Renck: Starting Bo Nix Was Right Decision. But Soon Enough, Broncos’ Sean Payton Will Have To Defend It.

BOULDER — CU Buffs coach Deion Sanders isn’t shutting the door on a return to action for transfer and former Ohio State tailback Dallan Hayden. But how open that door is for the Baylor game this weekend at Folsom Field remains to be seen. “We don’t know where he is right now or what he wants to do,” Sanders said during his weekly news conference when asked for an update on Hayden, who didn’t play in the win over Colorado State last weekend.

If the Colorado Avalanche ever has a full allotment of healthy forwards during the 2024-25 season, it could be the best group in the NHL. For now, the word “if” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The Avs begin training camp Thursday, and the expectation is that captain Gabe Landeskog and jack-of-all-trades Artturi Lehkonen won’t be ready while they recover from injuries.

The Nuggets are hiring former Denver Post reporter Mike Singer as director of intelligence and strategy as they make a series of front office hires and promotions before the 2024-25 NBA season, a league source told The Denver Post. Singer served as the Nuggets beat writer at The Post for five seasons until he left the newspaper in 2023, two months after covering the franchise’s first championship.

Denver Post Broncos writer Parker Gabriel posts his Broncos Mailbag weekly during the season and periodically during the offseason. Click here to submit a question. I’m not worried about Bo Nix. I doubt he’ll threaten Peyton Manning’s rookie record for interceptions. But the failure of the run game is puzzling. There seems to be a decent hole maybe three times a game.

FORT COLLINS — Surely, Kansas State wasn’t allegedly offering CSU quarterback Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi $600,000 in NIL money just to hand off and get the heck out of the way. “I have slowed the game down on offense a little bit,” Rams football coach Jay Norvell explained Monday at Canvas Stadium, “because we were playing some really talented people these first three weeks and I felt like, to give our defense a chance, I needed to slow down the game a little bit and run it a little bit more.” The problem isn’t that the Rams are fighting Shedeur Sanders.

CASTLE PINES — Logan O’Connor was well on his way to a breakout season for the Colorado Avalanche, and then a roadblock years in the making got in the way. O’Connor set a career-high last season with 13 goals and was going to easily secure a new top mark in points before a torn labrum in his hip ended his campaign in early March. “That was frustrating.