Watch highlights of Demaryius Thomas' best plays with the Broncos

Watch highlights of Demaryius Thomas' best plays with the Broncos
Demaryius Thomas was, without question, one of the greatest wide receivers in Denver Broncos history.
Statistically, he only trails Rod Smith on the team's all-time receiving list for yards (9,055) and touchdowns (60). He also holds franchise records for the most 100-yard games (33) and the most postseason receptions (53). Although it came in a losing effort, he also set a then-record with 13 receptions in Super Bowl XLVIII, and he scored Denver's only touchdown in that game.
That record has since been broken by James White (14 receptions in Super Bowl LI), but DT was probably even prouder of his Super Bowl 50 ring that came two seasons after the record-setting loss in Super Bowl XLVIII. Following the receiver's election to the Broncos Ring of Fame, here are highlights from his time in Denver:
Still looking for more? The NFL has 33 minutes of highlights on its YouTube page:
The Broncos also shared mic'd up footage of Thomas on their Twitter/X page:
One of the greatest in franchise history. LLDT.
Related: These 25 celebrities are Broncos fans.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

USA Today

44 minutes ago

• USA Today

Broncos roster: RB Blake Watson (No. 25) fighting for spot in crowded backfield

Broncos Wire's 90-man offseason roster series continues today with a look at second-year running back Blake Watson, No. 25. Before the Broncos: Watson (5-9, 195 pounds) was a five-year player in college, playing for Old Dominion from 2018-2022 and a lone year at Memphis. Watson played in 36 games for Old Dominion (ODU did not play any games in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), with 398 carries for 2,146 yards and 14 rushing touchdowns. Watson also had 60 receptions for 448 yards and three touchdowns in his time with the Monarchs. In his lone year with the Tigers, Watson had a productive season, hitting career-high marks across the board. In 2023, Watson rushed for 1,152 yards on 192 carries and 14 touchdowns, catching 53 passes for 480 yards and three touchdowns. Watson's 14 rushing touchdowns and 17 total touchdowns both led the American Conference Broncos tenure: Watson was signed by the Broncos as an undrafted free agent after the 2024 NFL draft. He had a quiet 2024, playing in two games for the Broncos, with only four carries for 10 yards and one catch for 13 yards. Chances to make the 53-man roster: Probably a practice squad candidate. Watson finds himself in a very crowded running back room in 2025. Watson will have to battle for his life against newly signed running back J.K. Dobbins, rookie RJ Harvey, Audric Estime, Jaleel McLaughlin and Tyler Badie. If Watson can't make it on the 53-man roster, he would likely be a top candidate for the practice squad. Related: These 25 celebrities are Broncos fans.

New York Times

an hour ago

• New York Times

A Broncos coach stared at life's ‘scariest time.' The team made sure he didn't face it alone

