On the roster (9): Pat Surtain II, Riley Moss, Ja’Quan McMillian, Jahdae Barron, Kris Abrams-Draine, Reese Taylor, Jaden Robinson, Brent Austin, Sean Fresch Jr.

How many on the 53? 5-6

Most impactful offseason move: Placing a second-round tender on McMillian

This is a position where it����ap certainly possible the offseason’s most impactful move is still to come between now and the start of the regular season, as either McMillian or Moss could end up landing a lucrative extension. For now, it����ap ensuring McMillian, a restricted free agent, returned to the fold with a tender for 2026 valued at $5.77 million. Nickel is a premium position in today’s NFL and McMillian is one of the league’s best. He played 66% of Denver’s defensive snaps in 2025, picked off two passes, ran one back for a touchdown, forced two fumbles and recovered another, logged four sacks and five tackles for a loss, ran communications from his spot in the slot and, of course, made one of the defining plays of Broncos postseason history with his game-saving interception of Josh Allen in overtime of the divisional round. He’s not the best player on Denver’s star-studded defense, but in many ways he’s the heartbeat. And he’s the tie that binds the cornerback group, which is headlined by Surtain, the multi-time All-Pro.

Biggest question to answer in camp: Is there a major surprise around the bend?

From here, the best bet is probably not. It����ap difficult to imagine a situation, however, in which there’s a change in Denver’s cornerback group without it being a major one. Yeah, maybe Barron becomes the next man in on the perimeter over Abrams-Draine. But what if he beats out Moss? Or what if a team offers a Day 2 pick plus for Moss or McMillian? Denver’s in Super Bowl mode, so perhaps the front office rebuffs anything other than a completely ludicrous offer, but the odds of both Moss and McMillian landing big deals after 2026 seem unlikely, so there could be some sense in cashing in if the interest runs hot enough around the league. More likely: The Broncos roll with Surtain, the best cornerback in football and on a Hall of Fame track at 26 years old, Moss and McMillian across the top line and a deep No. 2 line behind them.

Battle to watch: Barron against… pretty much everybody

That����ap not to say the second-year man has to be antagonistic. He just currently occupies a unique airspace that speaks to the Broncos’ depth and talent but also could understandably be frustrating for him. The 2025 first-round pick is versatile enough to play literally any spot in defensive coordinator Vance Joseph’s secondary. There also happens to be an established starter in every one of those jobs in Surtain, Moss, McMillian and safeties Brandon Jones and Talanoa Hufanga. It����ap not exactly the most electrifying training camp goal for Year 2, but if Barron shows in August that he’s a better option at safety than Devon Key, a better option outside than Abrams-Draine and a backup-in-name-only in the slot, it shouldn’t be long before he’s playing major time for the Broncos… somewhere.

Under the radar: Abrams-Draine

Every time Abrams-Draine has been called into action, he’s delivered. It started his rookie season in a tilt-a-whirl “Monday Night Football” game against Cleveland. It����ap continued through periodic injuries to Moss and Surtain, too. Abrams-Draine has some of the best ball skills in Denver’s supremely talented cornerback group. He’d almost certainly start on at least a few teams around the NFL. It����ap a luxury not many teams possess that they can put him in a game if an upper-echelon player misses some time. Teams around the league have capable pro scouting departments, but it����ap also natural to wonder if, as former Sean Payton and George Paton personnel fan out around the league — think Darren Mougey with the New York Giants, Jim Leonhard in Buffalo, Addison Lynch with the New York Giants and more — some familiar face will call back to Colorado in August and inquire about Abrams-Draine.

On the roster (10): Zach Allen, D.J. Jones, Malcolm Roach, Tyler Onyedim, Eyioma Uwazurike, Sai’vion Jones, Jordan Jackson, Matt Henningsen, Kristian Williams, Jordan Miller

How many on the 53?��Six to seven. The Broncos carried seven last year at this spot, and the top six names above are likely roster locks in training camp. Jackson has made the roster comfortably in each of the last two seasons, but played just five games in 2025 and then for head coach Sean Payton’s anger toward defensive staff for elevating him in the AFC wild-card game.

Most impactful offseason move:��Letting John Franklin-Myers walk.

This was determined long before this offseason. But in a stretch where the Broncos prioritized retention to near-unfathomable degrees, Franklin-Myers’ absence looms as the most important departure from 2025’s roster to 2026. He finished third on Denver’s defense in sacks last season, with 7.5; more importantly, his ability to create interior pressure often teed up All-Pro Allen and the Broncos’ stable of outside linebackers.

“He was an impact player,” defensive coordinator Vance Joseph said in June. “After watching the cut-ups, you kind of realize what you’re missing there.”

The Broncos’ front office made an understandable choice to not extend Franklin-Myers on a long-term deal likely worth $15-million-plus a year, and will now recoup a valuable compensatory pick in 2027. But his absence will be felt, in one way or another. That leads directly into the subsequent section here.

Biggest question to answer in camp:��Who steps up in place of Franklin-Myers?

Perhaps the answer is who��doesn’t. Joseph clearly indicated during the Broncos’ offseason program that Franklin-Myers’ void could be filled by a sort of three-man rotation among Uwazurike, Sai’vion Jones and rookie Onyedim, with the athletic Jones perhaps in a third-down pass-rushing role.

Denver will carousel all of them during training camp, plus veterans Jackson and Henningsen, and see what cream ultimately rises. The early favorite is Uwazurike, who flashed legitimate starting-level potential with 3.5 sacks and 39 tackles as a reserve last season. Asked about replacing Franklin-Myers in 2026, Uwazurike told The Post at the end of the 2025 regular season that he felt he could “take over that role completely.” He’ll have his chance this summer.

