In days after cancer surgery, Broncos' Alex Singleton is still helping Denver's linebackers

Luca Evans, The Denver Post on Nov 13, 2025

Published in Football

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DENVER — Somehow, Alex Singleton was smiling.

He smiles often. He has been cut in the NFL “10 times,” as Denver defensive coordinator Vance Joseph recalled Thursday, and still smiles. Singleton has smiled through a career resuscitation in the Canadian Football League, and through a torn ACL that wiped out his 2024 season.

And last week, when Singleton broke some stunning personal news to his defensive coordinator, Joseph found himself more immediately upset than the guy who’d just told him he had testicular cancer.

I’m going to be all right, Joseph recalled Singleton telling him, while smiling. We caught it early.

“My first thoughts was him and his family,” Joseph said Thursday. “It wasn’t football at all. And I made him understand that it wasn’t about football. Like, take care of your family, and make sure you’re OK.”

Of course, much of it was still about football for Singleton, a linebacker who played 58 snaps the day before he had surgery to remove a testicular tumor. He hasn’t practiced the last two days, and is all but assured to miss the Broncos’ matchup with the Chiefs on Sunday while awaiting results. On Thursday, though, Singleton was still seen at the facility talking with Joseph — smiling, of course — after practice.

He still made every meeting and every road trip while dealing with last year’s torn ACL, Joseph recalled. And Singleton has been in every meeting this week, Joseph said Thursday, trying to coach up erstwhile replacement Justin Strnad and the rest of the room.

“He’s so important to our team,” Joseph said, “because of that leadership.”

His intangibles will become a tangible loss on Sunday in a monster matchup with Kansas City. Singleton is a bastion of both the locker room and the Broncos’ defensive identity. His grind-it-out story is one of the best on a defense full of them, and he shares those stories constantly to younger players, Joseph said. And he wears the green dot, trusted to communicate Joseph’s calls, for a reason.

Joseph teed up one coverage last week against Las Vegas that was “a little bit off,” the coordinator reflected. Singleton fixed it.

“His football IQ,” Joseph said, “allows me to call games a certain way.”

It’s an unenviable absence as one of the smartest quarterbacks in the league comes to town Sunday. The Broncos have held Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes to two touchdowns, three picks and an 82.4 quarterback rating in three games in the Sean Payton Era in Denver. But this may be the most difficult matchup for Joseph yet. The Chiefs now have their full stable of weapons back, with No. 1 wideout Rashee Rice at four total touchdowns in three games since his return from a six-game suspension for his role in a March 2024 car crash.

“Having (No.) 4 come back has really helped,” Payton said of Rice on Wednesday. “He’s been something.”

Denver’s defense — now sitting at first in the NFL in yards-per-play surrendered — hasn’t broken down much this year. When it has, as Strnad explained to The Denver Post, it’s been at times because of miscommunications in Joseph’s match-coverage scheme. Now, the Broncos will likely be checking Rice and the still-dominant Travis Kelce without two key communicators in Singleton and reigning defensive player of the year Pat Surtain (pectoral).

Strnad filled in capably at will linebacker last year, but isn’t a natural mike linebacker. Joseph will likely turn to him to fill Singleton’s shoes, as Dre Greenlaw is more of an off-ball backer and has considerably less experience in Joseph’s system.

“Obviously, anytime the green-dot guy, the mike-backer goes down on a defense, it obviously has its effects on things,” Strnad said Monday.

“We’re obviously going to prepare to beat the Chiefs,” Strnad continued, a few words later. “It’s 11 guys on the field, and we’ll get it all figured out.”