe for the animals, and it’s not their drinking water.”
Getting past the water conservation goal would mean draining the pool where Mahali the hippo spent most hours lurking with just his eyes, ears and snout visible to visitors. Because he spent so much time in the pool, the water needed daily changes. It amounted to 21 million gallons a year, not to mention water heater bills that drove the cost to $200,000 a year, according to zoo officials. They estimated that Mahali used as much water as 350,000 four-person households.
“This facility is outdated,” Kubié said. “Some day this will become a huge saver of water.”
That day came before year’s end, and it indeed brought a tremendous savings. The zoo shipped Mahali to a new home (and a potential mate) at a wildlife preserve in Texas and drained the pool one last time. Ending the daily change-outs shaved more than a quarter of the zoo’s entire water usage from the previous year. It put the zoo significantly beyond its goal.
Denver Zoo’s water savings are part of a broader waste- and pollution-prevention effort aimed at being a good neighbor in uncertain times, Neeland said.
“Water savings and drought is top of mind for anyone who lives in the Western United States,” she said.
In Phoenix, a different mix of animals
That’s true of the Phoenix Zoo, as well, where zookeepers must maintain landscaping and animal exhibits in a city that baked under 100-degree-plus high temperatures for a third of the days last year. The zoo creates a “respite in the desert,” spokeswoman Linda Hardwick said, but has no hippos, penguins, grizzly bears or many of the other species that would require big water investments for outdoor swimming or cooling.
“We really specialize in animals that will thrive in the temperatures here,” Hardwick said.
The Phoenix Zoo uses most of its water on landscaping. After a consultant’s 2023 irrigation assessment, the staff centralized irrigation scheduling under a single trained technician and employed technologies including weather-based controllers and smart meters. Salt River Project awarded $70,000 in grant funds for the upgrades and several thousand more for training.
The zoo uses about 189,000 gallons a day, she said. That represents a 17% reduction from 2023, or 20% when adjusted for the year’s particular weather and evapotranspiration demand.
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram.
Watch CBS News
A Frontier Airlines plane has hit and killed a person at Denver’s international airport, prompting the evacuation of passengers. Authorities say the man jumped a perimeter fence and ran in front of the plane as it was taking off to Los Angeles.
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