Don’t count out Onyedim, though, who Denver’s defensive staff sees as an immediate potential Franklin-Myers replacement after drafting him in the third round this fall. And Roach could quietly pick up some of Franklin-Myers’ workload. More on that later.

Battle to watch: Sai’vion Jones vs. everybody for snaps.

After the Broncos moved up in the third round of the 2025 draft to nab Jones, the LSU product played exactly 39 total snaps in his rookie year. That was fine. And partly expected. Broncos general manager George Paton noted after the season that the staff knew Jones would “need a little development.”

“We were just so deep last year, it����ap tough for him to get in games,” Allen said in June. “But we saw in practice how great he was.”

The Broncos, now, need those glimpses in practice to show up in training camp. The 6-foot-5, 289-pound Jones has flashed the ability to push the pocket from the interior and blends an edge rusher’s speed with an interior rusher’s power. But he still needs work in the run game, as evidenced by Joseph’s suggestion that he could be a rotational pass-rusher. It would be a dream scenario for the Broncos if Jones shows in camp he’s ready, at least, to take up Uwazurike’s 36% defensive snap share from last season.

Under the radar:��Roach.

The Sixth Man might become the Fifth Man on Denver’s defensive line, soon enough. The Broncos extended Roach on a three-year deal worth over $29 million total in November, a not-insubstantial number; clearly, Denver prioritized retaining Roach at a lower number rather than shelling out for Franklin-Myers. And Roach quietly put together a standout season on the interior in 2025, with six total sacks and six tackles for loss in 14 games between the regular season and playoffs.

“I felt like I was rushing the way I play the run game,” Roach told The Post in June. “And I know how to play the run game, so by me rushing like that, I knew, like, I wasn’t thinking. It’s just the instincts kicking in.”

For two seasons in Denver, Roach has been generally thought of as a one-two punch at nose tackle, behind starter D.J. Jones. But Roach clearly has the greater ability to create pressure from different gaps along the defensive line. It’s possible, ultimately, that Denver’s Franklin-Myers replacement has been staring everyone in the face all along.

Solo meant, in four letters, that Smith’s quarterback should abandon any other read in favor of turning and throwing the ball to Butler.

“That,” Smith recalled, chuckling, “was our entire offense.”

It worked out well enough for the United Football League’s Battlehawks in 2026��because the 30-year-old Butler stands 6-foot-6, weighs around 227 pounds, and ran fast enough —�� — to warp any matchup against a UFL defense that dared to try him straight up. It was good enough to hand him the league’s Offensive Most Valuable Player this spring, for the second time in his career. It was good enough to land him on the radar of the Denver Broncos, who signed him in June to compete in training camp.

It has never been good enough, though, to give Butler a single NFL catch, a no-man’s-land journey through eight professional seasons that has mystified his coaches.

“I’m like, man, if he doesn’t get at least to camp – I’m like, man, this guy’s unbelievable,” Smith said. “Because he’s got stuff you can’t coach.”

Leaning into developing NFL prospects

The Broncos have now become the sixth NFL franchise to take a flier on Butler, furthering a roster-building trend that’s become a clear part of the organization’s summer plans. In each of the last four seasons, Denver general manager George Paton and his front office have signed at least one player from the UFL (formerly XFL and USFL) in June or July: practice-squad receiver Michael Bandy in 2023, key reserve OLB Dondrea Tillman in 2024, long-waived cornerback Mario Goodrich in 2025, and now Butler and cornerback Sean Fresch in 2026.

“It����ap almost like — without sitting in that room, they’re saving a certain number of spots for those guys,” said Battlehawks defensive coordinator Corey Chamblin, who coached Tillman with the Birmingham Stallions in 2024.

Perhaps they are. Bandy and Tillman, as two organizational mainstays, have now given the Broncos two points of credibility for evaluating UFL talent. In June, Broncos head coach Sean Payton told reporters he’d asked team scouts whether they were finding better players in the still-fresh UFL or the long-standing CFL; judging by his comments, they clearly pointed to the former.

“I think it’s kind of becoming that, ‘OK, where’s the next market?'” Payton said in mid-June. “They’re getting developed somewhere. Where are they if they’re not in our league? I think to their league’s credit, it’s helping us.”

This has become the UFL’s��stated goal after billionaire Mike Repole��. , 23 players signed NFL contracts after the league’s season ended this June, up from 10 at the same time in 2025. Last year, the league in favor of a centralized scouting model, placing team personnel responsibilities in the hands of individual head coaches and the league-wide player pool in the hands of an office helmed by former Buffalo Bills GM Doug Whaley.

The overall goal, as Whaley explained, is to get a wider variety of scouting looks to increase the talent pool, and thereby increase the UFL’s potential as a self-proclaimed “developmental league.”

“We’re leaning into it,” Whaley told The Denver Post. “Our coaches are leaning into it, our scouts are leaning into it, and the whole organization. The more we can have players, coaches, support staff make that jump to the NFL, that����ap exactly — that gives us great joy.”

Making the leap

One crop of players league-wide is in the Butler bucket: a 2019 fourth-round NFL Draft pick out of Iowa State who has consistently used UFL tape to try and leverage a foothold back to the NFL. The other crop is in the Fresch bucket, a cornerback who had one single rookie minicamp tryout as an undrafted cornerback from Rice in 2024 and has not been in the NFL since. The modern UFL, in player acquisition, has increasingly targeted the latter camp — in trying to establish a sort of year-round cycle between NFL and UFL roster movement.

Once NFL training camps begin in late July, Whaley and his staff assemble and rank a hot board of sixth-round, seventh-round and undrafted free agents on 90-man rosters leaguewide. At the end of the NFL season in the winter, Whaley explained, he and UFL scouts begin contacting those on that hot board — usually moored on practice squads — and deliver a pitch.

