On the morning of Feb. 25, 2023, Sai’vion Jones called his sister with tears in his eyes. His friend Marty was cold and stiff and resting in an empty box of red beans at his LSU residence. Jones’ mother, Sennecca, heard the news and told her son that they would bury him because the family had grown to love Marty. So Jones drove the 50 miles to Vacherie, Louisiana, and picked up a shovel.
He picked at the dirt in the front yard, right underneath the pecan tree. Sennecca’s voice rose and fell with a hymn, as her daughter wrapped Marty’s scales in an LSU flag and gently placed him in a small hole.
“You gon’ get another one?” Jones’ sister asked him as she patted the flag down.
He did — Coco, Jones named it — because through high school and eventual stardom at LSU, the now-Broncos 23-year-old defensive lineman has carried an obsession with bearded dragons that nobody in his circle can quite explain. Jones went everywhere with Marty, the lizard sinking its talons into his shirt and hanging along for the ride. His old high school coach, Robert Valdez, always found it personally unsettling how settled Jones was with a four-legged reptile crawling across his neck.
“He’s a different kid,” Valdez told The Post last year. “His best friend is a lizard.”
Jones is a 6-foot-5, 289-pound young man who plays a violent role in the trenches, but he is “still a kid,” as his mother, Sennecca, said. From the minute he was born, her son has been quiet. He’s comfortable around softer spirits and reclusive around older ones.
But Marty, now, rests under a Louisiana pecan tree. Jones left Coco at home in Vacherie, too, after the Broncos traded up in the third round of the 2025 NFL Draft to swing on his raw talent. And entering his second season in Denver, Jones is staring at a prime opportunity to shed a more reticent skin to make a louder impact at the heart of the Broncos’ defense.
Last fall, former Broncos defensive end John Franklin-Myers took it upon himself to mentor Jones, despite being acutely aware that Denver may have drafted Jones to replace him. Franklin-Myers is now gone to Tennessee, a considerable loss for a defense that thrived on his and All-Pro Zach Allen’s symbiotic relationship. Jones is perhaps the highest-upside candidate of a mix of veterans and youngsters who will vie in training camp to fill Franklin-Myers’ void, with no clear arrangement sorted on this defensive-line carousel.
“With the way we’re rotating those guys — if it happens to be one individual when training camp comes, great,” head coach Sean Payton said in June, when asked about replacing Franklin-Myers’ snaps. “If it happens to be the sum total of the group, so be it.”
Reserve Eyioma Uwazurike wants it and is the most logical immediate replacement. Third-round rookie Tyler Onyedim, the Broncos’ first draft pick in 2026, turned heads externally and internally in the offseason program. Veteran Malcolm Roach could veer away from nose tackle to fill some of the void. And after a rookie year in which he played just 39 snaps, the Broncos still believe Jones will be “a player,” as general manager George Paton said in January.
Jones just needs to seize his spot on the board.
“He’s developed at the right pace for us,” Broncos defensive-line coach Jamar Cain told The Post in September. “He’s doing everything we ask him to do. But being a quiet kid, sometimes you forget he’s there. Show up. Let us know that you’re there. Let us know that you’re doing your job. And he is.”
‘God had other plans for him’
Jones has died before. Twice, actually. He still has the mark in his neck, as a reminder only his mother will truly understand.
At two months old, he was diagnosed with a breathing disorder called laryngomalacia, where tissue . Not uncommon. Often harmless. But baby Jones’ condition was dire enough to necessitate a tracheotomy tube in his neck to open his windpipe, and one day his babysitter heard him dead silent and noticed he’d yanked the tube out of his neck.
Seneca was at a party when her family called her, and told her to meet them at the local hospital . She arrived to hospital staff yelling code blue. Her son flatlined. And was resuscitated. And flatlined. And was resuscitated. And airlifted by helicopter to Children’s Hospital New Orleans.
He spent the first year of his life on a heart monitor and an oxygen machine. Sennecca said she still thinks of those days often. Impossible to forget.
“I think about how blessed he is, and how he has a testimony to share,” she told The Post last summer. “Hopefully, one day, he’ll share it and encourage some people. Because, he’s real quiet. He don’t speak much. You gotta pull words out of him. But he’s definitely blessed, and he came a long way.
“He could’ve been dead and gone,” she continued. “But God had other plans for him.”
Her son doesn’t remember, really. But tendrils of memory can sneak through the subconscious. Jones did speech therapy until middle school and would only speak to certain people growing up, his cousin Jontae recalled. In his senior year at St. James High in Vacherie, Jones became the first defensive lineman to win the Sportsline Player of the Year Award, presented by Baton Rouge television station WAFB.
He did not quite ham it up .
“That was a real eye-opening experience … he wasn’t comfortable with that, at the time,” said former St. James defensive coordinator LaVanta Davis.
According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Vacherie is a town of fewer than 5,500 people. Sennecca said her son was “scared” when he first got to LSU. Jones barely played his freshman season. As a sophomore, he was enrolled in a public speaking class. He hated it, his mother recalled. Cain, then LSU’s defensive-line coach, would call Jones’ mother and tell her he was slipping. She’d tell Cain to do what he needed to.
“Sai’vion knew,” Sennecca said, “not to play with Coach Cain.”
