RJ Harvey speaks of the pain as if it were as simple as swatting a fly, because it was. To him, at least. He tore his ACL once, back in college, and learned to cut and trust his knee again from running on sand. This was just a nagging shoulder that he’d get treatment on through 2025, on Monday mornings, once the violence of Sundays wore off.
It wound up being slightly more serious.
“I played with a torn labrum,” Harvey told The Post this August, standing outside Denver’s practice facility. He mutters. He does not like the public eye. “I don’t know. I’m good now. I feel great.”
His parents would fly out from Florida for home games last season in Harvey’s rookie year in Denver, and Harvey eventually told his dad, Robert, that he’d done something to his shoulder in camp. He wasn’t sure what. But nobody knew how serious it was until Harvey got his end-of-season physical, and an MRI revealed damage.
He returned home to Florida this offseason and told his parents he needed surgery.
“We was like, ‘On what?’” Robert Harvey recalled.
“Thatap just who he is,” the father said later. “He doesn’t complain about anything.”
Harvey did not complain — publicly or privately, by all accounts — about the shoulder in 2025. He did not complain when he was hardly seeing touches early in the season. He did not complain when he was seeing a lot of touches, after starting RB J.K. Dobbins‘ mid-season injury. He did not complain when he injured his rib in Week 15 and didn’t miss even a dash of practice. And he did not complain about a remarkably drastic shift in his role from college to the NFL, where head coach Sean Payton hinted he could be his long-awaited “Joker” weapon in the passing game.
That “Joker” moniker has now vanished from the apountry lexicon, a casualty of Internet overuse. Harvey doesn’t hear it anymore; he smiles. And yet he appears plenty more ready for it in 2026, between good health and good wisdom.
“I wasn’t overwhelmed,” Harvey said, speaking on his utilization as a rookie. “It was just something that I didn’t do a lot of in college. So just watching a lot of Darren Sproles cut-ups in college, and seeing how he ran his choice routes and his wheel routes, and seeing how decisive he was out of his cuts. Thatap something that I focused on during the offseason, and I feel a lot more comfortable with my route-running this year.
“I’m just going to continue to get better and develop,” he continued. “And, yeah, itap going to be a great year.”
After down-shifting from bell-cow status at UCF to a primary pass-catching back for much of 2025, Harvey kicked back into gear after Dobbins’ Lisfranc injury in Week 10, a rookie second-round running back emerging as one of Payton’s most important offensive pieces. He racked up 326 rushing yards in the Broncos’ final seven games; Harvey averaged just 3.4 yards per carry down the stretch, though, and Payton abandoned Harvey handoffs in Denver’s AFC wild-card win in favor of 12 carries for quarterback Bo Nix.
The Broncos’ running-back room has only cluttered further in 2026, as the club re-signed veteran favorite Dobbins to a two-year deal and drafted steady Washington back Jonah Coleman in the fourth round of April’s NFL Draft. But Harvey established himself early in training camp as the Payton’s go-to running back in third-down and two-minute passing situations — and will be “certainly in that position” in 2026, as Payton said in August.
“The more I do it, the more comfortable I’m going to get,” Harvey tells The Post. “And I feel like I’m getting great chemistry with Bo.”
This journey started in May 2025, when Payton introduced Harvey to his Library of Perfect Plays — a collection of touchdown film from his days in New Orleans. Admission required one second-round draft ticket, and the resources were practically endless. And Payton, the man who had carved Swiss Army Knives from blunt-force instruments, dusted off a few volumes of one of his old favorites: Sproles.
It was a new world for Harvey, then a quiet 24-year-old who is now a quiet 25-year-old. Sproles was a classic scat-back who had more catches than carries in three years in New Orleans. Harvey was a bell-cow back for two years at UCF who hadn’t spent much time learning the nuances of passing-down activity. And here was Payton, in May 2025, pulling up New Orleans touchdown clips of running-back choice routes with a clear directive: Study.
Harvey did, and turned himself into an open-field tornado in the passing game: 47 catches for 356 yards and five touchdowns as a rookie. In June, he trekked to Austin, Texas for a . He told reporters this summer, too, that he’s watched a “lot of film” in the offseason of 49ers star RB Christian McCaffrey, Kansas City’s Kenneth Walker III and Detroit’s Jahmyr Gibbs.
And Harvey has showcased obvious growth as a route-runner in his second NFL training camp.
“Just being more decisive,” Harvey told The Post, on what he’s learned from studying Sproles’ tape. “Just floating out of your cuts, out of the breaks, on the option routes. Choice routes. Just turning your shoulders and head around quick, and thatap what I’ve been working on this offseason during camp.”
That’s a tantalizing thought for another go-to option for Nix, as Harvey led all NFL rookies in 2025 with 12 touchdowns in 17 regular-season games. Those stats, of course, masked some obvious flaws in the Florida native’s game. Denver and Nix visibly didn’t trust Harvey in pass-protection situations early in his season, and Harvey too often operated with happy feet when running between the tackles.
Dobbins will no doubt command Denver’s room on the ground in 2026, and Coleman could eat into situational touches. But Harvey has earned the trust, in camp, to fully sprout his Joker wings.
“Year Two in the system,” Harvey said in June, “I feel way more comfortable. And it’s only going to get better, from where I left off.”
