Bo Nix’s eyes widened just a little.
There will be many of those moments as a rookie in the NFL, but this time it wasn’t a learning experience. It was a chance to talk about something he and his new head coach, Sean Payton, both believe will serve him well in the NFL.
His brain and how it works on the football field.
“You have to be as efficient as possible,” he said. “So processing to me means taking something from the sideline, being able to evaluate it, see all of the pros and the cons of the play and understand that whatever happens, you have to react to it.”
Payton during the pre-draft process talked about finding a quarterback who can handle several decisions in a handful of seconds and do it over and over and over again.
Nix rattled off how he goes about doing that.
“So every play starts with, in the league, it starts with a huddle and starts with a play call,” he said as he got rolling. “There’s probably a shift or a motion or a movement. There’s going to be a cadence, there’s going to be probably a primary play and a secondary play. All of this is just your offense, so now you have to look at the defense and see what they’re in. You have to see the front, through the linebackers to the safeties. Once you see that, you just process everything and you hope your preparation has led you up to the point to where you can find the solution, find the answer quickly.”
Nix knows it’s one thing to talk about it, another to excel at it and yet another challenge entirely to master the NFL game.
It won’t happen overnight. But Denver’s rookie indicated he wasn’t planning to sit around and wait for it to develop on its own, either.
“At the beginning of this process, it’s going to be reading and reciting plays over and over and over so you can spit it out in the huddle because if nobody knows what to do, you’re all going to be wrong once you get to the line of scrimmage,” he said. “… It’s not just about processing it, it’s also about how fast you can do it. So again, I think it’s some people’s second nature and it can also be developed. The processing from college to the league is going to be different. The game could be faster, the speed of the game will be a faster tempo.
“You have to take that with a grain of salt because I think the best decision-makers, the best processors are the ones who do it quickly and don’t overcomplicate the game.”
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The ability to throw the deep corner route matters. The ability to marry eyes and footwork matters. The ability to lead matters. As much as anything, though, Nix’s mind is what Payton and the Broncos are betting on being a differentiator in the years to come.
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