It’s simple enough. The best hope for players on the fringes of NFL rosters is generally to sign a futures contract, which often keeps them in a team’s building for months with few reps before being cut amid free agency and NFL Draft reshuffling between March and June. The UFL, as Whaley and his team pitch it, offers an alternative opportunity in that same window to build 10 to 12 games of game tape against professional competition and broaden exposure.

“People are understanding — most importantly, agents are understanding — this is a legitimate chance for your guy to make that leap in playing ability to really get not only a look and get signed, but be able to stick now,” Whaley said.

Take Fresch, a 5-foot-8 nickel cornerback who led the UFL in punt-return yardage in 2026 and suddenly had four NFL teams reach out to agent Joe Flanagan for workouts after the season. AFC contenders like Buffalo and Houston came calling; Denver won out, and Fresch won a contract.

The alternative to a three-month UFL season? Fresch could’ve sat and opted for a veteran tryout during an NFL minicamp in May.

“That����ap like hoping for good numbers in the Powerball, man,” Flanagan told The Denver Post. “That (expletive) doesn’t work.”

This informal UFL-to-NFL aspirational system, though, is far from perfect. Both Smith and Chamblin noted that the UFL’s current schedule isn’t always conducive to landing players on NFL offseason rosters, since the UFL’s season runs through most NFL teams’ summer offseason program and OTAs.

“It’s all the UFL’s fault,” Smith said.

Whaley told The Post the UFL is exploring avenues to shift its schedule to align with the NFL programming in May. Those conversations are complicated, though, as the UFL is currently subject to the whims of venue availability — many UFL games are played in Major League Soccer stadiums — and television programming in a partnership with FOX Sports and ESPN.

“If we had our choice,” Whaley said, “we’d like to move it up so these guys can get in in the (NFL) offseason program and be able to get their feet settled.”

For now, though, the Broncos are still on the crest of a wave among NFL front offices that have demonstrated investment in current UFL development. And agents — often the conduit for UFL-to-NFL exposure — know it.

“It takes a specific mindset to say, like, ‘We’re going to churn our roster a little bit in May and June to get a better player that����ap an upgrade over the guys we’ve seen in shorts all spring and early summer,'” Flanagan said. “I think that����ap definitely a Broncos mindset, at this point.”

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 that����ap 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. That����ap their job. That����ap 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.

In Week 16, Jacksonville torched Denver for 34 points at Empower Field and put the Broncos on notice that they would not waltz through the rest of their regular season, let alone the postseason.

Quarterback Trevor Lawrence engineered a quartet of red zone touchdown conversions against the NFL’s best group.

Early in the fourth quarter, though, Robinson, a rookie outside linebacker, made a stand.

On first-and-goal from the 5-yard line, Robinson ripped unblocked off Lawrence’s left side as the quarterback meshed with running back Travis Etienne. Earlier, Lawrence, on a similar call, had pulled the ball, got leverage on Robinson, and walked in for a 1-yard touchdown.

He tried again.

This time, Robinson crashed into the quarterback and dropped him for a 5-yard loss.

On second-and-goal, Robinson blew off the line of scrimmage, ricocheted off of Etienne, and into an inside spin move past tackle Cole Van Lanen. Hurried, Lawrence dumped the ball off for a 3-yard gain.

Then, on third-and-7, the Jags finally wised up. Lawrence motioned running back LeQuint Allen into the backfield and deployed him to chip Robinson, effectively double-teaming him. An incomplete pass meant Jacksonville’s lone red zone failure of the afternoon.

Robinson’s on-the-job training as a fourth-round rookie came in fits and spurts last fall. He dressed for only six regular-season games, but played regularly in rotation when he was in uniform. He made the most eye-popping play of his first professional season — a turbocharged sack of New England’s Drake Maye in the AFC Championship Game —��only after he was a gameday inactive in the divisional round against Buffalo.

Over the course of 162 defensive snaps and about the same on special teams, though, Robinson put himself squarely on the Broncos’ radar as a Year 2 breakout candidate. He did so long before fellow outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper ran into legal trouble that has clouded at least his 2026 outlook and potentially his standing with the club altogether.

Before Cooper’s two arrests in the span of one June week, Robinson was part of an interesting, productive young group of edge rushers that give Denver options and enviable depth behind star rusher Nik Bonitto. Now Robinson and that group may well be counted on in a much more substantial way for weeks or longer this fall.

Que Robinson starting to tap into vast ‘physical gifts’

George Paton is not prone to hyperbole.

The Broncos general manager is a scout at his core, and he talks about players in that manner.

Just after Denver’s AFC title game loss, Paton was asked about the progress of the team’s rookie class —��headlined by first-round pick Jahdae Barron, second-round running back RJ Harvey and also including third-round defensive lineman Sai’Vion Jones, whom the Broncos traded up to draft. Paton said it was Robinson, though, who “may have the most upside of anyone in our draft class, and you could see it the other day.”

The other day, in this case, was when Robinson started up the field against the Patriots, put his hands on tight end Hunter Henry to disrupt his route to the flat, then eliminated a 5-yard gap between himself and Maye in a blink for a 9-yard sack.

That����ap the kind of play that can launch a young player into an offseason and a second season brimming with confidence.

“It����ap huge. It����ap huge,” outside linebackers coach Isaac Shewmaker told The Post earlier this month. “Take the teaching. We talk about the upfield shoulder of the tight end to help you redirect to the quarterback. That kind of thing, when those little things start happening and then you get the results, just the confidence you feel. …

“That����ap just what helps you begin to play confident and grow.”

