Nix and zones may bring Mahomes, but names will never hurt him.
“Bo’s used to being the top dog. He’s not intimidated. He thinks he belongs,” David Morris, Bo Nix’s longtime quarterback coach and founder of QB Country, said a few days ago by phone when I asked about Broncos-Bills and Denver’s first playoff game since 2015. “… He’s not intimidated of being in the category with the best of the best. He’s the ultimate competitor. He doesn’t want to just go out and win games he’s supposed to win. He wants to win the big games.
“That guy, he’s a warrior, and he knows what it takes to win football games. At the end of the day, he can hang with anybody.”
He’ll get his chance. There are two paths to the Super Bowl out of the AFC. The easiest one involves a DeLorean, a flux capacitor, and setting the time circuits for January 2036, when Josh Allen’s about to turn 40.
Otherwise, best cowboy up, buttercup.
John Elway had Kelly, Marino and Esiason. Peyton Manning had Brady, Roethlisberger and Flacco. Nix has the Squid Game, presented by Gatorade.
Pull the upset in Buffalo against Allen, you land a date with Patrick Mahomes in Kansas City. Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson, Houston’s C.J. Stroud and the Chargers’ Justin Herbert are slugging it out on the other side of the bracket. Runway Joe Burrow in Cincinnati just missed making the dance.
The AFC is stuffed like a chimichanga with generational QBs, all of whom might be slinging it for another decade. Mahomes, the graybeard, is 29. Allen’s 28. Herbert turns 27 in March. Jackson just turned 28. Stroud turns 24 in October. Burrow’s 28. Nix will be 25 in February.
“He can play with anybody,” chuckled Morris, who’s been working with Nix at QB Country — a quarterback training and development gym in Mobile, Ala. — since the Broncos rookie was a junior-to-be at Auburn. “And he’s not comparing himself to those guys. I do think he has the utmost respect for all those guys. And he learned from them and from their games and I think he looks up to them. He’s got a little bit of all those guys in him, from a style standpoint.”
Since 2002, first-time postseason QBs are 19-38. Over the last 11 seasons, rookie starters have combined for just four playoff victories, and Brock Purdy in 2022 accounted for half of those. It’s been 12 years since a rookie QB won a postseason tilt on the road, and the last cat to do it sold his Cherry Hills Village mansion with 12 bathrooms for $21.5 million last March.
Ain’t that a kick in the head? After spending 10 months making us all forget about Russell Wilson, Broncos Country needs Nix to get DangeRuss.
“This is, like you said, where I want to be,” Nix replied when I asked him about being in the same stage as Allen and Mahomes. “(These are) the moments that matter. These are the moments that people remember guys. So you’ve just got to go out there and cut it loose and go out there and play. And trust your teammates, trust what you’ve prepared for throughout this entire year — and frankly, my (entire) career, my (entire) life. So this is just where … that work finally gets to come into play. And it’s going to be fun.
“And those guys have done a lot of winning in the past. So I’ve got some catching up to do.”
No time like the present.
“He was the No. 1 player in America in his high school class,” Morris said of Nix, who was indeed 247Sports.com’s composite top dual-threat high school QB prospect for the Class of 2019, edging out Jayden Daniels. “I don’t think Bo’s going to be intimidated by anybody. He’s not going to take a back seat to anybody. Never has. Never will. He’s a competitor, a fighter, a believer …
“The thing to know about Bo is, he’s been through a ton of adversity. He was made for these moments, because he’s (dealt with) adversity. Anytime you’re playing on the biggest stage and competing against the best of the best, you’ve got to be mentally built to know how to prepare and also how to deliver on those moments. I just think he’s built for this moment.”
Diss him. Boo him. Dare him. Press Bo’s back against the wall, Nix becomes pure pass and vinegar. To smell the roses in the playoffs, you’ve got to laugh off the thorns.
“There’s nobody that can embrace the (stink) of football like Bo Nix,” Morris continued. “It’s a grind, man. He’s here (training) at 7:30 and he leaves at 4:30 and you do that every day for three months, and then you’ve got interviews and team visits, and you don’t know if you’re going to get picked sixth or 45th. And you end up going to the perfect place. Football (stinks) a lot of the time. And that’s when you’ve got to love it. If you don’t love it, you’re not going to make it.”
How do you know you’ve made it? When even hated rivals are tipping their caps from afar. Bronco-masher Maxx Crosby, the Raiders defensive end who lost to the orange and blue for the first time as a pro in 2024, offered this Nix scouting report during a recent appearance on SiriusXM’s “Let’s Go!” show:
“(Nix is) tough, you know what I mean? He doesn’t react. I think I was mic’d up, and they cut that whole clip of me discussing certain things with him, going after him. And he just kind of was looking at me. I was like, ‘OK, he’s actually got some (stones) to him.’”
Sure does.
The kind that make mountains.
“You guys are seeing all the glory of it. Football’s hard, man,” Morris said. “Bo embraces the hardness of it. He’ll (be) exhausted at some point mentally, but you know how it’s going to be. And you keep going. The conditions are going to suck Sunday. He’s good. He’s made for it.”
First-year phenom
The AFC is loaded with star quarterbacks, but only a few of them had rookie years as statistically successful as the Broncos’ Bo Nix. And none of them won as many games as Denver’s first-year signal caller. Here’s a look at each quarterback’s stats from their rookie season:
| Quarterback | Rookie Year | Record | Pass yards | Comp. % | TD passes | Passer Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bo Nix, Denver | 2024 | 10-7 | 3,775 | 66.3 | 29 | 93.3 |
| C.J. Stroud, Houston | 2023 | 9-6 | 4,108 | 63.9 | 23 | 100.8 |
| Joe Burrow, Cincinnati | 2020 | 2-7-1 | 2,688 | 65.3 | 13 | 89.8 |
| Justin Herbert, L.A. Chargers | 2020 | 6-9 | 4,336 | 66.6 | 31 | 98.3 |
| Josh Allen, Buffalo | 2018 | 5-6 | 2,074 | 52.8 | 10 | 67.9 |
| Lamar Jackson, Baltimore | 2018 | 6-1 | 1,201 | 58.2 | 6 | 84.5 |
| Patrick Mahomes, Kansas City | 2017 | 1-0 | 284 | 62.9 | 0 | 76.4 |
Source: Pro-Football-Reference.com
Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.