There’s something you should know about Denver as a sports city. This is a football town. And more specifically, it’s a quarterback town. But for the past eight years—ever since Peyton Manning retired after winning a Super Bowl with a team John Elway built—Denver has been a quarterback desert, with one failed passer after another. How desperate this city is to escape quarterback purgatory is one thing that Sean Payton seems to have become acutely aware of in the year and a half since he became the Broncos’ head coach.
Now, Payton is staking his professional reputation as a quarterback guru on Bo Nix becoming the first post-Manning-era quarterback to finally stick. On Wednesday, Payton named Nix the team’s starting quarterback for 2024, officially ending a monthslong three-way competition between the no. 12 pick; veteran Jarrett Stidham, who has started four games over the course of four seasons; and failed Jets first-round pick Zach Wilson.
Wednesday’s announcement was a mere formality—so much so that Payton didn’t even feel the need to tell the rest of the team before informing the local media—after Nix steadily improved throughout training camp and was clearly the best of the three quarterbacks in the first two preseason games. “[The team has] kind of seen this coming, to some degree,” Payton said at the press conference announcing Nix as the starter.
And so could this quarterback-starved fan base. I watched Nix and the Broncos’ joint practice with the Packers last week and attended his first start against the Packers a couple of days later. I can be as cynical as anyone working in the Denver media market—this is what the Paxton Lynch and Trevor Siemian and Joe Flacco and Russell Wilson years did to me—but by the end of Nix’s second series against the Packers, I found myself coming around to the cautious Bo hype that’s taken hold here this month.
Functionally, this is how Nix won the job: He completed nearly 77 percent of his passes in his two preseason appearances, threw two touchdowns, and didn’t take a sack or commit a turnover. He was poised and efficient; he’s been getting rid of the ball quickly and appears comfortable making anticipatory throws and finding receivers in the short to intermediate zones in the middle of the field. Essentially, he’s established himself as the anti–Russell Wilson, making the types of quick decisions and on-schedule passes that weren’t a big part of Wilson’s game during his failed two-year tenure in Denver. And we’ve yet to see him draw Payton’s ire. That last point is important. Nix landed in Denver in the first place because he was the quarterback Payton picked; he drafted Nix well higher than pundits expected him to go.
But it wasn’t just that Payton found a draft crush and acted on it—that sort of thing happens all the time. It’s that Payton wouldn’t shut up about his conviction that Nix was the one. It started almost immediately after the Broncos picked Nix, when Payton went live on The Pat McAfee Show and compared Nix to Drew Brees and gushed about all the ways Nix had impressed him at the quarterback’s pro day and during a private workout. He essentially laid out the case for why Nix was his favorite quarterback in a loaded draft class. Later, in his news conference in Denver, Payton would recall how, in 2017, the Chiefs moved up ahead of Payton’s Saints to draft Patrick Mahomes.
And then, ESPN’s Adam Schefter posted this on X:
Draft season lends itself to immense hope and intense hyperbole, but were we really mentioning Nix in the same breath as Patrick Mahomes? But that wasn’t the end of it. A couple of days after the draft, Sports Illustrated published an anecdote that detailed how Payton asked Nix to reveal what the quarterback carried in his backpack. Nix, Albert Breer reported, pulled out cleats and a lacrosse ball that the quarterback used to roll out the muscles in his back. “Everything was football related,” Breer wrote. “All of it.”
It was a lot. It seemed to me that maybe Payton was trying a little too hard to justify the surprising and somewhat controversial pick. Nix, let’s remember, was hardly a perfect prospect. At 24 years old, he was the oldest of the top quarterbacks in April’s draft. He underwhelmed in his first three college seasons at Auburn and chose to transfer to Oregon to find a fresh start. He put up impressive passing stats in Eugene, displaying a decent arm and athleticism, but he didn’t have the elite physical traits that teams usually look for in first-round quarterbacks. He was the sixth quarterback on Danny Kelly’s big board—his 48th prospect overall. He wasn’t viewed as a prospect who would deliver the huge highlight plays, but as Ben Solak wrote for The Ringer after charting Nix’s passes, he might be the quarterback best suited to hit the layups.
