Mile High Report
Or maybe neither? I’m going tight end.
The NFL Scouting Combine is underway, and today Sean Payton and George Paton will take center stage in the annual coach/GM pressers from Indianapolis.
A year ago in this context, Payton made a bold comment about the importance of doing a good job scouting the right players for your team — a process that begins in earnest at the Combine when teams begin meeting with college prospects they’ve been scouting.
“We’ll be really good at this,” Payton said at the end of his 2024 Combine presser. “And I think, to some degree, we’re glad that a lot of people aren’t.”
That played out almost to perfection in the 2024 season when Payton’s top QB choice, Bo Nix — considered bymany a “draft guru” to maybe be the sixth-best rookie QB — turned out to be among the top two while breaking record after record as a rookie quarterback for the Broncos.
Following a season that finally snapped the Broncos’ losing streak, Payton admitted they had “found that player that can lead us and be what we need.”
So now the head coach and GM are on the clock to find some playmakers for Nix if the Broncos’ offense is going to be what it needs to be.
“You literally never pick up from where you left off,” Payton said in his season-ending presser. “You rake everything back down to rubble, and you start again. ...There are a few important pieces, obviously, that will help us in a direction as we move towards the 2025 season, but that’s kind of how it starts.”
With Mock Draft season upon us, it’s hard not to consider — and get excited about — all the players associated with Denver’s draft.
And while there’s rarely consensus on who the Broncos will take, or should take, the prevailing view seems to be that Denver will go after a ‘joker’ to round out their offensive rebuild.
So the biggest question becomes...running back or tight end? And the obvious answer is...whichever position has the better player available at No. 20 (sure, an offensive lineman or a wide receiver might be in the mix in the first round for Denver because you never know, but my money is on RB or TE).
This draft is considered a deep running back class, so Denver could likely get good value at that position in rounds outside the first, but it would be hard to pass up the Heisman runner-up Ashton Jeanty if he fell to the Broncos at No. 20.
The Athletic’s Dane Brugler has the Boise State back as his No. 5 player overall, and Nick Kosmider of The Athletic described him as “a dynamic three-down back whose ability to consistently break tackles can force defenses into difficult decisions about how they deploy resources along the defensive front.”
But should Jeanty not be on the board at 20, there are other highly touted prospects — Kaleb...
