How Sean Payton programmed the Broncos to believe they can survive anything — even losing Bo Nix
In the postgame swirl, Alex Forsyth made a wrong turn.
The adrenaline of a 33-30 overtime win over Buffalo began to fade Saturday evening, but so much more sat right there for the Broncos offensive lineman to consider.
The week ahead. The AFC Championship Game at Empower Field. A trip to the Super Bowl on the line.
As Forsyth pulled out of the stadium, however, he went the wrong way.
Road closed ahead. Standstill traffic.
He sat with his thoughts. Then his phone buzzed.
A group message lit up with a text from a friend.
Bo Nix broke his ankle. Out for the season.
Forsyth assumed his friend had bad information.
Denver Broncos center Alex Forsyth (54) keeps his eyes on Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jeffrey Bassa (31) during the game at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri on Thursday, Dec. 25, 2025. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
“I figured it was one of those fake football accounts,” he told The Denver Post this week. “I was like, ‘Nah, I think you got fooled.’”
Forsyth had just seen Nix in the postgame training room. The third-year center has ankle issues himself, missed 16 snaps Saturday and was evaluated again after the game. He talked with Nix, a teammate in Denver for two years and at the University of Oregon in 2022, briefly about the game while waiting around the X-ray room.
“I didn’t think anything of it,” Forsyth said. “I’ve played with Bo since Oregon, so I know when something’s wrong. I couldn’t tell or anything.”
Nix didn’t yet know he’d broken a bone in his right ankle, though he suspected something was wrong. He didn’t yet know he’d have surgery less than 72 hours later. That there was no way he could continue playing this year.
It all turned out to be true. Forsyth’s friend was right.
Bo Nix (10) of the Denver Broncos gives instructions to his line during the first quarter against the Buffalo Bills at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver, Colorado on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
Teammates and coaches found out in myriad ways.
Offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi was driving home with his son, who told him. He, too, thought bad information must have somehow spread.
Lil’Jordan Humphrey was on his way to the parking lot when a teammate told him.
“It broke my heart a little bit,” said the wide receiver, who hours earlier hauled in a touchdown from Nix against the Bills.
Fellow quarterbacks Jarrett Stidham and Sam Ehlinger were in the training room with Nix while he was evaluated and the imaging was done. They each described the moments that followed as “devastating.”
Head coach Sean Payton, his team scattered to the wind, decided to announce the news to reporters right away Saturday night. He did so because he knew the injury wouldn’t stay quiet until a Monday morning team meeting, but in the process, he also seized an opportunity to set an immediate tone.
Payton didn’t just say Stidham would be fine. He pushed his chips to the middle of the table right away.
“Just watch,” he said defiantly of his No. 2. In the days since, Payton’s confidence has sometimes veered toward bravado.
Part of that really is about belief in Stidham. Much of it, though, is because Denver is not scrambling this week trying to figure out how to approach life without Nix. Really, Payton and the Broncos front office have spent the past three years assembling a team and an operation built for this exact moment. Now comes the biggest stress test to date on the biggest stage yet.
‘Hurricane proof’
Head coach Sean Payton of the Denver Broncos speaks to offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi during practice at the Broncos Park in Centennial, Colorado on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
Payton often talks about identifying players who are “hurricane proof.”
He attributes the metaphor to legendary University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban.
“Toughness really is not necessarily about physical, but the mental and how much you can take,” Payton said earlier this season. “And (Saban) likened it to hurricane windows. You can get the 139s, the 150s or the 189s. Obviously, if you go up, they cost more.”
Finding the right players, Payton said, is “finding the 189s.”
In November, Payton implored reporters to pick a Super Bowl team. Any of them. They all go through storms.
“They come every season,” Payton said then, providing an ominously accurate forecast.
Denver at the time had just lost running back J.K. Dobbins to a foot injury. All-Pro corner Pat Surtain II was out with a pectoral strain, too. That’s bad weather, to be sure, though Denver had won seven straight and would ultimately run that streak out to 11.
Stunningly losing your quarterback 60 minutes from the Super Bowl isn’t a squall.
It’s the eye wall of a Category 5.
Payton, however, thinks his team will come out the other side Sunday still standing.
He built the Broncos that way.
