Who Will Make the 2009 Denver Broncos’ Final Roster?

Mon, Jun 22, 2009

This past week’s cuts started me thinking about what the Denver Broncos active roster will look like and the gauntlet of competition that a football player will have to endure to make an NFL team.

The Broncos released five players Thursday including linebackers Boss Bailey and Louis Green, safety Herana-Dave Jones, running back Kestahn Moore and cornerback Rashod Moulton.

Though none of these cuts may have come as much of a surprise to any Broncos fan, they are nonetheless interesting because they begin to shape the 2009 Roster.

It was necessary to bring the roster size down to 80 because that is the maximum number of players an NFL team is allowed to bring to training camp. more cuts will follow in the coming months as each NFL team continues to whittle down their rosters as the dawn of a new season creeps ever closer.

Cuts can happen at any time during training camp when it becomes apparent to the coaches that a player is simply not able to keep up and compete with the others at his position. There are also some set times where teams will be required to dump players from their rosters.

After the third preseason weekend the rosters are required to drop to 65 players or below and after the fourth and final preseason weekend all NFL teams are required to have an active roster of no more than 53 players as they head into the regular season.

Each team is also allowed to form a practice squad, which may consist of no more than eight players.

That means that there are 19 more broncos on the current roster who will not even make Denver’s practice squad.

After that there are eight more players who are on the bubble and will fall just short of making the roster and will have to settle for serving time with the team on the practice squad in hopes of improving their skills for another shot somewhere down the line.

53 of the current 80 players will make the active roster, but even then they will have to compete each week in order to make the 45 man game-day roster, which will no doubt change each week depending on the team’s game plan.

All of this does not even mention the competition between the players who make the roster to gain playing time on Sundays, let alone to secure a position as one of the 22 starting Denver Broncos.

With so much turnover in the off-season between coaches and players alike, there are few players who can rest assured that they will be one of those starters. Even a Champ Bailey needs to work and both mentally and physically to adapt to scheme changes and prove his worthiness to his new set of coaches.

With all of this in mind, here are my predictions on where the current 80 players on the roster will end up going into the 2009 season.

Cut List

# Name Pos. Ht. Wt. Age Exp. College

60 Matt McChesney G 6′4″ 307 27 3rd Colorado

72 Pat Murray G 6′3″ 310 24 1st Truman State

61 Mitch Erickson G 6′6″ 290 23 2nd S.Dakota St.

76 Tyler Polumbus T 6′8″ 310 23 2nd Colorado

68 Stanley Bryant T 6′5″ 282 23 R East Carolina

77 Brandon Gorin T 6′6″ 308 30 7th Purdue

87 Jeb Putzier TE 6′4″ 256 30 7th Boise State

82 David Grimes WR 5′10″ 177 22 R Notre Dame

84 Brandon Lloyd WR 6′0″ 194 27 7th Illinois