In the springtime in Faunsdale, Alabama, schools of bass drift from deeper waters to the edges of lakes, lured by the kisses of the Southern sun. , knowing this, told 17-year-old he should try to fish right at the bank of the lake that bordered their not-so-summer camp this March. So Coleman cast his rod, ignoring a heap of good-natured prodding from Bo Nix — his de facto camp counselor — that he wouldn’t catch anything.
He let one line fly. No bites. He let a second line fly. And Coleman reeled in a 4-pound bass from the lake’s depths, long enough to touch from his fingertip to his bicep. Bo Nix looked on in disbelief as Coleman set his rod down and unhooked the conquest from his line.
Coleman turned back and saw Bo Nix had grabbed the rod for himself.
“I just saw it in his eyes, bruh,” Coleman recalled. “He was determined.”
Never mind that Nix wasn’t exactly a skilled fisherman, despite his Southern roots. Never mind that he was here to mentor, his own organization having organized this retreat. Never mind that Coleman, a senior quarterback at Central High in Phenix City, Alabama, had to show him how to cast a line.
Someone — OK, a 17-year-old — had indirectly presented the 26-year-old NFL quarterback a challenge. And so he began to try to fish.
“He was, like, really determined,” Coleman said. “He wasn’t even smiling. Like, straight face. Eyes on the rod. Locked in.
“So I’m like, ‘Oh, nah. This man for real.'”
Coleman learned quickly that the Broncos’ third-year quarterback is intentional. In football. In life. In everything. And Coleman has brought that back from Faunsdale to Phenix City, one of roughly a dozen young quarterbacks who have all internalized something from Nix across two years of specialized quarterback camps in Alabama. , a four-star quarterback in Florida and Harvard commit, has listened to Nix preach his values of falling back on faith amid imperfection. Titus Huard, a junior quarterback at Valor Christian, has been heartened by Nix’s vulnerability discussing the struggles of his position.
In turn, they have seen Nix grow up through fragments of his own self-reflection. In 2024, Nix, his father Patrick, brother and four close Nix family friends founded the nonprofit organization “AIRO,” named for the Greek word to lift or raise up. Since 2025, they have hosted four free multi-day quarterback retreats at remote ranch-style properties in Alabama, inviting roughly 12 to 16 prospects from across the country for an entirely different kind of QB camp.
“It was really less about football, at this camp,” Smith said. “To be honest, that was kind of their last priority.”
They ate. They fished. And prayed. And worshipped. All alongside Nix, a mentor trying to impart unfinished life lessons learned from grappling with his own perfectionism.
The camps are not really about football. Because Nix has come to believe his life is not really about football.
“It aligns perfectly,” Nix told The Post in August, asked how his retreats reflect who he is. “I am a quarterback. I have walked the same path that they’ve gone, and I share similar experiences.
“But at the same time, most importantly, I just understand — in the long run, none of this really matters.”
A QB camp unlike any other
In spring 2025, Smith’s flight touched down at Alabama’s Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport from Florida, where Smith was one of the invitees to Nix’s first-ever AIRO retreat. Patrick Nix texted Smith that a black SUV would be waiting for him outside the airport, for a long drive to the camp location.
Smith walked out of his gate, saw a black SUV, and opened the door to find the younger Nix — and fellow Broncos quarterback Jarrett Stidham — waiting to personally usher him.
“It was like, surreal,” Smith said. “I was like, ‘What’s he doing here?’ Like, the place is an hour and a half away. Why is he coming up here?”
The place was Sunshine Farm, a sprawling property with a massive lake, a line of side-by-side ATVs and a driving range that Smith described as “the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen in my entire life.” That was, of course, until 2026’s location: another lakeside property in Faunsdale, a town with about 90 recorded inhabitants.
Coleman watched from the window on his drive to Faunsdale as tumbleweeds drifted across back roads.
“I’m like, ‘Well, I know this scenery finna be great,'” Coleman recalled.
The house itself was outfitted with assortments of bunk beds on the second floor and a large dining area. A side room featured a TV and several couches, which Nix eventually used to gather the group to break down film. It was secluded.
The location mattered because of the intention. As a junior blue-chip recruit in high school, Nix and his father Patrick grew familiar — and slightly disillusioned — with the traditional youth quarterback camp circuit. So Patrick went to longtime friend Bill Gray, a former multi-area director for the Greater Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) in Birmingham, Alabama, with the idea to
After years of camps at Sunshine Farm, Nix and Gray’s families merged to transfer the camp under the AIRO name in 2026.
“We did an experience you may have never done before,” Nix told The Post. “Catch a fish, ride a horse, shoot a bow and arrow, something like that. And then at the end, the most important was — we want to share the gospel with them, and open up the Bible, and talk about life, talk about struggles. Because we all go through the same things.”
The moment campers arrived in Faunsdale this spring, they surrendered their phones. One of the staffers would hit the Internet and update the group on March Madness scores at the end of the day, during the spring retreats; otherwise, there was no Wi-Fi. The point, as Smith explained, was for the quarterbacks to connect authentically.
One day, as Smith recalled, a quarterback joked to Nix that he would eventually have to follow him back on Instagram if he beat him in a camp competition.
“Bo was like, ‘I don’t even touch my Instagram,'” Smith said. “Cause he can’t. Because the moment he opens it up, he’s going to start scrolling. He’s going to see something about how, ‘Bo’s injury-prone, and Bo’s this, and Bo’s that.’ So he can’t even do it. He does it from time to time, to check up on somebody, or just like that.
“But he’s like, ‘I can’t do it,'” Smith continued. “He’s got his guys to manage that … that was the other thing he mentioned was, the social media part can kill people.”
