When the Denver Broncos take the field next Sunday as they host the Kansas City Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes, they’ll have a brand new, freshly installed playing surface.

The Walton-Penner Family Ownership group has proven that they’ll turn over every stone and every blade of grass to ensure players have a high-quality and safe playing surface to play on as they continue to invest in player safety.

This has become a customary practice for the ownership group since they took over in 2022. They purchase the sod a year in advance so that they can deploy it and place the new surface down whenever the time is right.

From investing in player recovery initiatives to steadfast maintenance of the playing surface, Broncos’ ownership continues to support its athletes on and off the field. With the team sitting at 8-2, and in a position to put themselves in the driver’s seat for a postseason shot, if the Broncos host a playoff game, they’ll do so on a cutting-edge surface built for peak performance.

The ownership group believes in having a high-quality playing surface to give players their best chance at staying healthy. It’s the little details like this that matter, and players inside the locker room believe the Walton-Penner Family Ownership group is willing to do anything and everything to help the team succeed on and off the field, which has been reflected for three straight years in the NFLPA’s Player Report Cards.

Following the Broncos 10-7 win against the Las Vegas Raiders on Thursday Night Football, the process began two hours after the game ended in tearing out the current field surface, which has been in place since Aug. 3, following the final concert of the summer season at Empower Field at Mile High.

Chris Hathaway, the Director of Turf and Grounds at Empower Field, and his crew began the process of installing the grass we’ve seen for the first half of Denver’s season, following the Aug. 2 concert headlined by The Lumineers.

Hathaway and his team had until Aug. 16, the date of the Broncos’ only home preseason game, to get the field ready. That timeframe was 14 days to have it ready.

This time around, Chris and his staff will have had nine days total to get the field ready for Sunday, which is the shortest turnaround to date.

“We typically like a couple of weeks before the team comes back to play on a new field,” Hathaway said. “But with the way the schedule kind of landed, the weather, just a couple of different factors, we decided to do it after this game, ahead of the Kansas City game next week — definitely super tight. We can easily pull it off, and I think the field will play really well for the Kansas City game next week.”

The work began around 11:00 p.m. on Thursday night by removing the goal posts, sprinkler heads so that Chris and his team could begin the removal process at 6:00 a.m. on Friday morning, cutting an inch and a half around the entire playing field surface, grading the dirt underneath the old surface to ensure it’s as smooth as possible, and replacing it with new sod that contains that same inch and a half thickness as the removed field surface did.

“If all goes well, we’ll put out 115 rolls of sod by the end of Friday,” Hathaway said. “With another couple of hundred rolls of sod tomorrow. So hopefully by 3 P.M. Saturday afternoon, this field will be fully replaced and ready to go for Kansas City next week.”

With November hitting and temperatures fluctuating between cold and warm, the Broncos’ mini-bye week allows the newly installed surface to receive some direct sunlight, but the stadium also has technology that can help the process facilitate itself smoothly.

“We have a soil heating system under the field, so we’re able to warm that soil up to kind of trick the grass into thinking it’s more fall as we head into winter. But definitely doing it a little earlier in the year is always better. But we have a plan to take care of this throughout the regular season and into the playoffs if we have to. We have soil heat and growth tarps. We have soil, and we have growth lights as well. So we’re giving the grass that extra sunlight that it’s losing in the natural sunlight that it typically gets in September. So we’re able to replace that.”

The new field surface is in place and will receive a lot of attention this week from Hathaway and his team, and fans will have their chance to see it in person on Sunday when they pack the stands for the Broncos’ most important game yet, against Mahomes and the Chiefs.