Bo Nix Is Proving Sean Payton Right

A month into the 2024 NFL season, it didn’t look this way.

To some, the predraft doubts on Bo Nix—his ceiling, his path forward and even his status as a supposedly pro-ready prospect—were being confirmed. The Denver Broncos’ offense looked rickety to start Sean Payton’s second year, and the quarterback so many felt was overdrafted wasn’t solving it. He threw two picks in a Week 1 loss in Seattle, and two more as Denver was kept from the end zone in a Week 2 defeat to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The Broncos won in Weeks 3 and 4, but that, they said, was on the strength of Vance Joseph’s tough, overachieving defense. And through that first month, Denver sat 27th in the league in total offense and 27th in passing offense. Nix’s 62.5 passer rating was 30th among qualifying passers, topping only the soon-to-be-benched Anthony Richardson, he didn’t throw his first touchdown pass until Week 4, and somehow he was 31st in passing yards while ranking seventh in passing attempts (which put him last in yards per attempt).

In about every way, to the naked eye, the signs were bad.

Yet, as Payton strode to the podium after a sloppy 10–9 win over the New York Jets in a monsoon in Week 4, he was defiant in response to questions about Nix’s confidence, some five months after he stuck his neck out for him on the first night of the draft.

“Heck no—at some point, we’ll stop with the confidence,” Payton said. “The kid is confident. I should send him out to dinner with every one of you and you’ll see. He played well.”

Payton can ask for the check on that one now.

The reality is that Payton’s resolve on Nix was never shaken in large part because Nix’s own belief in himself never wavered. And two months later, he is now coming around the corner and approaching the season’s home stretch, somehow having caught Washington Commanders phenom Jayden Daniels in the race for the NFL’s Offensive Rookie of the Year award.

Stats tell a compelling story. On Oct. 1, the passer rating gap between the two rookies was a cavernous 42.5 points, Daniels at 107.4, ranking fourth in the NFL. Now, it’s down to just 7.7, and the two are in a dead heat in yardage (Daniels’s edge is 2,613 to 2,548).

But this isn’t about pitting two really good rookies—who paid dues in multiple schools, and multiple conferences, over five-year collegiate careers—against one another. To me, it’s about seeing what Nix’s case might tell us about the position going forward. And in a conversation he and I had Sunday night after another Broncos win, I got a lot of those lessons affirmed.

Welcome to The MMQB for Week 12! The early window had a dramatic set of finishes, and we had a superlative finish from a special player in the nightcap. We’re covering all that and everything in between in the Takeaways, where we’ll bring you …

• How a surging Lions defense has come alive, and is now matching the Detroit offense.

• The way Tua Tagovailoa is lifting a rallying Miami Dolphins team.

• The fight the Dallas Cowboys are showing for Mike McCarthy (and the New York Giants lacking it).

• Some detail on Saquon Barkley’s 302-yard night, and how he became a Philadelphia Eagle.

And a ton more. But we’re starting in Las Vegas, where the Broncos coolly took the Raiders apart behind a quarterback who vaguely resembles Iceman from Top Gun (he actually dressed up as him on Halloween), and not just in how he looks.

We can start with that bad month, to glean the first quarterbacking lesson from Nix—on how we look at all these quarterback prospects as they go from college to the pros.

Nix started a record 61 games between three years at Auburn and two at Oregon.

And it wasn’t just getting to play that much that’s benefitting him now. It’s the ups and downs he had to endure. It’s having been a legacy at his dad’s alma mater—a place where Patrick Nix is a legend, and was the pilot of Auburn’s legendary 1993 team—and having it all come undone for him. It’s how that necessitated a reboot across the country from his home state of Alabama in Oregon, to marry up with a first-year coach in Eugene in 2022.

Bottom line: If you thought a tough outing or string of tough games was going to spell doom for this 24-year-old point-guard-on-grass, you should probably read up a little more on him.

“I’ve been at the top. I feel like I’ve been at the bottom—you just got to react the same regardless of what it is,” Nix told me from the locker room after the Broncos’ 29–19 win over the Las Vegas Raiders. “I know I’m going to have a good game again. I know I’m going to have a bad game again. I got to ride the wave, get to the next one and get through it. I jokingly say all the time you only remember your last game.

“They’re going to forget this one by next week, and you’re going to have to go out there and do it and show it again. We got to continue to find ways to improve, which we have each and every week. And we’re going to continue fighting, getting these tough wins.”

In other words, Nix knew the sky wasn’t falling, mostly because when he may have thought it had fallen on him before. But he didn’t just dodge the clouds, he found a way to rally.

And that, of course, is just part of the library Nix built in his head over five college seasons.

There’s also the volumes and volumes of football knowledge, both offensive and defensive. He played in a vastly different scheme in Eugene than he had at Auburn, and he got to game plan against, and be schemed by, opponents in both the SEC and Pac-12, having to figure out, over and over again, how to counterpunch.

So when an NFL coach throws something at him, there might be a learning curve—like there is with any rookie—but there’s also probably an applicable answer he has to whatever the question might be.

“That’s helped a lot,” Nix says. “Any time you can see safety movement or a defense or a front, and run it against the play, you’re just going to pick up knowledge and carry it with you. That’s what I’ve been able to see a lot of. It’s translating and carrying over. It’s just seeing things really well and efficiently moving the ball down the field, doing whatever the offense needs, whether it’s a run check or a protection check or a man-zone pass.

