Alex Palczewski will readily admit, with a different four-letter word, that he doesn’t know jack about playing wide receiver. He does,however, know people. And all throughout the lead-up to 2025’s NFL Draft, the Broncos offensive lineman would regale his locker room with tales of a young receiver he played with for a couple years at Illinois.
“I was like,” Palczewski told The Post in January, “‘F—in’ Pat Bryant.'”
There are many ways to describe Bryant. Most who try, though, end up offering this simple structure, often involving an expletive and an inflection that nearly crosses the vocal threshold from overwhelming admiration into admonition. The 23-year-old Bryant is not scared of much, and plays like it. He blocks and cuts over the middle with little abandon, the same qualities that Palczewski saw when he was a teenager at Illinois, the same qualities that made Bryant into one of Bo Nix’s favorite scramble targets down the stretch of 2025.
Those same qualities, however, also expose his 204-pound frame to hits that ended his rookie year before it could truly flourish.
“I mean, itap a part of the game,” Bryant reflected in early May, at a charity event at Kaiser Elementary School. “I ain’t really dwell that much on it.
“But my main focus this offseason was just, at the end of the day — becoming bulletproof, so I don’t have to deal with any of that.”
The bullets hit hard in 2025. First came a tweaked hamstring, which sidelined Bryant for Week 15’s game against the Packers. Then came Week 16’s brutal late-game concussion against Jacksonville, with Bryant immobilized out of precaution and carted off in the scariest sight of the year at Empower Field. Then came a second, minor concussion in the Broncos’ wild-card matchup against the Bills, with Bryant trudging to the locker room in frustration after a monster opening quarter.
“I was pretty hot,” Bryant recalled, of being ruled out for the rest of the game. “I mean, I was pretty hot. But, thatap how the game go, I guess. Whoever upstairs … whatever they saw.”
Then, finally, came the cherry on top: another hamstring aggravation and an exit in the AFC Championship Game, in a Patriots matchup where Bryant was already playing in a Guardian cap.
The string of flare-ups completely bucked the momentum of the 2025 third-round pick’s rookie season, as Bryant was establishing himself as a near-irreplaceable piece in Denver’s offense. In his last five active games of the regular season, he racked up 21 combined catches for 229 yards and was consistently playing the most game-to-game snaps of any receiver behind Courtland Sutton. Even as the Broncos’ receiver group has become cluttered with the trade for Jaylen Waddle — who Bryant called a “great add” — no member of the room directly overlaps with Bryant’s mix of tools.
“We got a very diverse room,” Bryant said this month. “Everybody got their different skillset. But at the end of the day, we’re just weapons for Bo.”
Bryant is a unique one. He emerged, as just a rookie, as Sean Payton’s most trusted blocking WR not named Lil’Jordan Humphrey. He proved fully capable of playing at X or at Z receiver. And despite finishing fourth in targets, Bryant had the most yards-after-catch over expected (+29) of any Broncos wide receiver in 2025, according to Next Gen Stats.
Payton’s offense, even with new coordinator Davis Webb at the helm, is still highly likely to hinge on frequent personnel mixing. But if Bryant can bring last year’s late-season impact into this year’s training camp, there’s a clear path to him sticking in three-receiver sets with Sutton and Waddle in 2026.
ճif,ultimately, hinges on Bryant’s health.
“Sean Payton’s camps are hard,” veteran receiver Trent Sherfield, a Bryant mentor and former Broncos WR, told The Post in February. “Like,everybody knows that. Going six days in a row. He’s a rookie, right? So trying to get your body back from training camp, and then you go into the regular season — Sean’s regular-season schedule is not a piece of cake, either.
“And so, itap gonna take time.”
Bryant told reporters in May that he’s spent most of the offseason at the Broncos’ facility rehabbing his hamstring, rather than returning home to Florida. At Sherfield’s advice, he’s installed a hot tub and a hyperbaric chamber at his home in Denver. Bryant said, too, that he’s “throwing on a couple pounds” this offseason.
“I ain’t really get to build how I want to build (last year),” Bryant said, referencing his strength. “So this offseason, thatap kinda what I focused on.”
After the Broncos’ first game of 2025 — just two months before Bryant wound up taking his job — Sherfield sat at his locker and marveled at the young receiver’s fearlessness through camp. Bryant’s hands-on routes across the middle, Sherfield told The Post in September, were “rare.” And the veteran then noted the concept of the second-year leap for receivers.
“I think he’s going to make plays this year, too,” Sherfield said then. “But I think next year, the sky’s the limit for him.”
As long, after all, as Bryant’s body isn’t the limit.
