Mile High Report
The real fun is about to begin as the Broncos will face off against the Niners in joint practices Thursday and Friday before their first preseason game on Saturday.
Don’t you worry, says the head coach, because the starters will definitely see the field.
“There’s this feeling that, ‘Oh, if I practice them a bunch, then I’m not going to play them in the game,’” Sean Payton mocked. “We’re playing guys in the game.”
And no matter what tweets you may have seen pointing out the various interceptions from Bo Nix earlier this week, Payton also doesn’t want you to worry about the quarterback.
“Look, we’re charting picks here like hurricanes, so he is doing fine,” Payton added.
But more important to Payton is Nix’s second-year development of processing the offense – and he has high praise for the QB.
“He’s much further along,” Payton said, adding that instead of just calling out the play, Nix is able to give more info and messaging to players in the huddle. “If you look at it, you have these 12 seconds, you get the play, the cadence, the snap count, and then can you remind the back, ‘You might be the primary….’ The little reminders. He’s light years further along. He’s doing well.”
In fact, there was this fun tidbit about Payton’s view of his quarterback…
And then this week there was this gem from ESPN’s Seth Wickersham — an excerpt from his book, giving us a glimpse of Payton’s view of Bo Nix during the draft months in 2024.
It turns out that when the then-Saints head coach was scouting Patrick Mahomes, he had been developing his own quantifiable way to determine whether a college quarterback would be successful at the next level.
To Payton, a quarterback’s processing speed — his ability to react a fraction of a second faster — was a primary metric but a difficult one to quantify. Intuitively, he knew that quarterbacks with high rates of sacks and turnovers either freeze or panic. So he looked at how often the QB take a sack.
“If a quarterback is sacked quite a bit in college, per drop back, you can improve that some,” Payton says now. “But it generally means the processing is a little delayed.”
Ultimately Payton’s formula considered negative plays (sacks, fumbles, interceptions) against total drop backs. He added up the negative plays and calculated their percentage of occurence against the total. A lower percentage meant fewer negative plays.
For context, Mahomes’ percentage in 2017 was 8.1%…very good. During the 2024 Draft, Payton tested his formula on all the top QBs: Caleb Williams (17.5%); Drake Maye (10%); JJ McCarthy (7.8%).
While Payton and the Broncos might have had a chance to get McCarthy, that was not guy Payton wanted.
“I want this kid,” Payton tells ESPN reporter Seth Wickersham, who promised to reveal nothing to anyone before the Draft.
That “kid” was of course Bo Nix.
Because his numbers for Payton’s metric were off-the-charts...