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Zack Grossi rehearsed the pitch countless times. He envisioned Sean Payton sitting in front of him, peppering him with questions about his background or how he viewed the next frontier of NFL offense. The interview had been conducted over and over again before it actually arrived. Advertisement 'I had all this practice of what I was going to say,' Grossi said. 'I was ready.' It was early 2023. Payton had just been hired as the Denver Broncos' head coach, but he spent the first couple weeks of his tenure finishing the last assignment from his previous job: providing commentary for Fox ahead of the Super Bowl. Grossi had just finished his first season as an offensive quality control coach in Denver, but his coaching future, like that of many of Denver's assistants following Nathaniel Hackett's firing, was in limbo. Finally, Payton returned to Denver, ready to finish assembling his staff. 'He comes back from the Super Bowl and walks around to my desk,' Grossi said. 'and he goes, 'Hey, what's up?' I say, 'Hey, Coach.' I had all this stuff planned, all these (film) cut-ups, had it all planned. But he goes, 'I'm gonna keep you on my staff.' I go, 'Awesome.' He goes, 'OK, I'll see ya.' That was it.' Payton had already done his homework. He had interviewed Grossi for an opening in New Orleans five years earlier. Though the head coach went a different direction with that role, Payton left impressed with the young assistant. Payton eventually made Grossi his pass game specialist, assigning him primarily to Denver's wide receivers. What followed was a blur of nonstop work as the new staff went about the task of turning around a franchise that hadn't been to the playoffs in nearly a decade. Practices, meetings, game days, film review, one unrelenting block of the football calendar bleeding into another. Grossi, who spent part of his childhood on the sidelines at Tampa Bay Buccaneers games while his dad ran security operations with the team, loved being in the middle of it all. 'The game was love at first sight,' Grossi said. 'There was never anything else for me.' That's what made the quiet so deafening as the 35-year-old sat alone on his back porch on an early October afternoon last year. Grossi had just been on a two-week road trip with the Broncos from Florida to West Virginia to New Jersey, which included two season-altering victories. As Broncos coaches and players spent their Wednesday afternoon in the thick of another week of game preparation, Grossi stared ahead, contemplating the news he had just received. Advertisement A massive tumor was growing in his chest. And he had no idea what came next. 'It's just like, boom, everything stops,' he said. 'Your whole world gets flipped upside down.' Just as Grossi was collecting himself, sharing the news with his wife, Jacqueline, his phone pinged with a message from Greg Penner. The Broncos' owner told the young assistant that he and fellow owner Carrie Walton Penner were fully behind him as he began what would be a brutal, whirlwind battle over the next four months. What Grossi didn't know at the time was that Penner had already funneled that same message to others throughout Broncos headquarters. That set the stage for an 'overwhelming' amount of support that would prove critical for Grossi and his family as they stepped into the unknown of fighting a cancerous tumor that came with an avalanche of complications. 'It's not realistic in this profession, but I hope I can work for Greg and Carrie for the rest of my life,' Grossi said earlier this month as he looked out at the Broncos' practice field following an OTA workout. 'That's the only way I can scratch the surface of beginning to repay them for what they did for me.' The first warning signs were easy enough to shrug off. Grossi couldn't sleep after the 2023 season ended. He tossed and turned. His body was restless, unable to get comfortable. He'd drift off, only to jolt awake again. 'I ignored it,' he said. 'I'm like, 'It's probably just because we had a long season. It is what it is.'' Grossi figured he needed to lose weight. He began doing 22-minute walks on an inclined treadmill. He then closed the workout by sprinting for three minutes. He paid more attention to his diet. Pounds started falling off. His weight kept dropping, even when training camp for the 2024 season arrived, and Grossi entered more of a maintenance stage with his workout and diet regimen. Advertisement 'I'm like, 'Man, my metabolism must just be going,'' Grossi said with a laugh. ''All the work I did, I created this monster of a guy.'' Grossi began experiencing neck pain as the season approached. He was treated for stenosis, reasoning it was related to his football playing career, which began when he was 6 years old and included four years as a quarterback at Concord University in West Virginia. Soon, he couldn't finish the three-minute sprint. He cut it back to 90 seconds instead and kept pushing. When he began feeling his heart beat while he lay on his side in bed, Grossi chalked it up to his excitement and anxiety about the season ahead. What he knows now is that he could feel his heart because the tumor was actively pushing it against his rib cage. 'You just rationalize everything,' Grossi said. 'You never think something's wrong.' Grossi kicks himself now for ignoring the signals his body was sending. 'I was an idiot,' he says. He has transformed into a staunch advocate for early screening. However, his mindset while muting alarm bells wasn't unusual. 'The culture of football is, 'You've got to be tough,'' said Broncos offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi, whose grandfather, legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, died at 57 following a brief battle with an aggressive form of colon cancer. 