ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — As Bo Nix stepped onto a podium following a Broncos training camp on Aug. 1, he looked across the field toward the team’s recently abandoned, former practice facility, a building soon to be demolished. Behind him sat the glistening, new $175 million facility he and 400 other members of the organization had begun settling into just days earlier.
The stark change of venue mirrored the “drastically” different mindset Nix said he was bringing into his third season as Denver’s starting quarterback — one he laid out in simple terms.
“Year 1, I’m trying to just not mess up for the team,” Nix said. “I feel like Year 3, I’m trying to make plays for the team. It’s just quite the different feeling. It’s just a confidence-level thing.”
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His confidence is built on his results as an NFL starting quarterback, a job Nix won during his first training camp after Denver selected him with the 12th pick in the 2024 draft. He has led the Broncos to the playoffs twice, with the first appearance ending the franchise’s eight-year stretch without a postseason berth. He helped the Broncos wrest the AFC West away from the Kansas City Chiefs for the first time in a decade last season. He outdueled the Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen to win an overtime playoff game.
Nix has accounted for more touchdowns than any player in his draft class, and no quarterback has won more games through his first two seasons than the 24 victories he helped produce for the Broncos in 2024 and 2025.
Yet, Nix can be like a fluffy cumulus cloud passing through the sky on a summer day. One member of the football-consuming public can stare up and see a certain kind of quarterback. Another could look at the cloud and see a different passer entirely. Nix does not make the top 10 in preseason quarterback polls. Critics point to a history of ankle injuries, often leaving out that Nix has started 63 of a possible 64 games over the past four seasons, dating back to his time at Oregon.
The sports talk show circuit has been so jammed with narratives about Nix this offseason that his head coach, veteran Sean Payton, felt compelled to jump on social media to dispel a take he found particularly egregious.
“It’s the one cool thing about our sport,” Payton said. “You could argue, at any position, a top 10, and (in) all of those discussions, generally, time will give you those answers. We love what we’re seeing (from Nix). Again, they’re measured by wins, and they’re measured by certain things. Ultimately, that’s how history will be written about any of them, the quarterbacks specifically.”
Nix is carrying it all onto the precipice of the biggest season of his football life, which begins with the Broncos’ Week 1 opener at Kansas City on Monday night. He will be eligible for a massive contract extension as soon as next offseason. In a ballooning quarterback market that has 13 players at the position currently making more than $50 million annually, including two over $60 million, it’s not outlandish to envision a new long-term deal for Nix that makes him the franchise’s first $300 million man if he puts together the kind of season he and the Broncos believe he is capable of producing. It’s a decision that will impact how Denver goes about building a Super Bowl contender in the years to come.
The quarterback is handling that pressure in much the same way he’s handled it while leading an NFL-high 10 game-winning drives across the past two seasons: by naming it.
“Competitively, the way we are as players, you better treat every year as a year you have to prove it,” Nix said. “You have to go out there and show the team that you’re worth what they’re putting in for you and what they’re building around you. You can’t ever let up and think that, ‘I’ve made it. I’ve gotten to where I need to be.’ Quite honestly, I’ll never feel that way.
“There’s always the next season. There’s always the next championship to go after. I think every year for every player is going to feel like a contract year, because it should.”
When Davis Webb took over as the Broncos’ offensive coordinator in February, he quickly built a project designed to analyze Nix’s first two seasons as Denver’s starting quarterback. Every decision. Every throw. The goal was to tweak the scheme to highlight Nix’s strengths and find areas where the quarterback and the offense could still grow. The process helped move the Broncos toward their offseason acquisition of Jaylen Waddle, a dynamic target who has already demonstrated an ability to bend the defense’s geometry in a favorable way for his quarterback.
Nix, as he rehabbed from the ankle injury that forced him to miss January’s AFC championship game, was breaking down his own game in a similar way.
“The one thing you’re seeing from him is he’s trusting his throws — a lot,” tight end Adam Trautman said as he found refuge in a quiet, air-conditioned corner of the team’s indoor field after a sweltering camp practice last month. “With his timing, there are some tight windows he’s throwing into now that maybe before, in years past, it was, ‘Eh, maybe I’m not going to take a shot there. I’m going to check it down.’ He’s trusting himself, and it’s cool to see because you can always get the ball. It doesn’t matter what you’re feeling in coverage; he’ll rip it in there.
“He’s coming in here now, and it’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m afraid to mess up.’ It’s ‘Now I’m the guy. I need to get better, too. I need to trust the things that I’ve worked on in the offseason.’ This is the best training camp he’s had, for sure.”
Nix illustrated his aggressiveness in training camp with whom he was willing to attack: namely, All-Pro corner Pat Surtain II. As a rookie and a quarterback who built a reputation on being a mistake-averse passer, Nix rarely looked Surtain’s way, let alone threw the ball near him. Even in his second training camp, you likely could have counted on one hand the number of times Nix attacked the superstar defensive back.
That changed in August as Nix challenged the best player on the team almost daily. Nix reached a notable milestone when he hit Waddle on a deep touchdown pass after he got a step on Surtain, but the quarterback learned just as much from coming up on the wrong end of that battle.
“My first two years, if (Surtain) was over there, I pretty much worked to the other side of the field, but I don’t think that does him (any) diligence,” Nix said. “Now that I feel a little bit more confident and comfortable, I don’t mind throwing it his way and getting an incompletion on the stat sheet just to help him out every once in a while.
“He does a really good job, and every once in a while, when we get to complete one on him, it kind of feels good for the morale of the offense. It shows us that we’re also really good and we can attack the best player in football on defense.”
The trust isn’t only evident in what Nix believes his arm can do. It also shows up in how he is processing what he sees on the other side of the line of scrimmage. Nix has always been a chore to “sack” during camp practices due to his mobility and elusiveness, All-Pro defensive end Zach Allen said recently. But the task is more difficult in this camp with Nix finding new areas of the field to exploit.
“Definitely now, the way he reads defenses, it’s second to none,” Allen said. “It really is impressive how elite he is. The big thing everyone talks about is how few sacks he takes. It really is a struggle. The offensive line he has is really good, but he gets the ball out quick. Seeing him be comfortable in his third year is awesome.”
Bo Nix will be eligible for a contract extension after this season, one that could put him among the NFL’s highest-paid players. (Ron Chenoy / Imagn Images)
Payton visibly cringed early in training camp when he was asked about the notion of a “Year 3 leap” for Nix. He pointed to the quarterback’s resumé of winning games, including a franchise-record-tying 14 victories in 2025. Then, the coach reframed the question.
“Do I think he’s going to continue to improve? Yes,” Payton said. “I think there are certain areas for us offensively that can help with the quarterback — a consistent run game throughout the year. There are some things that we can do to help him.”
The Broncos should have their strongest backfield of the Payton era after re-signing a healthy J.K. Dobbins and drafting Jonah Coleman. Payton made a change at receivers coach after Denver dropped the second-most passes in the NFL last season (37, according to TruMedia), bringing in Ronald Curry from Buffalo. Payton passed off play-calling duties to Webb, who is familiar with Nix after spending the previous two seasons as his quarterbacks coach. And then there is Waddle, who brings “an element of explosiveness that I think as an offense we’ve lacked for a couple years,” Nix said earlier this offseason.
Those are all elements that add to Nix’s elevated confidence, the offseason’s theme for the young quarterback.
“His mindset,” Surtain said of his quarterback, “is that he’s ready to show the world what he’s about. … He’s ready to make a statement.”