Robinson, listed at 6-foot-4 and 243 pounds, has long arms and a powerful frame. The Broncos loved his physical traits when they drafted him No. 134 overall last spring, but they didn’t know exactly how fast they’d start to see returns. After all, the former five-star high school recruit played just 370 defensive snaps in his four-year career at Alabama. That was hardly his fault. Robinson found himself behind the likes of future first-rounders Will Anderson Jr. and Dallas Turner.

“Throughout the whole draft process, I liked what I saw,” Shewmaker said. “There were physical traits that I really liked. When he got here, same thing. He kept showing it. His thing is, just making him play with confidence. Giving him the confidence that, ‘you go out there and you play fast. Everything else is on me.’

“When he lets it loose, you see the physical gifts he has.”

Broncos defensive coordinator Vance Joseph saw them when Robinson was on the field, but even more acutely when he did his annual postseason film review.

When Robinson’s name came up earlier this month, a smile creased the veteran coordinator’s face.

The Vance Jospeh smile when Que Robinson’s name comes up.

Said the second-year OLB looks like a player who “can be a future starter for us.”

— Parker Gabriel (@ParkerJGabriel)

“When Que played, he played really well,” Joseph said. “It looked like a guy who can be a future starter for us.”

Joseph uttered those words after Cooper’s first arrest but hours before his second.

The future typically arrives faster than expected in the NFL. For Robinson, there’s at least a chance it����ap arriving this summer.

Healthy Jonah Ellis, steady Dondrea Tillman and a wildcard

One of Shewmaker’s favorite sequences of the season arrived early.

When Marvin Mims Jr. muffed a Week 1 punt early in the fourth quarter, Tennessee and rookie quarterback Cam Ward were set up at the Broncos’ 22-yard line and trailing 13-12 with 11:43 to go.

That����ap not exactly game on the line, but it was a huge moment in a game teetering toward trouble for the heavily favored Broncos.

The defense trotted onto the field with Jonah Elliss and Dondrea Tillman at outside linebacker instead of Bonitto and Cooper.

After a 2-yard Tony Pollard run, Elliss sacked Ward for a 16-yard loss. Then on third-and-24, Tillman won clean off the edge and forced Ward to spin away and into Zach Allen’s arms for another 11-yard backtrack.

From sure to take the lead to out of field goal range, largely at the hands of a pair of reserve edge rushers.

“That����ap what it is,” Shewmaker said. “There’s no one, two, three, four. There are the guys that are up for each game and let����ap go. … I’m not worried about, ‘Oh, I have to have one of those (starters) on the field.’ I’ve got full confidence in everybody else, so we’re going to try to keep everybody as fresh as we can.

“I don’t like playing more than three to four plays in a row and then we’re going to get the next guys in. And we’re just going to keep on that.”

Elliss and Tillman have been the primary reasons the Broncos have been able to play that way the past two seasons. Tillman, a summer signing out of the UFL in 2024, has nine sacks the past two seasons and has played in 25 straight games plus three playoff contests since November 2024.

Elliss burst out of the gate as a rookie with five sacks in 2024, but dealt with shoulder and hamstring issues last fall and never looked like he was really in top form.

Broncos staff praise Elliss’ versatility and the group pondered moving him inside this year, but “at the end of the day he’s a really good rusher,” Shewmaker said simply.

“Last year he got dinged up a little bit and it was hard to get into a rhythm,” he added. “But he’s a great player for us on the edge and then we’ll just try to find more ways to get him on the field.”

Drew Sanders has been more than dinged up and represents the wild card in the group this summer. The 2023 third-round pick didn’t play a snap last year after injuring his foot in training camp and missed 13 in 2024 due to an Achilles tear. That means Sanders has played in just four games the past two seasons after appearing in all 17 as a rookie in 2023.

Can he stay healthy? Can he unlock the potential that����ap so far sat idly in an athletic, explosive player?

For now, the Broncos have smaller goals for him.

“He can get the alignment, the assignment, all of that,” head coach Sean Payton said earlier this month. “There’s a young player that, knock on wood, we feel like is really talented. …

“He’s coming into this portion of training camp healthy, so I’m encouraged with that.”

The Jonathon Cooper question will need an answer eventually

The next date on Cooper’s court calendar is a hearing on July 24, four days before Broncos veterans report for training camp.

Cooper’s criminal cases have been consolidated into one that includes four charges, led by one for felony assault. They stem from two incidents involving his girlfriend, the first an argument that turned physical, including Cooper acknowledging to a police officer that he picked his girlfriend up by the neck, according to an updated arrest affidavit. Cooper participated in Broncos OTAs after the initial arrest but then was arrested again a week later, hours after Denver’s practice ended, after his girlfriend said he showed up at her apartment and pounded on the door for 5-10 minutes and also sent her 20 unreturned messages. He has not been with the team since and was an excused absence from the club’s mandatory minicamp on June 16 and 17.

If Cooper’s case goes to trial, it will almost certainly be well into training camp or even the regular season. That means the NFL and the Broncos could have to decide what, if any, punishment they will levy before the criminal proceedings play out.

The league’s personal conduct policy does not require a player to be convicted in criminal court to be subject to discipline and lays out a baseline six-game suspension for players found to have engaged in domestic violence, “with possible upward or downward adjustments based on any aggravating or mitigating factors.”

There is also the eventual question of whether the Broncos will consider cutting ties with Cooper altogether. He is the first player to be arrested since Payton arrived and since the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group purchased the team in August 2022.

After Cooper’s initial arrest, Payton said that the team had “a long visit” with him. After the second, the veteran coach spoke about the organization’s high standards and said, “We’ll consider all of that as we continue to gather the information.”

