If your buddy with Broncos season tickets is complaining about Sean Payton’s load management, he might be a few bricks short of a load himself.

A week into NFL training camps and it’s already brutal out there. And not just because of the heat.

The Giants’ Cam Skattebo, who’s built like, and plays like, a giant mountain goat, left practice Friday. So did ace edge-rusher Brian Burns. The Seahawks’ Jadarian Price got dinged with lower body soreness. The Packers’ Josh Jacobs suffered a groin injury this past Thursday.

Pro football is one of those games in which the world’s best sprinters have to prepare for a marathon. You can’t win a division title in early August. But if a critical player goes down with an injury, you can sure as heck lose one.

“I don’t like the term. I feel (very) NBA when I hear ‘load management,’ right?” Payton told reporters Thursday at Dove Valley. “But I believe in the science.”

So do the wanna-be scientists up in the Grading The Week (GTW) offices, come to think of it. Which is why we’re glad to see Payton and his staff exercise discretion over the first seven or eight practices of training camp with Broncos veterans as opposed to trying to exercise them to death.

Broncos load management — B

It’s a tricky balance. The only way to master a violent game is to practice violence, repeatedly. The old fuddy-duddies among the GTW crew are now well-known for complaining about the state of NFL tackling in the 2020s, much to the chagrin of the younger crowd. They often speak of tackling as if it were some lost martial art, practiced by shoguns with single-bar facemasks.

On the flip side, the goal here is to be playing football until early February, and your “best” football from, say, late November onwards. The Broncos aren’t The Junction Boys, and Paul “Bear” Bryant has been dead for 43 years.

So if Payton chooses to keep vets such as 30-year-old wideout Courtland Sutton, who blew out his knee early in the 2020 season, on a pitch count until the middle of the month, by golly, that’s good by us. Especially after a week in which two of Sutton’s fellow receivers, Jaylen Waddle and Marvin Mims, Jr., both appeared to tweak something over the first few padded practices of camp. Nik Bonitto and Luke Wattenberg suffered injury scares early in the week, while Friday saw Mims, Nate Adkins and Matt Henningsen all leave practice early — and the latter via a cart.

So if said pal continues to fret about the Broncos being “physically ready” for September 14 in Kansas City, or the rigors of a Week 1-6 stretch that features (and the NFL did this on purpose, surely), the Chiefs, the Jaguars, the Rams, the 49ers, the Chargers and the Seahawks, ask him if he can name the NFL’s “preseason champion” from last year. Or, heck, any “preseason champ” since 2006. We’ll wait.

Rockies’ trade deadline tweaks — C

Rebuilding the Purple and Black from Rox bottom was always going to be a process — and a long one — for Paul DePodesta and Josh Byrnes. And nothing about their trade deadline activity affected our trust in said process. That’s a good thing.

Also good: The club’s top five minor-league prospects, according to MLB.com, are all still here. So is catcher Hunter Goodman, who was never likely to be moved. And outfielders Mickey Moniak (age 28) and Jake McCarthy (29), which was more of a surprise, given their experience and their left-handed bats. Maybe other teams were less enamored with the two veterans’ respective gloves — Moniak sported a minus-2 Defensive Runs Saved total, per FieldingBible.com, heading into the weekend, while McCarthy was at minus-4.

If there’s a “down” side, it’s the logjam that remains in front of top hitting prospects, Charlie Condon and Zac Veen. And you tend to get what you give — and when you’re giving away a light-hitting outfielder and two set-up arms, you can’t expect much in return. Of the three minor-league arms acquired, Mason Adams (ex-White Sox) is now, according to MLB.com, the eighth-best arm in the farm system, while Aiden May (ex-Marlins) is now No. 10.

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