Broncos ILB Alex Singleton had surgery Friday after testicular cancer diagnosis

DENVER — When Alex Singleton first got the results of a random drug test late last month, he didn’t know what to think.

The 31-year-old Broncos linebacker is diligent about what he puts in his body. How could he have been flagged for elevated levels of human chorionic gonadotropin — a hormone that produces progesterone?

Singleton could hardly have been prepared for the eventual answer: Testicular cancer.

Singleton was diagnosed a week ago after a visit to a urologist and subsequent ultrasound work. They’d caught the cancer early, but still needed to remove the tumor surgically as soon as possible.

Singleton, though, wanted to play in Denver’s Thursday night game against Las Vegas. So he put one of the worst words in the English language — ”Cancer’s a scary word. It still is. It freaks me out just saying it,” he told reporters Monday — out of his mind as best he could. He played all 60 snaps in a 10-7 win, the Broncos’ seventh straight, then had surgery Friday.

“Football’s always been an outlet for me and always will be, so to be able to play Thursday and, honestly, the short week made it better,” Singleton said. “Tuesday and Wednesday, I got to fully immerse myself in football and not really — get this off my mind as best I could. We weren’t going to know anything until after the surgery anyway.”

He told only a few teammates before the game about what he faced. Then he told the rest of the team Monday in the group’s 10 a.m. team meeting.

“It was just nothing but support and love,” Singleton said. “I feel like I’m disappointing them more having to miss a game. That’s how I feel about it, you know, it’s such a shock and such news to me.

“Just having love and support from them means so much. They care so much about my health, and it means a lot.”

“Obviously, we were all surprised by it,” fellow inside linebacker Justin Strnad said. “… It’s big news and I’m just glad that everybody’s here to support him and give him everything he needs in this time.”

Singleton, a Thousand Oaks, Calif., native, said he definitely will not play Sunday against Kansas City, but that if the rest of his diagnostic testing comes back with good news — he and his doctors believe it will, given the screening and testing done so far — then he plans to be “back up and running” soon. Denver does not plan on placing him on injured reserve, setting the stage for a return as early as Nov. 30 at Washington or perhaps in the week or two following.

Of course, whether Singleton misses one game, three or somewhere in between is hardly as important as getting his cancer diagnosed early.

“The doctor all week was like, ‘Please stop Googling things,’” Singleton said. “So I haven’t Googled much. I’ve tried not to. Because obviously, you start googling any kind of cancer, and you can take yourself down a dark rabbit hole really quickly. I haven’t done that much (research), but we’ve taken it out and the pathology is getting checked right now. I’ll know here this week what we’re really looking at in the long run for me.”

The past 10 days have been intense.

“It’s been a whirlwind, I would say,” Singleton said. “I don’t necessarily even know if I’ve coped with everything that’s gone on.”

It began Wednesday with the confounding drug test results.

“The first issue was, we talked about things that could’ve externally caused that elevated hCG levels,” Singleton’s agent, Paul Sheehy, told The Denver Post. “And he’s like, ‘No, I don’t take any supplements. I don’t do any of that stuff.’ … I’ve been with Alex a long time. So, if he tells me something, I know it’s true. So then we start saying, ‘Okay, well, it could be something that you didn’t even know was out there.’ So, nothing at all. No supplements, no. Nothing. Okay. So, let’s look at what other causes could there have been to this elevated level?

“And, as remote as it was, like — germ, I think it’s called germ-cell cancer, is a marker for that. And so I said, ‘Okay, let’s immediately get in there.’ So like, within two days, we had an appointment with originally an oncologist, and then we got referred to a urologist. And that was last Monday. So, that’s when he first found out.“

Added Singleton, “On Monday when I finally got these results, it was not freeing for me, but for me with anything in life, I’d rather know a game plan and know that stuff is moving forward and how to attack that than anything else.”

Singleton told reporters that once the urology results came in, Sheehy told Broncos general manager George Paton and the training staff. He was scheduled for an ultrasound “literally within 15 minutes,” he said.

Of course, Singleton wanted to play against the Raiders.

“(Team officials) and my wife kind of took on all the pressure of planning all the doctors appointments and surgery planning and all that, so I was able to — which this is what I wanted to do, was just focus on football for the week for the Thursday game,” Singleton said. “I just wanted it not to change my life yet, if that makes sense, because it’s still so shocking.”

He was in on a tackle on Las Vegas’ opening possession, then started the Raiders’ second drive by thumping running back Ashton Jeanty for no gain. Singleton, a team captain who calls Denver’s defense on the field, finished tied for the team lead with nine tackles. After missing the final 14 games of the 2024 season due to a torn ACL, Singleton returned this year to lead the Broncos through 10 games with 89 tackles — the No. 5 mark in the NFL.

Hours later, he was having a cancerous tumor removed.

“Until today, it’s really been just us who’s known about this,” said Singleton, who added that he’s spent most of the past few days laying low at home with his wife, Sam, and 9-month-old daughter, Tallyn. “It’s just been us together going through the emotions of the whole thing and just enjoying each other’s company.”

The veteran starred at Montana State and then played in the Canadian Football League before finally cracking an NFL roster with Philadelphia in 2019. Now in his fourth season with the Broncos, he said he “wrestled” with the idea of going public with such a private diagnosis.

To Singleton, though, the fact that he was diagnosed because of a drug test rather than simply just by noticing something amiss helped push him to share his story.

“I figured, I found out early, so I 100% want to, as I learn more, be a voice for this,” said Singleton, who encouraged early screenings and not to be afraid of the doctor. “I felt, all last week, a couple of guys knew, and I felt almost like I was contagious in a way. That’s just how I, I guess, perceived or thought about cancer. So, 100%, to take the stigma off of it and be an early advocate and push for screenings and stuff, I think, will be really important in the long run.

“Mine was not me noticing something. It was a drug test noticing something. But the second I went and got it looked at, how fast everything has kind of gone along is, obviously, going to end up saving my life in the long run. It’s really important.”

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