'You have an ache and pain or something's bothering you, and you say, 'I'm just going to tough it out.' Shoot, it happened to my grandpa. He had cancer and was like, 'Gah, I got to be tougher.' Never got it checked out. You chalk it up to the grind. … It's a wake-up call for all of us. If something's wrong, get it checked out.' By the time the Broncos began their long road trip late last September, Grossi had added a constant, pernicious cough to his list of ailments. As the Broncos practiced through a rainy week in West Virginia, members of Denver's staff began expressing concern. Advertisement 'He's like, 'I haven't been sleeping.' I'm like, 'What do you mean you're not sleeping? We're exhausted,'' recalled Logan Kilgore, a Broncos offensive quality control coach and close friend of Grossi's on Denver's staff. 'The last thing I was thinking about doing when I go back to my room is staying awake. … He's telling me, 'Man, I just feel like I can't catch my breath.'' The day after the Broncos returned to Denver following a win against the New York Jets, Grossi met with trainer Paul Burant, seeking treatment for his cough. Burant sensed a deeper issue and set up Grossi with a team physician. An abnormal heart rate raised concern. Grossi was sent for bloodwork. On Wednesday, he had MRI scans. They revealed a cancerous mass in his chest that a biopsy would later reveal to be a yolk sac tumor. Grossi was in tears as he delivered the news to Jacqueline, whom he calls 'the toughest person I know.' He still marvels at his wife's reaction. 'She doesn't even blink,' Grossi said. 'She says, 'We have to kill it.' I'm a wreck. She's like, 'Calm down. We just have to kill it.' She never wavered from that. She was so positive.' Jacqueline had seen her husband scratch out the career they envisioned after meeting 16 years ago as students at Concord, where Grossi said he was a 'good, not great' quarterback. She knew he wasn't afraid of a hard path. Grossi worked for a year as a graduate assistant at Concord following his playing career, then was hired by Buccaneers general manager Jason Licht in a scouting assistant role in 2014. When Dirk Koetter was hired as Tampa's head coach two years later, he pulled Grossi onto his staff, first as the assistant to the head coach and then in a quality control role. 'I was just really impressed with his work ethic and his hustle around the office,' Koetter said. 'He was a guy that was in there early and would stay late. He would do all the little things. So I asked Jason if I could take Zack onto the coaching staff, and he agreed. He was a jack of all trades. He would help us get prepared for team meetings. You could tell he was a sharp guy who knew football, knew technology and wasn't afraid of the hours.' Koetter was fired after the 2018 season, and new head coach Bruce Arians hired an entirely new staff. Grossi entered the college ranks, first as the quarterbacks coach at Hampton University in 2019 and then as the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Southern University. His chance to get back into the NFL on Hackett's staff in 2022 meant accepting that he would need to push up the rungs of the coaching ladder once again. Advertisement 'Me and Zack have always agreed on this fighter mentality,' Jacqueline said. 'We were just like, 'Hey, we are going to fight our way out of it.' It's kind of what we had been through while chasing this career and stuff like that. We're like, 'This is just a different fight.'' It was a fight that was new to Grossi and his wife, neither of whom had dealt with cancer diagnoses among their family members. What Grossi knows now is that it helps to have 'a bulldog' in your corner when charting out a fight against cancer. He had one in Beau Lowery, the Broncos' vice president of player health and performance. Lowery helped schedule Grossi's biopsy and set him up with an expedited treatment plan, which included an initial, five-day round of chemo that began just one week after Grossi's initial diagnosis. He charted a blueprint that helped the young assistant grasp what he was facing. 'He was so instrumental in that early part of everything,' Grossi said. The best-laid plans for Grossi during the next four months came with their fair share of setbacks. He was initially scheduled to go through his entire treatment at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, but days before the scheduled flight to Texas, he began coughing up blood and had to be admitted to CU Anschutz hospital just outside Denver. It was there he met Dr. Laura Graham, the on-call oncologist who happened to specialize in the exact kind of germ-cell tumor Grossi was battling. 'It was a miracle she was working that night,' Grossi said. 'I meet her and she tells me, 'Hey, this is what you've got, and this is the treatment plan.' She said, 'I think you need to start chemo tomorrow.' I'm like, 'OK, here we go.' Once I got the treatment plan, it became a very clear opponent every day. 'This is what you have to do.' … It was fourth-and-1 every day.' Two days after Grossi finished his first round of chemo, he felt better. He was breathing easier. His bloodwork revealed that the medicine was already impacting the tumor. The next day, though, Grossi felt like he had an anvil on his chest. He couldn't walk up the stairs. He couldn't catch his breath. He developed a fever, a worrying sign because the chemo treatment left his body's immune system compromised. Advertisement The culprits were blood clots that had developed in the PICC line used to deliver the chemo through his body. One of the clots traveled to Grossi's lungs, resulting in a pulmonary embolism. 'I was in bad shape — real bad shape,' Grossi said. 'That was the lowest, scariest time. I called my dad and had some tough conversations. 