Sean Payton plopped down in a rental car filled with other Broncos coaches and scanned the faces inside.
The group had just wrapped up a private workout with quarterback Bo Nix in Eugene, Ore., in March, and Payton didn’t hide his enthusiasm about what he had just witnessed.
“I just looked around (the car) and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Payton said.
Over the course of 80 passes and the meeting before he took the field, Nix had confirmed everything Payton, general manager George Paton and other team evaluators saw as they dug into the tape and did the background work necessary for the weighty decision of drafting a franchise quarterback.
Accuracy. Quick release. Arm strength. Size. Intelligence.
The Broncos had loaded Nix down with a cache of information at 5 p.m. the day before they were set to meet at 9 a.m. When Nix began spitting back the install, Payton said he was convinced the quarterback had “spent the (previous) night in a hotel room with the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, the coffee on.”
There was more work to be done when the group touched down in Denver, but the Broncos began to believe they had found their new quarterback.
Five weeks after he watched the Broncos drive away, Nix picked up the phone Thursday night as it rang with a 303 area code. He was going to Denver, the 12th pick in the draft that featured a record run on quarterbacks. Nix was the sixth signal caller selected in the first round, marking the first time in the modern draft era that many players at the position had gone that quickly.
“I had an idea because they showed interest,” Nix said when asked during a conference call Thursday whether he thought Denver would be his draft-day destination. “They came out to Eugene; they had some Zooms and all that stuff. To be honest with you, you never know until you get the phone call and you hear your name called on TV. I just can’t say how excited I am to be a part of this organization.”
The Broncos have only drafted a quarterback higher than the 12th pick once, when they drafted Jay Cutler in 2006. Nix is the first quarterback drafted by Denver in the opening round since 2016, when former general manager John Elway traded up to draft Paxton Lynch.
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How Bo Nix won over Sean Payton and led the Broncos to a history-making draft pick
2024-04-26 14:50:00
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