“Whatever it is, I’ve just been able to see a lot, and that way I can execute now.”

That showed up Sunday, too, as it has all year in very specific ways.

The marriage between Payton and Nix seemed natural before Payton even drafted Nix.

It was obvious enough to scouts and coaches who know Payton well that the narrative that the Broncos would pluck Nix with the 12th pick became almost cliché through March and April. But the love and the fit were real—and the importance of finding that kind of coach-quarterback synergy is another lesson anyone can take from Nix’s year.

Payton did a ton of legwork on the 2024 draft’s quarterbacks coming out of his first season in Denver. We detailed all of it on the Monday after the draft, but the real key was Payton doing a detailed boots-on-the-ground evaluation.

Nix hadn’t thrown well at the Senior Bowl in January, and going after Tennessee’s Jugs machine of a quarterback, Joe Milton, in the quarterback line at the combine only bolstered the perception that the Oregon star was weak-armed by NFL standards. Denver combatted that by sending a fleet of scouts and a list of throws to roll out like they were pressing buttons on a jukebox for Nix’s pro day. Then, Payton worked him out himself.

After doing everything Denver wanted at the pro day, determined to answer any remaining questions, Nix went through a grueling 80-throw script at the private workout, with Payton and his crew of coaches and scouts running the show. Nix had big hands and a bigger lower half than some may have thought, which helped contextualize how he played with such great control at Oregon (he had zero fumbles in his two years in the Pac-12).

He also had plenty of arm, elite accuracy and, maybe most importantly, a coach’s son’s mind for the game. The Broncos sent Nix roughly three days of their offensive install at 5 p.m., the night before the workout, and he came back the next day with a good chunk of it down cold.

All of that informed Payton that he wasn’t just capable of being a good NFL quarterback, but a good NFL quarterback in the way Payton sees the position best played—and the way, yes, Drew Brees played the position for him in New Orleans for 15 years. That’s why, in the end, when so many teams didn’t even put a first-round grade on Nix, Payton had him as the second-best quarterback in the entire class, and in a class that, months later, is showing the sort of potential across the board that doesn’t come around very often.

So, it should be little wonder that, in the time since the coach put that grade on him, Nix has been in football heaven working with Payton.

“He’s always coaching,” Nix says. “He’s always teaching. I pick up stuff from him from meetings or watching video, on the practice field with alignments or splits or coverages. You name it. He’s just coaching and teaching. It always feels like he’s on it, and he’s always in coach mode. There’s never a moment where you’re not getting everything you can around him.

“I’m just blessed to be with a coach like that, that knows the offense and has been around some greats and has coached some greats and he’s a great himself. It’s really good to have that.”

And the progress the two are making is leading to some pretty high-level football concocting—which showed up on both of Nix’s touchdown passes Sunday to veteran receiver Courtland Sutton.

On the first one, “the go ball one-on-one was exactly how we called it,” Nix says. “We had man on the side with Court. Then, we had zone the other way. They rolled to man pressure at the end, and Courtland had a great one-on-one with soft coverage. He went up there and got it like he does all the time. He just continues to show that stuff. It’s really good.”

Then, Sutton, Nix and Denver showed something else, with less than six minutes left and Denver up 19–16. It was first-and-goal from the 2-yard line and, as such, space was at a premium.

“He was the second read,” Nix says. “We had a corner and then the over. Courtland was the backside over, he got some space with his guy and he made a great inline catch. He made great plays in the second half, really explosive. That’s what he does for our team.”

But looking back at the play, you see something Nix did, too. Off a jet-sweep action to Nix’s left, the pocket moved right with Nix, and he kept his eyes downfield, running from the rush, and threw the ball back across his body and into Sutton’s belly, as the receiver moved left to right across the end line.

The play effectively put the Raiders away. It also showed so much about Nix—his poise, his knowledge of the offense, his ability to keep thinking on his feet and that, yes, he has the athleticism and arm strength to get it done at the NFL level.

There’s one last lesson to take from Nix, and how he and the Broncos got to where they are now.

In that story I wrote in April, there was an anecdote where Payton asked Nix to empty his backpack. Nix did, pulling out a roll of tape for his ankles, a lacrosse ball to roll out his back and a spare pair of football cleats just in case. Payton does stuff like that to get an idea of who a guy is as a football player. In Nix’s case, the coach found a quarterback who had only football-related stuff.

That backstory got poked fun at a little after we published the story. But I know it was relevant to Payton and the Broncos because it confirmed that Nix’s reputation as the gym rat, coach’s-kid football addict was real.

Further confirmation has followed.

“Yeah, he just asked what was in the bag,” Nix says, recalling that morning. “It was your typical stuff—I had the notebook and the iPad and typical things for recovery, some cleats, all that kind of stuff. They just want to know a little bit about you, see how you roll.

He laughed, and added, “That’s one way to do it.”

More poignantly, it showed Nix would do it the way Payton envisioned it.

So here they are now together, in late November, with all the jokes about the backpack gone, and the indictments and sweeping judgments of late September forgotten, with all these lessons people should (but probably won’t) take from their story.

In the place of all that stuff? Denver has its quarterback and, as things stand now, that quarterback may well be the NFL’s Offensive Rookie of the Year.