'This is where I want to be buried. My financial people, this is their number. They'll have everything.' You are trying to set up things for your wife and your daughter. That was the scariest time.' Grossi was battling on multiple fronts. He was dealing with the chemo, the medicine's side effects and now the clots that forced him to be on blood thinners. It created a complicated dance, all as doctors tried to stabilize Grossi enough to stay on schedule for his next round of chemo. 'I remember one of the doctors saying, 'This is one of the most complex cases I've ever been on,'' Jacqueline recalled. 'It's usually more straightforward. Like, 'OK, this is the cancer, and this is what we're going to do.' He just had so many little things that were popping up that had to make them regroup and say, 'OK, what's our strategy?' That was hard.' Graham and Grossi's medical team ultimately found the right balance of treatments to treat the blood clots and prepare the coach for his next round of chemo. Meanwhile, the Broncos sent in reinforcements. Ema Thake, the team's nutritionist, would make the 30-minute drive from the team facility to Anschutz to bring customized meals for Grossi, helping him limit weight loss as a result of the chemo treatments. Joe Harrington, the team's director of football video, set Grossi up with a film system so he could watch cut-ups during treatments and while he recovered at his house between rounds. Staff members Pam Papsdorf and Adam Newman helped book travel and hotel reservations for Grossi's family so they could be at his side during treatment. The team sent meal-delivery gift cards for the family to use while they sat with Grossi at the hospital. Kilgore would call Grossi on his drives home after marathon game-planning sessions, 'making sure he still felt connected to what we were doing.' General manager George Paton and his wife also checked in routinely. The Broncos' medical team stayed in close contact. 'I was taken aback,' Jacqueline said. 'I think I underestimated how much they would help. They were awesome from the get-go, from the first day Zack got the diagnosis. There were constant texts and encouragement. It was awesome.' Advertisement As Grossi recovered from the blood clots and delved into his second and third rounds of chemo, a goal materialized. The Broncos were on track for their first playoff appearance since 2015, and Grossi wanted to be a part of it. In the middle of November, as Grossi was ascending from the neutropenic 'dip' that immediately follows a chemo treatment, he was cleared to visit the team facility. After the Broncos went through their final walk-through before a home game against the Atlanta Falcons, Payton asked Grossi to break the team down in the final huddle. Grossi was still frail. He wore a beanie, the chemo having taken his hair. But he reveled in the camaraderie with players, several of whom pulled him aside to share ways cancer had impacted their own families. It was all a reminder of the finish line Grossi was trying to reach. 'He's a fighter,' Payton said. 'It's inspiring.' Grossi finished his final round of chemo ahead of the Broncos' regular-season finale against the Kansas City Chiefs. He returned to practice that week. He prepared to coach in the game that Sunday afternoon, Denver needing a victory to secure its playoff spot. But on Friday, his body began sounding alarm bells. Grossi was quick to listen. 'I know something's wrong. I go to the care clinic, they swab me, and they're like, 'You've got COVID,'' Grossi said. 'Not a huge deal for a normal person, but for someone in the middle of chemo, they're like, 'I wouldn't do the game.'' Grossi was sidelined for one more week, but Denver's victory against the Chiefs set up a playoff matchup against the Bills on Jan. 12. He was scheduled for surgery to remove the shrunken tumor in February but was cleared to travel with the team. Grossi found his familiar seat in the coaching booth above Highmark Stadium. He stared down at the field, taking it in, ruminating on all that had taken place over the past four months. He thought about his wife's strength. He still laughs at the image of Jacqueline rolling a fridge through the hospital, one that the Broncos supplied so he could store the customized meals they were sending. So many hands had helped pull him here, to his first NFL playoff game as a coach, and Grossi reflected on all of them. Advertisement Then, it was time to work. 'I got back on the headset, the full thing,' Grossi said. 'There was a moment in the game where I was talking on the headset, and Sean goes, 'Who is this?' I was like, 'It's Zack Grossi, baby! Let's roll!' Everyone started laughing. So making it back for the playoff game was very special. Everybody was unbelievable.' 'It was like he never missed a beat,' Kilgore said. 'He was just sharp. The things that he would bring up situationally and the things he would provide on game day, it was like he picked up where he left off in Week 4. He had clearly stayed connected to what was going on (with the team), and with everything else that was going on, I think that provided some normalcy.' Five weeks after the loss to the Bills, Grossi had his tumor removed by MD Anderson surgeon Wayne Hofstetter — 'an absolute beast,' as Grossi calls the doctor. The resulting scans revealed the Broncos assistant was completely cancer-free. During the days that followed the surgery, Grossi broke down film from his hospital room in Houston. By the time the Broncos hosted their rookie minicamp in May, Grossi was back on the field, working with a new group of young receivers. A bright coaching future remains firmly in front of him once again. He just spends less time getting lost on that horizon. 'You just appreciate every bit of what you're doing right now,' Grossi said. 'There is never a moment where you're looking like, 'Man, I'm ready for this to be over.' Like, 'I'm getting out of here today; I've got the weekend off.' You're never looking at anything like that ever again. It's much easier to be where your feet are.'