“It starts with really the right type of DNA that you’re bringing in,” he said in November. “You’re bringing in these guys with grit, toughness, football I.Q.. Generally speaking, those are hard-weathered players that can withstand the storms that come in our league.”
Hard and dark times
When Payton arrived in Denver in early 2023, he promised players on the roster one thing: The past did not matter. Everybody would be evaluated on what he, his staff and the front office saw with their own eyes going forward.
Some talented players didn’t last more than the first season, like 2020 first-round receiver Jerry Jeudy.
Some who’d been leaders under previous coaches did not work for Payton, like guard Dalton Risner and safety Justin Simmons.
Others, though, found their way through the chaff and into the light.
One example: 2023 undrafted rookie Jaleel McLaughlin. The North Carolina native spent part of his childhood in and out of homelessness. He played Division II and then FCS football. His pre-dawn workouts became the stuff of legend.
Payton liked the tape. He loved the rest.
DENVER , CO – JANUARY 4: Jaleel McLaughlin (38) of the Denver Broncos sheds Tony Jefferson (23) of the Los Angeles Chargers during the third quarter at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver, Colorado on Sunday, January 4, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
“I heard the report on how he arrived at being a candidate to be in the NFL,” Payton said. “Then the question was, ‘Is he good enough?’ That question has been answered.”
Talent and traits matter. There is a performance baseline that is required to make it in the NFL. But to Payton, once that line is satisfied, grit is a differentiating factor.
That’s how nickel Ja’Quan McMillian, undrafted in 2022, went from early bench player for Payton to starting nickel to now one of the premier slot men in the game.
Defensive coordinator Vance Joseph, this week, acknowledged to The Post that McMillian doesn’t hit the physical thresholds Denver sets for defensive backs.
“He’s undersized,” Joseph said. “He’s fast but not really fast. But he was always tough and smart and the ball always found him. That’s his best trait. Having him here for three years, you watch him and how much he’s overcome, first with his physical traits. But he’s so tough mentally and he’s so smart.
“When things get hard and dark, he’s at his best. You need guys like that. Sometimes you have guys who are really, really good athletes, they’re the perfect profile, but when things get tough, those traits go away.”
Ja’Quan McMillian (29) of the Denver Broncos warms up before the game against the Jacksonville Jaguars at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver, Colorado on Sunday, Dec. 21, 2025. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
The Broncos prioritize players like McMillian and McLaughlin. They, like everybody, need elite talent and they have it in Surtain, OLB Nik Bonitto, DT Zach Allen, RG Quinn Meinerz and others. But they’ve managed to collect high-end players who are “like-minded,” as Allen describes it, and then fill in the roster based on a willingness to sacrifice on talent or traits for players they believe fit their mental mold.
“Sean’s done a good job of finding players like that,” Joseph said. “Guys who love football. Guys who just earn their way. Our defense is full of them. Malcolm Roach has earned his way. Not a profile guy by any means. Undersized for a defensive lineman. But just tough, smart and the energy is so positive every day.”
The Grit Lab
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance,” that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”
If the Broncos’ football operation is an institution, Payton casts the shadow.
He is obsessive about winning. “Maniacal,” he’s said multiple times, about any detail he deems as being even remotely potentially impactful to that cause.
That does not mean everything he does is right, that he handles every situation with aplomb or that those tendencies can’t sometimes get in his own way.
What it does provide, though, is clarity.
Once a goal is set forth, it does not go back to the shelf. Once a standard is set, it cannot be lowered.
The wrench turns only one direction.
In 2023, Payton’s first year, he said he’d be “pissed” if the Broncos didn’t make the playoffs.
The next year, he stiff-armed any notion that carrying $53 million in dead salary cap from Russell Wilson’s contract and playing a rookie quarterback should dampen expectations for his team. He reminded everyone about those dead cap charges after Denver made the playoffs, but never used them to head off a potential step back because he never believed a step back would come.
“When you have like-minded people, excuses aren’t going to be an option,” Allen said. “That’s why the past two years have been so good is because we’ve been able to bring in like-minded people. Guys really, genuinely enjoy spending time with each other and the more time you spend here, the better you’re going to be.”
Players can sharpen skills, get stronger or become more familiar with schematics, to be sure. But they can also learn to become grittier. More hurricane-proof.