That’s exactly what Payton seemed to want as he led the Broncos into the post-Wilson era. Payton found his greatest success as a coach with Brees, who carved up NFL defenses with his precise passing. It would be unfair to both Brees’s Hall of Fame career and to Nix at this point of his career, when he’s yet to play a regular-season game, to make any real comparisons between the two—but that hasn’t stopped Payton. Earlier this month, after an early training camp practice, Payton praised Nix’s “pocket sense.” “He doesn’t take a lot of sacks. I think he knows when the play is over—time to go. Then I think he can make plays when he’s going,” Payton said. “I used to say this all the time: ‘The sack numbers are a reflection more on the quarterback than the offensive line.’ Brees was one of those guys. He was a tough sack. The ball came out, and I think Bo has traits like that.”
With all of this background, of course Nix won the job. How damning would it have been for Payton if his chosen quarterback couldn’t beat out a journeyman like Stidham or a reclamation project like Zach Wilson? Still, Payton wanted Nix to earn it.
“The minute that there’s someone that has something that’s not earned, that can affect and impact your locker room. It really can,” Payton said.
Stidham seems popular in the Broncos locker room and appeared to deftly navigate what was surely an awkward situation when Payton benched Russell Wilson late last season, effectively ending the highly paid quarterback’s time in Denver. Even after Nix’s impressive performance in Sunday’s preseason game against Green Bay, Stidham remained listed as QB1 on the Broncos’ official preseason depth chart. It seemed that night that the competition was all but over, but patience reigned.
“Oftentimes these things take care of themselves, but we’re not in a hurry to arrive at those types of decisions,” Payton said Wednesday. “We want to see it, and I think it’s important relative to the team that we handle it that way. [Nix’s] been outstanding.”
This entire process has largely been a new experience for Payton, who, before this year, had overseen just one true quarterback competition in his 16 previous seasons as an NFL head coach. Most of that is a function of his arrival in New Orleans in 2006, at the same time as Brees, and not needing to pick a new starter until Brees retired after the 2020 season. The next summer, Payton wound up anointing Jameis Winston over Taysom Hill after a quarterback competition that stretched several weeks into the preseason.
Nix, though, will become Payton’s first rookie Week 1 starter. (He’ll also be the first rookie to open the season as starting quarterback for the Broncos since John Elway did it 41 years ago. No pressure, kid.)
In drafting Nix and, now, making his ascension to QB1 official, Payton bears the pressure to make it work. He never hid his displeasure about coaching Wilson last season—Wilson didn’t operate the offense the way Payton prefers; he took too many sacks and couldn’t effectively throw in the middle of the field. In Nix, he found a quarterback who will do what he wants.
Payton’s fingerprints are all over the rest of the roster, too. The Broncos spent a league-high $235.1 million in free agency in 2023 before slashing veteran salaries (and cutting popular players like safety Justin Simmons) and taking on a historic amount of dead money this season to account for the albatross of Wilson’s contract. When the Broncos opened training camp last month, only 27 players on the 90-man roster had been in Denver before Payton’s arrival in 2023. With one preseason game remaining, several starting jobs remain open, including at linebacker, cornerback opposite Patrick Surtain II, and center.
In June, I asked Payton about the personal investment he might feel in the success of the 2024 Broncos team, given his role in selecting the entire quarterback room and so much of the roster. He said his motivation was more team driven and less personal, and in the same press conference, he went on to say that he’s less affected by external narratives than he was at other times in his career.
“I think that I have two middle fingers. I’ve gotten better with age [at] not using them,” Payton said, laughing. “I don’t play a lot of video games, but you have x amount of battery life and energy, and you try to use it where you think it’s best going to help the team. So you learn over time to not spend as much on the things you can’t control, certainly lists. If that concerned me, we wouldn’t have drafted Bo Nix where we selected him, if I was paying attention to that.”
It’s been more than 40 years since a rookie quarterback has taken the Rocky Mountains by storm and almost a decade since the last stretch of competent quarterback play. At training camp practices and at Empower Field at Mile High, I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of the hordes of fans who were already wearing new no. 10 Nix jerseys. But then I remembered that this is a quarterback town. Broncos fans want to believe in the next quarterback, and for now, that’s Nix, and that sliver of hope is back.
