The campus, nestled roughly 1,000 steps from the edge of Gardner Lake in Connecticut, was a frothing cauldron of testosterone. Before St. Thomas More welcomed its first-ever class of female students in 2021, it was an all-boys college-prep boarding school of around 125 young men. Roughly 50 of them played football. The teenagers that bounded through the door and into dorm rooms puffed up their chests, trading war stories of the previous campuses they’d conquered.
A young Miles Scott, as St. Thomas More football coach Ernest Anderson tells it, was a breath of fresh air in this cloud of hormones.
One night in the 2020 season, Anderson was walking around the halls for bed-checks, knocking on doors for lights-out. Kids, as usual, were fiddling with controllers. Playing “NBA 2K.” Playing “Madden.” Then Anderson cracked open the door to Davis’s room, a transfer who’d come from Illinois for his senior season of high school ball.
Scott was lying in bed, listening to Marvin Gaye to wind down.
“That’s when I knew he was an old soul,” Anderson, formerly Scott’s defensive coordinator, recalled. “And it was really that he was here for one reason.”
Scott, an Illinois receiver-turned-safety drafted in the seventh round this April by the Denver Broncos, has never in his football life been particularly fast. He is well-built. He is strong. He is smart enough that Yale once offered him a scholarship. But his best trait, as former Illinois teammate Kenenna Odeluga said: Scott takes a “pursuit of learning, in everything that interests him, to the highest level.”
He is a talented singer and plays the piano. He is remarkably good with geography. He became fluent in Spanish in college, for reasons unknown. And every game week in his final couple of seasons at Illinois, Scott tracked down Fighting Illini defensive analyst Myers Hendrickson for one-on-one film sessions to study the upcoming opposing quarterback’s tendencies.
Those traits first endeared Scott to Illinois as an unknown walk-on receiver out of St. Thomas More, in 2021. That trait first endeared Scott to the Broncos as an unheralded safety in 2025. Scott is a kid, Odeluga said, who “would give you the skin off his back if he could.” Illinois and Denver both keyed in on him for that same reason.
That is not a coincidence.
“A lot of scouts, all of them ask a lot of the same questions,” said Illinois receivers coach Justin Stepp, describing NFL scouts’ pre-draft process. “And I know, as far as Denver, they ask a lot of the same questions that we ask when we’re out recruiting kids.”
There is a pipeline building from shared philosophy, out a couple of states east. Blue-and-orange to blue-and-orange. Scott is the third Fighting Illini in the past four years, after Alex Palczewski in 2023 and Pat Bryant in 2025, that the Broncos have targeted straight out of Illinois. All are completely different football players. All are the same 쾱Իof football player.
“They might not have been the five-star guys,” Odeluga, who played with all three at Illinois, told The Post. “They’re not the guys that you’ll see … all the hoopla around them. But these are guys that bring their lunch pail to work every day, do what the coaches tell them, do it to the best of their ability, and then are there when the team needs them the most. And those are just — lunch-pail guys.”
Tough, smart, dependable
In five seasons under head coach Bret Bielema, Illinois has advanced from perennial Big Ten loser to Big Ten contender, despite landing just . In Champaign, Bielema hires, recruits, and begins and ends team meetings with the same three-word motto: tough, smart, dependable. These are not exactly novel foundational values. But they happen to be nearly identical to the same principles that Sean Payton brought as New Orleans’ first-year head coach in 2006, and brought to rebuild Denver in 2023, and the same principles that Payton’s mentor, Bill Parcells, operated by
“Bill really helped and still helps Sean with personnel, as far as knowing what he needs at O-line, D-line, different positions around the team as a head coach,” former Saints linebacker Scott Shanle told The Post last year. “There’s no doubt about it — Bill Parcells, you would never be in the Bill Parcells doghouse if you knew what you were doing, you executed, you played hard, and you didn’t get hurt.
“Bill hated hurt players. Sean hates players who are hurt.”
Intangible values have become tangible roots, intertwining across the 1,000 miles from the Rockies to the American Midwest. Palczewski, the first Bielema-era product to land with Payton’s Broncos, is a 6-foot-6 Polish offensive lineman who looks more like a freight handler than a football player at first glance. But he authored the , and became a roster lock in the 2023 preseason after going undrafted.
“Tough, smart,” Payton said of Palczewski, then. “He’s played a lot of football. Itap not always pretty, but there is this quality of — he gets the job done.”
As the 26-year-old Palczewski has become an indispensable part of Denver’s offensive line and earned himself a two-year extension this offseason, Bielema . Every single time Illinois hosts a potential offensive-line recruit on campus, Bielema pulls up that tweet and shows them Payton’s words about Palczewski.
“Tough, smart, dependable has nothing to do with your ability — it has to do with the way you think and act, right,” Bielema said. “And here’s Sean Payton saying two words that we preach every day.”
