Melvin Gordon has a new team
Melvin Gordon has a new NFL team… but he is staying in the same division.
Gordon is headed to the Mile High City to play for the Denver Broncos. Ian Rapoport of NFL Network tweeted the news at the end of a very busy week in professional football:
If we do have a 2020 NFL season — and right now, none of us should be making any assumptions whatsoever about the trajectory of coronavirus and our country’s ability to return to some semblance of stability — the two games between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Denver Broncos will be appointment television. Gordon’s relationship with the Chargers was anything but comfortable the past 15 months. The fact that he moved to an AFC West rival makes the division clash between the Chargers and Broncos that much more of a hate-fest.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chiefs-Raiders was the ultimate rivalry among the teams in the current AFC West. In the late 1970s, Broncos-Raiders was the hot rivalry in the division, and that rivalry resurfaced in the mid-to-late 1980s. In the early 1980s, Raiders-Chargers was the sexy AFC West clash. In the mid-to-late 1990s, Broncos-Chiefs became the AFC West rivalry which captured national attention.
The height of the Broncos-Chargers rivalry enjoyed two brief periods: One was in the middle of the 2000s, when both teams were Super Bowl threats. Denver made the AFC Championship Game in the 2005 season. The Chargers were 14-2 in 2006 and reached the AFC title game in the 2007 season. The other high point of the Broncos-Chargers rivalry emerged when Peyton Manning played for Denver. He and Philip Rivers met in high-stakes regular season games plus the 2013 divisional playoff game won by the Broncos.
The Kansas City Chiefs are still the Super Bowl champions, and their games with the Chargers have been the most important AFC West games over the past three seasons. However, Melvin Gordon moving to the Rocky Mountains makes Broncos-Chargers an AFC West clash which will be impossible to ignore… once football does return (and we don’t know when that will be).
Drew Lock will face Tyrod Taylor in the quarterback matchup between the Broncos and Chargers, but when these two teams take the field, all eyes will be on the running back for the Broncos, not the two signal-callers.
Melvin Gordon just made the NFL a spicier, more interesting place.