An eventual decision will undoubtedly be seen as a marker for how Payton and how the ownership group will handle such cases going forward.

Money is unlikely to be a driving factor, but it will become part of the equation if Denver releases Cooper.

The 28-year-old signed a four-year, $54 million extension in 2024 and pocketed $15 million of that money during the first two seasons. He’s due $12 million more this year.

Denver, though, could go after a substantial portion of that money if it wants to, following a potential release.

Only $1.7 million of Cooper’s 2026 pay is guaranteed. On top of that,�� more than $20 million of Cooper’s deal has been paid or allocated as signing bonus. Any of that bonus money allocated for 2026 or beyond — a total of $17.1 million — is eligible for forfeiture, multiple player agents told The Post. If the Broncos tried to claw back all or some of that money, a grievance would likely follow. If the club succeeded, it would gain salary cap credit for the money forfeited.

All of that is of downballot concern, but it could enter the picture at some point.

In the meantime, the Broncos’ young pass-rushers step to the fore. Robinson would have been a player to watch even without Cooper’s troubles. Now, he’s even more so.

“The strength and size he has, there’s not going to be many tight ends that can block him,” Shewmaker said. “Not many tackles that can block him one-on-one, either.”

Jonah was too young, then, to truly understand. He was old enough to��see. To internalize. His father was once a self-described “young menace to society,” a longtime gang member with the Bloods in South Stockton trying to rid himself of his past. But the reaper kept knocking at Jamon’s door, and winking at his son.

“Just because I walked away from it,” Jamon once told his mother, “doesn’t mean people have forgotten what I’ve done when I was a part of it.”

So Jamon pulled up to Stribley Park this day wearing all black, with no trace of red except a splash across his Nikes. The park sat on the east side of town, across lines and into blue-affiliated territory. He was there, simply, to pick up Jonah from football practice, who was then playing with the East Stockton Yellowjackets. Jamon had no rag. He had no gun tucked in his waistband. The Crips at the park that recognized him, though, had guns tucked in theirs.

They approached, and Jamon lifted up his shirt. No weapon, he told them. No malice. No violence. He bowed down. It wouldn’t have worked, perhaps, if Jamon didn’t point to Jonah peeking from behind his legs.

“My son’s right here,” Jamon recalled telling them. “He’s playing football. I’m trying to teach him something different.”

The group cooled, eventually, because of the fleet-footed boy who was drawing whispers in Stockton.

“That’s��your��son?” the group asked.

He was. Over the years to come, Jonah grew into the pride of Stockton, and Jamon cheered for him in stadium stands alongside men who would’ve once wanted him dead. Subsequent run-ins cooled. Jamon drew hints of his son’s halo. And a son gradually became something more to his father.

“That was his miracle child,” said Trent Washington, a pastor in Stockton and longtime family friend.

Jamon Coleman now believes Jonah Coleman saved his life, in one way or another. It took his son’s rise in football for his father to fully pull away from gang ties, even as his skin is still pockmarked with bullet scars that may never fully fade. And in return, Jamon dedicated much of his life to protecting the son and the gift that saved him.

Years after his dad’s reformation, Jonah sits on a bench at the Broncos’ practice facility in Dove Valley, gazing out at the green expanse of his future. He has run all the way from Stockton to Arizona, to Washington, and to Denver, a fourth-round rookie running back who can play a major role in the Broncos’ shot at a Super Bowl.

And if he runs far enough in Denver, Jonah hopes the force of his steps can ripple back to Stockton and shake the same generational forces that he helped his own father escape.

“Stockton is tough, man,” Jonah said Wednesday during the team’s minicamp. “It’s so easy to get wrapped up in whatever the hell is going on around you.

“A lot of people set this ceiling, like, right here,” he gestures, raising his hand to chest level, “instead of trying to shoot past the stars. You know what I mean? And for me, I wanted to shoot past the stars.”

A breeding ground for gang activity

Marcella Johnson was showing plenty during her brief stint in San Joaquin County Jail in 2003, several months pregnant at the time. She was struggling to make ends meet while taking care of her dying mother, and was booked on welfare fraud for not properly reporting income from one of her jobs, she said.

And she’d coo to the boy in her stomach, as��he’d jostle around.

“Hold on, guy,” she’d say, munching on some fruit. “We’re going to be out of this real quick. Eat this orange. Eat this apple.”

Shortly after his mom got out of prison, Jonah Coleman was born, already knowing what it felt like to want out.

He began walking at 7 months old, Jamon said. When his father took him to the toy store, little Jonah eschewed trucks and toy weapons in favor of a ball. The neighborhood kids on Stockton’s south side would gather for rowdy games of tackle football in front of Jamon’s apartment building, and one day Jamon saw Jonah toddling around with them, the smallest kid around.

Jamon saw his son get popped hard a couple times. Jonah started crying.

“I was like, ‘OK, well, he’s done,'” Jamon recalled. “He’s going to come in the house now.”

Jonah pulled up his shirt, wiped his face, and kept on playing.

Eventually, young Jonah went to stay with his mother for a time on the south side of Stockton after Marcella and Jamon separated amicably. He would come bursting into the house, sweating from running in the California sun, and Marcella used to ask her son why he smelled like a wet dog. He did not stop. He went to Stribley Park one day to find the Yellowjackets practicing and tried hopping into conditioning drills — unsuccessfully — without paying any fee or obtaining written approval from his parents.

He got it, eventually. And thus triggered environmental forces that Jonah could see, but took years to fully understand. became best friends with Jonah while both played for the Yellowjackets, and the pastor remembers the area around the park in East Stockton seeing gunfire yearly. Shooting drills, Washington called them.

The team had a chant, Washington remembered. Call-and-response.

“Who are we?”