Yahoo

10 hours ago

• Yahoo

Denver Nuggets Nearly Made Kevin Durant Decision During Offseason

Denver Nuggets Nearly Made Kevin Durant Decision During Offseason originally appeared on Athlon Sports. The Denver Nuggets are coming off a season in which they surprised many. First, it was the decision to fire head coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth just days before the end of the regular season. As a result, the Nuggets went into the playoffs with an interim head coach, David Adelman. Advertisement Some thought that the decision would prove to be a death sentence. Although still early, it proved to be the right move in the first round of the NBA Playoffs, as the team defeated the Los Angeles Clippers in seven games, who were one of the hottest teams in the NBA entering the playoffs. Nov 22, 2024; Denver, Colorado, USA; Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic (15) controls the ball under pressure from Dallas Mavericks guard Jaden Hardy (1) in the first quarter at Ball Arena. © Isaiah J. Downing-Imagn Images Denver Nuggets nearly made Kevin Durant decision In the second round, the Nuggets met up with the Oklahoma City Thunder. To that point, the Thunder had looked nearly invincible, making quick work of the Memphis Grizzlies in a sweep. Many believed that dominance would continue after the grueling Clippers series, but the Nuggets gave the Thunder a decent run for their money before falling short in Game 7. Advertisement The Nuggets lacked depth and top-tier talent outside of Nikola Jokic. Likely looking to make a trade in the offseason, the Nuggets were a surprise contender for the services of Kevin Durant, according to Shams Charania, before he was ultimately traded to the Houston Rockets. It's fun to imagine what such a trade package would've looked like from Denver's end. To make the salaries work, it would likely have had to involve Jamal Murray, or, more likely, Michael Porter Jr. in addition to young players like Peyton Watson, Julian Strawther or Christian Braun. Now, the Nuggets will look elsewhere to add depth to attempt to keep up in what will likely once again be a tough Western Conference. Contending next year should be Denver's top priority if they don't want to risk Jokic asking for a trade. If they can't build upon what they accomplished this season and at least get back to the Conference Finals, that's very well what could happen. This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jun 22, 2025, where it first appeared.