Faith, family and football
Before their first night of sleep this spring, Smith — a camp veteran from the previous year — warned Huard that they would be woken up with rather loud music. Indeed, as Smith recalled, Nix and his father had an interconnected four-speaker system rigged up in the property that lit up at 6 a.m.
And Nix and father Patrick would walk around, rousing half-asleep quarterbacks from their slumber, to the ܲ-ٴ-岹-ٱ-岹-ٴ-ܲ-ٴ-岹-ٱ-ٱ-ٱof the “NFL on FOX” theme song.
“It almost startled me, a little bit,” Huard said. “I’ve never really had anything like that in my life. Never an alarm clock like that. That was pretty cool.”
The day began, from there, with a yoga and stretching circuit down by the lake led by Nix’s brother Caleb, a standout safety in his own right at Jacksonville State. Breakfast, then, precluded a set of field-work drills led by Nix and others, and then “some sort of competition,” as Smith put it. Interspersed throughout the day — morning, afternoon, and night — came a set of group devotionals.
This, to Nix, is the most important element of his retreats, a man : “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.”
“Basically, turn young athletes from high school, college and the pros level to better men in Christ,” Nix’s adoptive brother and NFL receiver told The Post, on the retreats’ mission. “Also football, but mainly men in Christ. So — want to be a firm believer. And if you haven’t made a decision, you go to the camp. You might not make the decision to follow Christ there, but you’re definitely going to get really good work, have some really good food and just fellowship.”
Nix spoke to campers at length throughout the weekend — as did fellow attendees Stidham and quarterback Sam Ehlinger — about the pitfalls of his journey, in hopes it could help with theirs. He was a kind of dream-school prodigal son at Auburn and wound up feeling the school ran him out the door in what he told the group was “one of the hardest parts of his life,” as Smith said. He found freedom again at Oregon, bringing new pressures as a first-round NFL quarterback. Something clicked in 2025, through up-and-down individual performances that nonetheless helped the Broncos to a 14-3 record and AFC Championship berth.
“He said, last year with the Broncos was the first time — and Stidham kinda mentioned this too — they really felt joy playing the game of football,” Huard recalled.
Before every single positional meeting they had in 2025, Nix and Ehlinger sat down for a Bible study. Stidham joined them later in the season.
“They said that was really comforting to them just to get them through, maybe, hardships,” Huard said.
In March, too, Nix ran through the series of fortunate-turned-unfortunate events that befell him in January. He told campers it wasn’t a pretty scene, after Denver’s AFC wild-card win over Buffalo. Family celebrating. Adrenaline wearing. Pain creeping. Doctors bringing Nix in for X-rays.
The dream season was over, instantly, with the broken ankle Nix didn’t know was broken. An entire city’s elation gave way to despair. Yet he managed to rationalize it, sitting with his back against an Empower Field hallway in January.
And Nix’s perspective had widened already with the birth of his daughter Riley in the month to come.
“What are you going to do?” Smith said, recalling Nix’s message. “Are you going to crumble, or are you going to stay strong in your faith? And he was grateful that happened, because it made him into a better person. He talked about how it helped him be a dad. He also talked about — football’s amazing, but seeing his daughter born is something so much more special than that.”
“He had an amazing year,” Smith continued, “and he also had an awful thing that happened, and he also had a kid that was born. And there was just so many things that happened that year … and I can remember him saying this. He was like, ‘I had an amazing year, and I’m not going to let one thing hold down the 14-3 season that we had.'”
Learning to play free
On their second night in March, a Saturday, the group gathered in that side room of the house for a Nix-focused film session. He did not scroll through general quarterback clips, or track down the campers’ Hudl film. He threw up his own tape from Denver’s AFC wild-card win over Buffalo.
By all accounts, Nix passed his second-ever NFL postseason test: 26-of-46, 279 yards, three touchdowns and an interception while missing second-leading receiver Troy Franklin. He did not focus on that. Instead, he picked apart his mistakes. Buffalo’s defense, he told the young group of quarterbacks, did a strong job of mixing up coverages against him, and Nix felt he too often looked downfield and missed shorter openings in front of him.
Huard noted, for better or worse, how hard Nix was on himself — “how perfect he wanted to be,” as Huard said.
“Kinda broke down what he was thinking, where he messed up, the whole nine yards,” Smith said. “Which is another level of humility, being able to go up there and show kids you just completely messing up for their benefit.”
His message rang clear to Huard and Smith. Nix discussed the concepts of Year One Bo and Year Two Bo. Year One Bo, he explained to them, relied more on hero-ball and occasionally wasn’t 100% clear what was going on in the nuances of head coach Sean Payton’s system. Year Two Bo understood — despite the pressure on his shoulders — that Denver’s fate didn’t need to fully ride on him.
“He talked about not having to do everything all on his own, trust his guy,” Smith said. “And thatap what honestly took him to the next level. He said that he threw to his checkdowns or his running backs so much, and they had such a better season because of that. So I think that was the biggest thing that he touched on was that — not having to be superhuman.”
He will have help in that regard with new receiver Jaylen Waddle, whom Nix told Smith he had been on the phone with the day before they arrived in Faunsdale. And he will have help, too, in the worldview he has tried to impart at remote palaces in Alabama, unable to help his own self-aggrandizing within his own game but better able to accept the slew of forces beyond his control.
“I feel like my perspective is right,” Nix told The Post, “and I feel like I just understand and really have a desire to help these kids navigate their life that they’re going through, and maybe avoid some of the things early on that I could’ve avoided. Just by fully giving it up, and not putting your identity — not putting your all into the game. Because itap going to let you down.
“You’re not going to be perfect. You’re going to make mistakes. And as soon as I learned that in my time at Auburn, I’ve been just a lot more free as a player. Just free as a person.”