Since Palczewski’s arrival, Denver has created a new, direct tie to Illinois with each passing year. In 2024, the Broncos hired Jim Leonhard — who’d been a senior football analyst at Illinois — as their defensive passing-game coordinator. In Denver, Leonhard fed Payton and the Broncos’ offensive staff information on Bryant, an ascending 6-foot-2 receiver and a hand-in-glove fit for Payton’s utilization of wide receivers. Payton eventually credited Leonhard for his insight into Bryant’s makeup, a clutch target and avid blocker who Stepp said would often beat Bielema to Illinois’ building in the mornings.
Roughly a month before the 2025 NFL Draft, members of the Broncos’ staff called Illinois with specific requests of film on Bryant. One, Bielema said, was a cut-up of one-on-one practice reps of Bryant working against current Seahawks All-Pro corner Devon Witherspoon, a former Illinois All-American in 2022. Such tape, Bielema said, showed Bryant was “very successful” against Witherspoon.
The Broncos had another specific request for Illinois with those tapes, Stepp recounted: do Դdztell another team they’d requested that film, for fear of tipping their interest in Bryant.
“I would tell you the Denver Broncos — in my opinion, they know who they are and they know who they want to be,” Bielema told The Denver Post. “And they target players, and do an unbelievable amount of recon to try and make sure that what they’re looking at is the reality of what they’re going to get.”
On Denver’s radar
Enter Scott, the latest Illinois-to-Denver tie — and one that’s quietly been brewing for a while. In 2025, shortly before the Broncos drafted Bryant, the Fighting Illini hired Mike Neu as an offensive assistant. Neu is a longtime Payton associate, having served as a scout for New Orleans in 2006 and later the Saints’ quarterbacks coach from 2014 to 2015. And shortly into Neu’s time in Illinois, he reached out to Payton and asked if he and members of the Fighting Illini’s staff could shadow in Denver’s building during offseason activities.
Payton acquiesced. Bielema, Stepp, Neu, offensive coordinator Barry Lunney Jr. and former defensive coordinator Aaron Henry (now at Notre Dame) spent three days in the 2025 offseason with the Broncos, observing in meeting rooms and watching practices. Stepp was struck, he told The Post, by how similarly Denver structured practice to Illinois. Neu sat in on quarterback meetings, and wound up taking some bunch-formation concepts back to Illinois for quarterback Luke Altmyer’s senior season. Henry spent time picking the brain of Broncos defensive coordinator Vance Joseph and implemented concepts from Denver’s schemes against 12-personnel (two-tight-end) formations into Illinois’ system.
And on that excursion — nearly a year before their seventh-round selection rolled around this draft — Broncos staffers asked Bielema about Scott.
“I knew this was a guy,” Bielema said, “that had been on their radar for a while.”
True to Denver’s attempts to camouflage their interest, Scott told The Post at rookie minicamp that he “didn’t have a clue” the Broncos were interested in him pre-draft until they reached out to host him on a top-30 visit. And in many ways, this journey to Denver is unlikely. Scott walked on at Illinois in 2021 after receiving exactly two collegiate offers at St. Thomas More, and spent two years as a backup receiver. After his second season, Bielema told Scott he’d put him on scholarship if he moved to defensive back.
Scott looked at Bielema like he’d grown three heads. But a scholarship was a scholarship.
Across the next three seasons, Scott started 37 of a possible 38 games at safety for Illinois, intercepted seven passes, and was named captain twice. His journey embodied Bielema’s foundational ideals. So did his personality, a quiet and multitalented individual who captured pin-dropping silence when he spoke.
“If there’s a guy that I would say that I could lean on to give me the pulse of the locker room — offense, defense, or special teams — it was definitely Miles Scott,” Bielema said.
In a true rarity, former Illinois defensive coordinator Henry entrusted Scott as Illinois’s green-dot play-caller from his free-safety slot. And Scott’s on-field transition should be easier, Henry anticipates, because of similarities in Illinois and Denver’s defensive schemes. Both the Broncos and Fighting Illini, Henry explained, run a lot of “bare” formations — a five-man rush with three defenders deep.
“Miles was the catalyst of that,” Henry said. “He was very, very, very intelligent, and knew exactly what I wanted to get done.”
He’s a player, then, that Denver sees fitting its system, and is the latest Fighting Illini who could fit neatly into the Broncos’ locker room, too. Palczewski has become a beloved figure on the offensive line for his versatility (and remarkably colorful mouth). Bryant has become a beloved figure in his receiver room for his fearlessness (and remarkably colorful mouth). The 24-year-old Scott, now, will find his own corner.
“That night on draft day that Denver selected him,” Neu recounted, “I kinda got chills. Just because I know he’ll be such a great fit.”