“East Side!”

Washington always noted, from seeing years of kids come through the Yellowjackets and get caught up in gang activity, that the call was actually referring to the territory, not the team mascot.

“To me, it was a breeding ground,” Washington said. “‘Where you from? East Side’ … when you start saying that, you’re poisoning their mind, and you’re influencing – ‘East Side. East Side.’”

In a team meeting this week, the Broncos held a conversation about domestic violence and how it can be passed down through generations, Jonah told The Post. The 22-year-old said his mind drifted back to his own beginnings, in Stockton, on that concept of general generational trauma.

“Like, as far as the gangbanging, the way how people act, the way how people move, all that stuff is passed down, from generations,” Jonah said. “It����ap kinda like what you go outside and see, everything as a kid — you can’t really talk or anything yet. The most you can do is see. Like, you see things. You see before you can talk. So when you’re a kid, that����ap all you see.”

His father, before him, saw.

‘I want you to be way better’

Before he became a pastor at Victory In Praise Church in Stockton, Washington knew gang life, too. So did everyone in Stockton who’s watched Coleman grow up, in one way or another. The Crips and Bloods reached the apex of their Stockton influence in the 1980s and 1990s, Washington recalled, as the concept of fast money��.

Once, Washington went to a party in the Nightingale Avenue area in southeast Stockton, later known as the birthplace of As Washington remembers, a man got shot in the foot. He limped down the street, retrieved a gun from the trunk of his car, and started shooting up the party in return. Washington scrambled to the roof, where a friend’s cousin pulled out her own gun and shot.

It jammed. The bullet shot into her own stomach. Washington and “associates,” as he put it, rushed the girl to the hospital.

“You would think, at that time, common sense would tell you to go home,” Washington said.

They went to another party.

“Those moments — did that stop me from going clubbing or being in a gang, or dealing drugs?” Washington said. “No. That stopped nobody.”

That, certainly, didn’t stop Jamon Coleman. His own father wasn’t in his life while he was growing up. His family eventually explained to him that his dad was a pimp. Attention, instead, came from the array of faces he’d pass on the way to the store and on the corner, gang members beckoning with brotherhood. They sensed he was fearless. He accepted an initiation ritual of sorts that involved breaking his ribs and sending him to the hospital, to build trust that he wouldn’t turn to police if a situation got violent.

“There’s no secrets to what his dad went through,” said Nate Howard, Jonah’s eventual high school coach at Lincoln High.

Bullets flew through Jamon’s life, and wove directly into the start of Jonah’s. Jamon rattled off: he has been shot in his side, and his groin, and his leg twice, and his back, and his head. When Jonah was 3, sound asleep in his room at his older sister’s birthday party, bullets from an assault rifle cracked through the windows of Jamon’s house and left holes above his bed. When Jonah was a few years older, riding his bike, he watched as a car pulled up next to Jamon and occupants shot his father several times.

Jonah sprinted towards Jamon, crying, as his father laid on the ground leaking blood. In that moment, Jamon told his youngest son to promise him to never pick up a rag in his life.

“I don’t want you to be like me,” father told son. “I want you to be way better.”

Slowly, though, Jamon’s son began to help him heal, from a life thrust upon him. On another occasion, Jamon got shot after going to a party with Marcella. The bullet hit close to his spine, leaving his legs numb. Jamon, for a time, was in a wheelchair, hoping he’d eventually be able to walk again.

One day, a young Jonah — lively as ever — jumped knee-first onto his father’s lap, in the wheelchair. Jamon pushed his son off him.

“What did you do that for?” Jamon recalled telling his son. “That hurt!”

Jonah looked back at him, shocked. Quiet.

“Dad,” Jonah asked, “you can feel your legs?”

Jamon started crying.

‘If you don’t love the process, you won’t last long.’

In Washington’s eyes, this particular Stockton life is an addiction. To material things, sure. But an addiction to attention. To reputation. A hit so powerful, indeed, that it dulls one’s own innate sense of self-preservation.

Even still, as cracks of pain spread through Jamon’s voice when discussing his past, hints of pride drip through.

“It just became a part of me,” Jamon said.

Eventually, though, that piece of Jamon could no longer coexist with the size of his son’s ambition. Around 9 or 10 years old, Jamon brought Jonah to trainer Vince Carter, a Stockton native . Immediately, Carter recalled, he could tell Jonah “wanted different.”

“He was not OK with how the generations were before him,” Carter said. “Like, he really wanted to change.”

Jamon went to his associates on the south side, and told them he couldn’t run with them anymore. He went to older enemies on the east side, and told them he’d be crossing territories solely to watch Jonah play with the Yellowjackets. East-side Crips began to ignore Jamon in favor of telling his son “good game” and to “put on for the 209.” Friends watched as Jamon got a house for himself and his children, and removed himself from the street corners he used to frequent.

“I told Jonah, ‘Some of this stuff is only possible because of you,’ Jamon said. “I was like, ‘Man, you changed Dad’s life so much, man. And I appreciate you. So I’m going to make sure that — there’s going to make some days that you’re going to be upset with me, but I’m going to push you to the limit.’”

In the summers, Jonah would strap on a football helmet and a 25-pound weighted vest and run up a 5-mile hill carrying a football, three days a week. Jamon would putter behind him slowly in his car, drinking lemonade and blasting the air conditioner. At the summit, he’d make Jonah take off the vest and run back down with the football.

If he dropped it, Jamon told his son, he’d have to start all over again.

“It was just hell, man,” Jonah told The Post in May. “You got to love the process. And I loved every bit of it. If you don’t love the process, you won’t last long.”