Payton said as much Thursday, citing Dr. Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the 2016 book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.”
Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton takes questions from the media after a Broncos team practice on Friday, Jan. 9, 2026, at Broncos Park Powered by CommonSpirit in Centennial, Colo. (Photo by Timothy Hurst/The Denver Post)
“Obviously, it’s something that I think is learned to some degree,” Payton said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I was just born with grit genes.’ It can be developed.”
It can be developed, Duckworth contends, not just in individuals but in organizations.
“The thing that makes a difference, I think, is that if you understand what grit is at the individual level, then you see what you need at the team level,” Duckworth told The Post this week. “You have to have a top-level goal which gives meaning and purpose to everything. You want all the arrows pointing in the same direction. … Who sets that goal? For a team like the Broncos, it’s most often the coach. It keeps people aligned to the overall goal — obviously everybody wants to win the Super Bowl. But often there’s a philosophy and a culture to the team.”
Duckworth, who teaches a course at Penn called “Grit Lab,” hasn’t worked with Payton previously but she’s been rooting for Denver in the playoffs because she is friends with — and has received research funding from — Broncos owner Carrie Walton-Penner.
In 2018, Duckworth co-authored an article and wrote that “restlessness with the status quo and an unrelenting drive to improve” are fundamental to organizations with grit and that, “clarity around high-level goals can be a competitive differentiator.”
Payton believes that in Year 3, his Broncos have all of that.
The next challenge
Ultimately, none of this may matter Sunday against the Patriots.
Nix’s loss is a big one, no matter how resolved the rest of the group is.
The gambling company Circa Sports earlier this week installed New England as a 5.5-point favorite and its risk manager, Jamey Pileggi, determined the Broncos would have opened as 1.5-point favorites had Nix not been injured.
That’s a 7-point swing. Ten of Denver’s wins this year have been by that margin or less. Six of the NFL’s 10 postseason games thus far have been, too.
The Patriots matched Denver’s 14 regular-season games and have dominated the Los Angeles Chargers and Houston so far in the playoffs.
Amazingly, only a Week 1 loss to Las Vegas, the worst team in football, produced the tiebreaker that put this game in Denver rather than Massachusetts.
Head coach Mike Vrabel’s team is balanced, explosive and led by quarterback Drake Maye, a 2024 NFL Draft classmate of Nix’s who authored an MVP-contending season.
They’re good. They’re favored. Most expect they’ll win.
What had become clear over the course of 12 one-score wins, though, is that the Broncos do not rattle easily.
What has crystallized in the hours and days after Nix’s injury is that they will not rattle even in the aftershock of one of the most surreal post-game emotion swings a group could endure.
Certainly, if the Broncos bow out, players and coaches will wonder what might have been. They will remember the year they had such a golden opportunity and when it changed just that fast, so close to the finish line.
Right now, though, Payton is betting he’s built a fortress impenetrable to such thoughts as long as there is still an opponent ahead.
“Anything that’s like, ‘imagine if we had this,’ that never crosses anybody’s mind,” Allen said.
Payton showed up Monday morning for a team meeting, the first time the group had been together since Nix’s injury, and told them that Sunday would be determined not by how Stidham played, but by how everybody else did.
He projected confidence, just like he did Wednesday when he implored Broncos fans to be loud and said they’d have “plenty of time to rest after this one. Two weeks.”
From the first days of training camp this year, Payton talked about this team as one that could make a championship run. He didn’t guarantee it, but he said he wanted the group to be comfortable thinking and talking in those terms.
For as much as the earth moved beneath the Broncos’ feet in the hour after Saturday’s win, the reality at hand Sunday did not.
Two teams are left in the AFC. One of them is going to the Super Bowl.
Payton, seemingly, hasn’t even considered the possibility of the Broncos not being that team. His lengthened shadow envelops the locker room entirely.
Lil’Jordan Humphrey (17) of the Denver Broncos catches a touchdown pass from Bo Nix (10) as Darnell Savage (25) of the Buffalo Bills wraps him up during the second quarter at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver, Colorado on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
“He just knows what he’s got,” Humphrey said. “He knows what kind of coach he is, he knows what type of players he has in this locker room and he doesn’t think it matters what the situation is.
“We can go out there and handle business.”
Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.
