The Denver Broncos and a Mile High Legacy
Colorado
The stadium sitting here west of downtown Denver has gone through several corporate names over the years, Invesco Field, Sports Authority Field, and now Empower Field, but Denverites have always called it Mile High, and the team that plays here has been a fixture of this city's identity since the earliest years of professional football.
The Denver Broncos were founded in nineteen sixty as a charter member of the American Football League, the upstart rival that would eventually merge with the National Football League. Those early teams played in hand-me-down uniforms, and the original vertically striped socks became a locker room joke. They labored for decades before finding sustained success. The arrival of John Elway in nineteen eighty-three changed everything. The quarterback from Stanford became the defining figure of the franchise through two decades: five Super Bowl appearances, back-to-back championships in nineteen ninety-seven and nineteen ninety-eight, an electrifying improvised playing style that made him one of the most decorated players in NFL history.
Elway retired after the second championship, but the Broncos found another chapter with Peyton Manning, who arrived in twenty twelve and delivered a third Super Bowl title in twenty fifteen. During his time in Denver, Manning also set an NFL record for points scored in a regular season and broke nearly every passing mark in the league.
The current stadium opened in August of two thousand one, replacing the beloved original Mile High Stadium that had hosted the team since their AFL days. The new building cost roughly four hundred million dollars and seats seventy-six thousand, one hundred twenty-five fans at an elevation of five thousand two hundred eighty feet, exactly one mile above sea level, a detail the franchise treats as a point of civic pride. The thin air at altitude has long been cited as a genuine advantage for home teams, contributing to the stadium's reputation as one of the louder, more intense environments in the league.