Kids that Jonah and friend Tyrei Washington grew up playing with on the Yellowjackets, as the elder Washington remembered, got caught up in gang activity and left football. They had friends both affiliated and EBK, two of the most prevalent gangs in Stockton. But Jonah never accepted plenty of welcoming hands despite rubbing elbows in such crowds, and Jamon hardly let his son leave the house, least of all for a party.

And over time, as Jonah became a star running back who once ran for 30 touchdowns his sophomore year at Lincoln High in Stockton, Jamon found himself barbecuing and playing dominoes with some South Stockton members who had gradually become friends.

“They saved each other,” Johnson said. “Jonah saved his dad, and ‘Mon kept him out of the streets and kept him out of the negativity that was going on out here. So I would just say, it made ‘em both grow.”

A tone-setter and a leader

After Jonah ran for 1,053 yards as a junior at Washington in 2024 — transferring there to follow head coach Jedd Fisch and running backs coach Scottie Graham from Arizona — Jamon’s phone buzzed incessantly with calls from programs trying to not-so-subtly persuade his son to hit the transfer portal again. They bandied about potential NIL offers of up to $2 million as incentives, Jamon said.

It would’ve been roughly $400,000 to $500,000 more than Washington could pay him, as Fisch told The Post. Eventually, though, Jonah simply told his father to stop answering any more calls. He wanted to graduate in four years, which would’ve been made more complex by transferring again.

And he didn’t want the fast money.

“He was kind of like the poster child of players,” Fisch told The Post, “that we wanted to promote within our program.”

At a younger age, Jonah made a promise to his late grandmother that he’d graduate college. At one practice during the fall of 2024, Washington’s assistant athletic director of football academics Diamond Brown was standing on the sideline when Jonah bounded up to her in full pads and begun complaining about his grade in a music class.

Brown replied that his overall GPA was at a 3.9, as she remembered.

“That’s B.S.,” Jonah retorted. He resolved to talk to his music teacher. He wanted a 4.0.

He finished with a 3.94, good enough to land himself as a 2025 , honoring the nation’s premier student-athlete. Last week, he flew back to Washington for his graduation. It fulfilled his promise to his grandmother. It also fulfilled a personal goal for Stockton.

“Give kids hope that they don’t have to be a gangbanger, they don’t have to be a drug dealer, they don’t even have to be a football player,” Jonah told The Post. “They don’t have to do nothing. You can go to college, and get your college degree. And just because you came from Stockton don’t mean that you can’t do that. You can still do that. Just being able to change a generation, ultimately.”

Such a platform, of course, will come foremost from Sundays in Denver. Jonah led the Big Ten in touchdowns (17) in 2025, and finished his college career averaging 5.5 yards per carry. His supplementary skills mesh directly with necessary running-back responsibilities in Sean Payton’s offense; the running back is an “elite pass-protector,” as Fisch said, and has had a heavy workload in Broncos summer practices catching passes out of the backfield.

As the Broncos have placed a premium on drafting and acquiring players who specifically fit their ideals around leadership and IQ in the locker room, Jonah’s intangibles stood out, too. Broncos general manager George Paton is a close friend of Fisch, and the Washington head coach gave a glowing evaluation.

“He’s an alpha,” Paton told The Post on Jonah, after the draft. “He’s a tone-setter. He’s a leader. Jedd says that he’s one of the best players he’s ever coached.”

It is all apparent in the way the 220-pound Jonah carries a football, molded by following Jamon’s bumper up a hill.

“That����ap why you see him running so angry at times, running over people,” Washington said. “It����ap like, ‘I got somewhere to go. Somewhere to be. And it����ap not in Stockton.’”

A father’s goal

In late April, Marcella Johnson and her family loaded four cars, each with five people, and caravanned the seven-hour drive from Stockton to San Diego for Jonah’s NFL Draft party. No one involved wanted to host it specifically in Stockton.

“We (didn’t) want, running to some store to get some ice or something, something to happen,” Jamon said.

After the Broncos drafted him in the fourth round in late April, Jonah didn’t return to Stockton through the team’s offseason program. That was by design. In his first couple of years returning from college, Marcella said, her son would stay at a hotel in a surrounding area around Stockton like Manteca, California, rather than sleep at one of his parents’ homes. And he often visits preacher Washington’s house first before heading home to Jamon’s.

“He knows there’s nothing out here that����ap good,” said Rob Alcazar, a friend of Jamon’s and Jonah’s former 7-on-7 coach.

In time, of course, Coleman’s family hopes he’ll return to Stockton consistently and set up youth camps, similar to . For now, though, he wants to move his father away. Jamon has left the past behind, but danger still lurks. Shortly after he was drafted, Jonah called his dad in May and asked if it would alleviate stress if he got him out of Stockton.

In response, Jamon told his son that he didn’t owe him anything.

“I’m not one of those parents that����ap like, ‘Oh, my son’s in the NFL, so now he owes me a house. He owes me a car,'” Jamon told The Post. “No, I’ll drive my same car and I’ll live in my same house, if I have to. My goal and my gift was to see him make it.

“If I walk outside and I drop dead on my way to heaven, or wherever I’m going, I can say, ‘Yeah, my son made it.’”

Cooper, the Broncos’ outside linebacker, was arrested Thursday night for the second time in about a week. The 28-year-old defender, according to online records, was booked at the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office detention facility on a charge of domestic violence and misdemeanor charges of harassment and violation of a protection order.

The details paint an even scarier picture. Cooper and his girlfriend were arrested last Thursday night and given a court order to stay away from one another. Only records indicate that Cooper’s girlfriend called police this Thursday, a few hours after the Broncos completed organized team activities, to say that the Broncos edge-rusher had shown up at her apartment and knocked on the door for “five to 10 minutes.”

