Broncos complete multiple ambitious offseason projects, adding a giant scoreboard, huge team store and numerous F&B options

To successfully complete multiple renovation projects in one offseason in an active summer, the Broncos had the crane located outside the stadium instead of on the field.Courtesy of Denver Broncos

The Denver Broncos finished what was estimated to be approximately two years’ worth of work on Empower Field at Mile High during this past offseason, despite hosting nine events. It’s not a project schedule the stadium’s general manager, Jay Roberts, would wish upon any of his peers in the venue management world.

“I don’t have a lot of hair left, and I would have even less if I had to do this often,” he said. “In a perfect world, you’d have more time for planning and preparation in advance of the actual construction. But if you’re going to do major renovations, you have to do it between seasons, so, that’s never going to stop, where sports teams are going to try to knock out a whole lot of work in a summer.” 

The renovation stemmed from the Walton-Penner family’s acquisition of the team for $4.65 billion in June 2022.

“Their desire was to make an immediate, significant impact on the stadium,” said Broncos President Damani Leech, who was hired in August last year.   

The $100 million renovation project — the stadium’s owners, the Metropolitan Football Stadium District, pitched in $12 million, with the rest of the costs covered by the Broncos and NFL G4 funding — is the largest in the venue’s 22-year history. The work included a new video board that’s 70% larger than the previous one, conversion of an alumni gathering room into the Breckenridge Bourbon Club, total refurbishment of nearly 130 suites, a new team store in partnership with Aramark Sports + Entertainment, and a host of new amenities to improve fans’ food and beverage experiences and ability to move throughout the building.

Getting that done in the time frame the new ownership group wanted was a major challenge, especially with one of the busiest offseason event calendars in the venue’s history, highlighted by a pair of Taylor Swift shows. Divvying up the projects among various designers, builders, and service providers and vendors ultimately worked. 

“It was constantly a sprint, not just a run, since this project started,” Roberts said. “It caused my project team a little extra work because they had to deal with three different groups, times two, but I think it was the right decision in the end.” 

Divide and conquer

The team spent the 2022 NFL season developing its plans, then got league approval for G4 funding in December.

The first task was conceiving all the ways that fan experience could be enhanced at Mile High, then categorizing those ideas by the broadest impact (video board, concessions and team store), aspects of the stadium that hadn’t been touched in a long time (suites), and operational improvements that could be made (new elevators).

Because the projects didn’t overlap too much, it was deemed feasible to carve up the work among different designers and builders. They sent out separate requests for information to various architects, contractors, and vendors for each project.  

“As busy as the Denver market is and as busy as a lot of these contractors are, we wanted to be able to say, ‘Contractor A, you focus on these one or two projects. Contractor B and Architect B you focus on these projects,’ so that we could make sure we had their full attention,” Roberts said. “Even for some of these larger firms [it] might have been a challenge to put together a team to handle that.”  

That resulted in Turner Construction and DLR Group handling the suites; G.H. Phipps and Perkins & Will designed and built the Breckenridge Bourbon Club and took on the concessions work; Mortenson and HNTB installed the south end zone scoreboard and built the new team store; and Daktronics and Arrow Electronics designed and installed the video board.  

The Broncos missed the playoffs, so work began in mid-January. The Broncos’ internal project management team, headed by Roberts, Julie Siebert and Zach Myhra, juggled the design/build pairs, reporting updates to Leech on a biweekly basis.  

“It’s important to make it clear who’s responsible for what, in terms of actual physical spaces,” Leech said. “And the additional challenge that we took on was making sure, from an Aramark Sports + Entertainment standpoint because you have different companies working in different spaces, that the look and feel is at least cohesive around the building.” 

One of the Broncos’ new offerings this season will be the Breckenridge Bourbon Club. Courtesy of Denver Broncos

The work

The 72-foot-tall, 225-foot-wide video board, built and installed by Daktronics and now the fifth-largest scoreboard in an NFL stadium, is the most noticeable change.

To install the new board, workers had to drill nearly a hundred feet into the bedrock to make sure the structure could withstand wind load. Massive cranes were needed to lift the board modules, but instead of placing the cranes inside the stadium on the field and having to remove them for events, Mortenson kept them outside the stadium, meaning work had to stop only on the day of an event. That was critical with Supercross, Monster Jam, two festivals, and five concerts on the offseason event docket. 

Extensive improvements were made to the LED ribbon boards throughout the seating bowl and north scoreboard, as well as the control room operating the system. The Daktronics package also included a new forced perspective board on one of the concourses that creates the kind of 3D illusions that are commonplace in big LED advertising boards at Times Square in Manhattan, for example.  

Permanent concessions were installed on the South Deck for the first time in the venue’s history, part of a larger F&B project in concert with concessionaire Aramark Sports + Entertainment aimed at reducing lines and increasing variety. And the new team store is 25% larger than before, with more point-of-sale systems, expanded checkout areas and, for the first time, customer restrooms.  

Premium was spruced up, too, including the new field-level, 350-fan-capacity Breckenridge Bourbon Club. Leech said the team felt like it “owed it to our ticket holders” to improve the suites, which hadn’t been significantly changed since the stadium opened. Fixtures, flooring and surfaces, and artwork and furniture were replaced and modernized.  

“As suite terms come to conclusion, we’ve built in some fairly modest price increases for that,” Leech said, “but we didn’t view this as ‘we’re going to do this and immediately charge everyone extra for it.’”