Sean Payton has some very specific things he wants in a quarterback. He wants a mobile guy who runs to throw, as opposed to just creating chaos. He wants a quarterback who can throw to all levels of the field intelligently. And he wants someone smart enough to adhere himself to Payton’s passing concepts.
Russell Wilson was none of those types of quarterbacks, which was one of many reasons things didn’t work out between Payton and Wilson with the Broncos last season. In the 2024 draft, Payton made it abundantly clear which guy he thought best fit that paradigm when Denver selected Oregon’s Bo Nix with the 12th overall pick in the first round. That was seen by some analysts as an overdraft, but those analysts aren’t in Payton’s head, and again, Payton needs a quarterback who will do very specific things.
In “The Xs and Os” back in March, Greg Cosell and I got to watch tape with Nix for half an hour, and from that, there should be no question about Nix’s football intelligence.
As to everything else Payton wants, the coach was pretty effusive after he got his guy.
“He’s extremely smart,” Payton said of Nix. “We tried to send these guys similar tests—they were identical—the night before, 5:00 p.m., e-mailed the test. When I say the test, the series of first-, second-, third-day install. So quite a bit to study. [When it is] 5:00 p.m. and you get three days of install, and we’re meeting at 9 [o’clock] in the morning, it’s almost purposefully a little bit more than we think. Then at what point do they fail? In other words, it’s a lot. These guys all were really impressive. We got there at 9 a.m. and we gave him the test at 5 p.m. He’s sitting there in the office, and you could tell that he probably had been in the hotel room, do not disturb, pot of coffee, just grinding on it. So he’s extremely intelligent, really smart. He handled a lot of the protections.
“I gave you five or six different statistics. Negative play differential. When you watch him, it’s pretty calming. He’s very efficient, and it’s not just because of the [underneath throws]. You see a ton of NFL throws in their offense. His accuracy, he set an NCAA record. Then was he making the throws that we’re going to ask him to make? I think the one thing over the years, if you study it closely, guys that get sacked a lot in college tend to get sacked a lot in the NFL. Sometimes, that might be processing. Often times, we’ll look at the offensive line, the ball comes out and it comes out sometimes in funny body positions. He has a quick stroke.”
The Broncos also gave Nix a bump up in the person of Oregon receiver Troy Franklin, Nix’s most efficient and explosive target, with the 102nd overall pick in the fourth round. I’m not quite sure how Franklin lasted that long — I had him as a second-round prospect — but the fit was clear for Payton and general manager George Paton.
“We see him as an outside ‘Z,'” Payton said of Franklin’s potential deployment in his offense. “He has really good speed. He is a guy we were really impressed with at the line of scrimmage. We also had the Combine and even at Bo’s private workout he was there. We probably had a little bit more exposure. There was a lot more coincidence to that. That is just how this draft unfolds sometimes.”
Troy Franklin, WR, Oregon
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) March 29, 2024
PLUSES
— Oregon ran a ton of hi/lo concepts last season, and Franklin proved to be one of the NCAA's best receivers when taking the top off a defense on post/go/over routes.
— Gliding vertical speed with a discernible extra gear to get to the deep… pic.twitter.com/1GbNX57T3I
