The Broncos drafted two wide receivers this year and both Carlos Henderson and Isaiah McKenzie offer the team potential solutions to issues in the return game that plagued the team all of last season.
Their arrival is going to make it tougher for some Broncos holdovers to make this year’s team. It’s hard to imagine Henderson, a third-round pick, getting cut under any circumstances and McKenzie, a fifth-round selection, would have to be a pretty major flop to fail to make the team, so space gets scarce once you pencil them in along with starters Demaryius Thomas and Emmanuel Sanders.
Cody Latimer, Jordan Taylor, Kalif Raymond and Bennie Fowler return from last season’s roster and Marlon Brown is back after a back injury put him out of commission last year.
“That’s a full room,” coach Vance Joseph said, via Jeff Legwold of ESPN.com. “We drafted two young guys who are going to help us in that spot. It was a good room last year. We added, in my opinion, more speed. We added a guy in Isaiah who can do a bunch of different things for us on the offensive side of the football. When you draft guys that have a shot, it does naturally motivate guys. It should. … It’s going to be a tough decision in terms of who makes our football team, but that’s the way it should be.”
Latimer, a 2014 second-round pick, has caught 16 passes over his first three seasons and his failure to develop as hoped helped make Henderson and McKenzie appealing to the Broncos in April. If the rookies show enough this summer, Latimer could be out of chances to make good on what the Broncos saw in him coming out of college.