Mile High Report
The 2025 Denver Broncos may have as much talent as any team in the NFL. Here are three Secret Superstars who can help them reach their postseason dreams.
Do the 2025 Denver Broncos have the NFL’s best overall roster?
There is a credible case to be made. The 2024 Broncos ranked seventh overall in DVOA — 16th in offense and fourth on defense — and the ceiling isn’t there just yet. The offense will ostensibly improve in Bo Nix’s second season, and Nix showed more than enough in his rookie season for everyone to be confident that head coach Sean Payton found his man at the game’s most important position after the Russell Wilson misfire. Payton’s offense is incredibly complex and detailed, and Nix took to it like a proverbial (Oregon) duck to water.
Of course, if you were lucky enough to watch tape with Nix before he was selected 12th overall in the 2024 draft, as myself and Greg Cosell of NFL Films and ESPN’s NFL Matchup were, this wouldn’t come as a surprise. Not only was Nix misclassified as a chuck-and-duck thrower by some analysts when he actually had (and has) a great deep arm, but his mind for the game blew us away. Rarely have I spoken with a college quarterback with this much on the ball in an NFL-transferrable sense.
And when you get to that defense under Vance Joseph... hoo, boy. Patrick Surtain II is widely recognized as the NFL’s best cornerback, Riley Moss has become a credible bookend, and when the Broncos took Texas’s Jahdae Barron with the 20th overall pick in the 2025 draft, it’s my opinion that they got themselves the next Brian Branch. Like Branch, Barron can play just about everywhere on the field, and he can lock it down from wherever.
Add that to a pass rush that was the NFL’s most disruptive in 2024, and the possibilities of the healthier versions of safety Talanoa Hufanga and linebacker Dre Greenlaw (two former San Francisco 49ers stars acquired in the 2025 offseason), and nobody will want to deal with these guys.
Sean Payton is well aware of the expectations in his third year as the Broncos’ head coach. It’s great to be a preseason darling, but the 2024 postseason saw the Buffalo Bills beat up on his Broncos to the tune of a 31-7 thrashing in the Wild Card round, so he’s all about pumping the brakes until he sees what he really has out there.
“The one thing we have to avoid is this idea that we are going to pick up where we left off,” Payton said in late February at the scouting combine. “I don’t like that because our league has shown that the season ends, and you take the proverbial game board, you take all the pieces and dump them, and you start again. Certainly you are more confident, the experience has helped a number of players, but the journey begins. We don’t shy away from it....