Cain helped Jones through that class, Sennecca recalled. And helped him assert his voice, too, in the middle of a stacked LSU defensive line room. The Tigers had several upperclassmen and future NFL players ahead of Jones on the depth chart, and yet Cain would preach to Jones that he didn’t need to simply wait his turn.
“Be a player,” Cain would tell him.
Jones tallied the third-most sacks (4.5) on the roster despite finishing 16th in defensive snaps and leveraged the season into a starting role for two more seasons at LSU.
“I said, ‘You’re better than him — go take his job,'” Cain recalled. “Like, this is on you. Don’t be happy being a backup. And then thatap when he started taking off.”
Coveted size and speed
He is a different man now, after the LSU spotlight has coaxed Jones’ personality out to reporters. At heart, he is not that different. At the start of last season, The Post asked Sennecca if she had any idea where her son’s head was at as he entered his rookie season in Denver.
“I don’t know,” Sennecca said, laughing. “I have no clue. He don’t talk.”
Jones has had a familiar ally in Cain, though, a highly touted defensive-line mind who jumped to the Broncos in 2023 after that one season with LSU. Their journey picked up right back where it left off three years ago, on a new stage but in a similar situation. And Cain has prodded Jones just the same as when he was in college — a young man who ignites, former coach Davis said, when he realizes he has a legitimate opportunity in front of him.
“100%,” Cain said last fall, asked if he’s encouraged Jones to take others’ jobs in Denver. “I’ve done that with him. ‘Hey, Sai’vion, let’s get going, let’s get going.'”
The Broncos, certainly, did not expect or need Jones to fill an immediate need in 2025. Cain was the architect of a pass rush that finished tied for the fifth-most sacks in NFL history, after all, and Denver knew Jones would need some post-Louisiana seasoning after transitioning from an edge rusher to an interior defensive lineman over the course of his college career.
The promise, though, is simple enough: Jones has the burst of a speed rusher with the frame to put on a defensive tackle’s weight. He ran a blazing 1.59-second 10-yard split in pre-draft testing in 2025 and has the height and arm length (33.5 inches) to shed blocks quickly, as his high school coach Valdez said.
“He’s a big, physical player,” Patriots left tackle Will Campbell told The Post on Jones, his former LSU teammate, during the week of Super Bowl LX in February. “Extremely talented … I know Sai’vion will be ready when his name is called.”
But Franklin-Myers and Jones, both, were well aware of the veteran’s expiring contract amid their mentor-mentee relationship last season. The Broncos specifically chose to let the 29-year-old Franklin-Myers walk for a three-year, $63 million deal in free agency, and have made the explicit decision to turn to internal development rather than pay for external help to fill a rather sizeable hole.
“We got a lot of good guys, and that’s going to create a lot of opportunities for people,” Allen said in June. “And we came close to the sack record last year, and we fully expect to break it this year.”
Easier said than done without Franklin-Myers, who finished with a career-best 7.5 sacks in 2025 and had a larger impact than simple raw numbers. According to film charted by The Post, the Broncos’ three best pass-rushers — Allen, Nik Bonitto and Jonathon Cooper — all had more sacks last season when Franklin-Myers was on the field as opposed to off (even as Franklin-Myers had just a 49% snap share in 2025).
The room is well aware, as Roach said, that it needs to find a way to fill Franklin-Myers’ shoes.
“After watching the cut-ups, you kind of realize what you’re missing there,” defensive coordinator Vance Joseph said in June. “We’ve drafted to that position fairly well, so we have some young guys that we expect to step up and play. Thatap their job. Thatap why we drafted those guys … you can’t pay everyone. So we chose to let JFM walk and draft to his position. So those guys have to play well.”
In Uwazurike, Onyedim, and Jones, the Broncos have three suitors for Franklin-Myers’ snaps who have completely different body types yet are cut from the same cloth. The 28-year-old Uwazurike and 23-year-old Onyedim, in fact, overlapped for a season at Iowa State in 2021. And when the Cyclones were recruiting Onyedim out of Richmond, Texas, then-Iowa State defensive line coach Eli Rasheed went to then-senior Uwazurike and told him he wanted him to serve as Onyedim’s “big brother.”
The similarities run deeper, beyond a shared Nigerian background. Uwazurike played his entire high school career at Southfield-Lathrup, a campus in Michigan, . He left high school underdeveloped, and left Iowa State with untapped upside, as former defensive coordinator Jon Hancock would tell NFL scouts that Uwazurike’s best football was still ahead of him. And Uwazurike is still raw in NFL terms, with just 637 career defensive snaps after a full-season gambling suspension in 2023.
Onyedim, Hancock told The Post, is the “same guy” in football terms — carrying raw upside into Iowa State and beyond.
“Enyi is, now, still tapping on the ceiling that’s growing,” Rasheed said. “Tyler is the same human in a twitched-up, faster body.”
In June, discussing Uwazurike’s development, Joseph made clear that all three in this triumvirate could cycle in to fill Franklin-Myers’ absence. Sometimes, even, all within the same set of downs.
“Maybe it’s a first-and-second-down run-stopping role,” Joseph said, “and Sai’vion takes over the pass-rush role.”
That name-drop means something and carries expectation. Jones has always lived on his own wavelength, his cousin Jontae said. He has been a young man comfortable in his own shell, family members said, only cracking when his frame got too large for him to remain hidden away.
And the Broncos want him — and maybe need him — to fully break through.