According to an affidavit, Cooper sent her at least 20 messages. Both were under court protection orders that forbid them from interacting, stemming from a June 4 incident in which the woman endured “strangulation with hypoxia and traumatic brain injury,” the affidavit reads.

“I started to cry and he pressed, like, further — (because) he had me held up against the wall — he just pressed further and then dropped me and just started screaming at me that it was my fault and that I, like, caused this, and that I was like, a (expletive),” she told police, according to the affidavit.

Cut him. Now.

This isn’t just about football. It’s about trust. It’s about accountability. It’s about decency. What was becoming a distraction for a franchise riding high during a championship window has taken a more awful, serious turn.

The Broncos have to ask themselves a simple question today: Which cost is greater? I Or the stain on a franchise from a story that gets worse by the day?

For Carrie Walton-Penner and Greg Penner, this shouldn’t even be a discussion.

You move on.

Cooper isn’t just a danger to a team’s image anymore. He’s become a danger to another human being. A second arrest, and every unseemly anecdote that’s emerged since, removes any benefit of the doubt. All Cooper had to do to keep his career on track and his team out of the headlines was … nothing.�� He couldn’t.

If the Broncos do nothing in response, then what does that say about them?

“We had a long visit with Coop,” Payton, the Broncos’ coach, said Thursday afternoon as voluntary organized team activities (OTAs) wrapped up with Cooper in attendance, “and now the process plays out.”

And Coop did what he did anyway.

“I haven’t (talked about it with the team), and yeah, my instincts told me not to right away,” Payton continued. “(At) this time next week, we have three days of mini-camp. We’ll have a number of speakers. I think there’ll be a time, though, to talk about it.”

That time is right here. Right now. As a best-case scenario, NFL precedent suggests a hefty suspension for Cooper is coming — most likely for six games, regardless of what the courts decide.

The Post’s Luca Evans reported late Thursday night that officials added felony second-degree strangulation charges to the Broncos defender’s case. The veteran linebacker pleaded not guilty in court last week and was seen practicing this past Thursday at OTAs — the last voluntary team session before mandatory mini-camp begins Tuesday. Cooper is slated for a motions hearing on July 6, and a potential jury trial in late July.

Last year, the NFL suspended Chiefs receiver Rashee Rice six games after the wideout pled guilty to two third-degree felony charges stemming from a road-racing incident in Dallas. In 2024, the league suspended then-Arizona wideout Zay Jones for the first five games of the regular season after Jones was charged with misdemeanor domestic battery in Florida. Those charges were later dropped. The suspension wasn’t.

And when it comes to replacements — no, Von Miller isn’t necessarily the logical answer here, either.

For one, the 58 you knew and loved is Von gone. Miller hasn’t played on more than 37% of his team’s defensive snaps since 2022. Pro Football Focus hasn’t given him a grade better than 85.8 (out of 100) since 2021. PFF says The Vonster missed 20% of the tackles he attempted last fall with Washington.

The popular scouting site’s wonks pegged Miller in 2025 as a 64.4-rated defender. Which, we’ll grant you, is solid for a then-36-year-old edge guy. It’s also a drop of 21.1 points from the 85.5 overall grade Vonster collected as a member of the Buffalo Bills in 2024.

Meanwhile, Broncos linebacker Jonah Elliss is 23. PFF graded him out with a 75.8 score overall during the regular season. Elliss recorded three sacks and 18 hurries on 370 snaps, per the site’s advanced metrics, and … didn’t miss a tackle.

Dondrea Tillman is 28. PFF gave him a 68.5 overall grade, with a run-stopping grade of 72.3, which ranked 19th in the league among edge-rushers. Missed-tackle rate: 15.4%.

Que Robinson is 25. He landed a 65.4 overall PFF grade on just 163 snaps as a rookie last fall. Missed-tackle rate: 16.7%.

It’s easy to put 2 and 2 together and come up with a 58 reunion. Only��that’s fuzzy math.

The Broncos don’t just have cheaper, younger options than Miller. They have better ones, already on hand.

Per Spotrac.com, the Broncos, as of Friday morning,��at $30.36 million. The site said Vonster was worth a 1-year, $5.8-million deal , which would certainly fit the budget.

But does he fit the building? Payton’s built a culture in Dove Valley around his image, his standard. Von takes up a lot of oxygen in any locker room he joins. But especially the one here, where 58 is already revered.

To general manager George Paton’s credit, the roster is already buffered in case of a long-term Cooper absence. We haven’t even mentioned Drew Sanders yet. And defensive coordinator Vance Joseph slathered Robinson with all kinds of love Thursday when asked about the second-year defender’s upside for 2026.

“After the season, watching the cut-ups (of game tape) … when Que played, he played really well,” Joseph said. “He looked like a guy who could be a future starter for us … so it’s our job to keep improving with Que, and get him more reps.”

If Payton is serious about accountability and trust, a window on the Broncos’ defense is about to open. A Super Bowl flag is on the ground, now, waiting for the next man to pick it up and run to daylight.

Head-coaching buzz around 31-year-old quarterbacks coach Davis Webb had risen from sneaky whispers to verbal conversations in late January, and Denver had no obvious other options than to promote a hot commodity or risk him walking out of the building. So Payton — around the time Webb had interviews with Buffalo, Baltimore and Las Vegas for head coach vacancies — a source told The Post — floated the concept of play-calling duties to him. Webb had separate conversations with general manager George Paton and owner Greg Penner, too.

And once that concept became real, there was no other decision to be made, as Webb told reporters Thursday.

“I didn’t really know what the situation was going to be for me,” Webb said. “But, I mean, I pretty much signed immediately whenever they offered that.”

The question, as Webb himself outlined there: What, exactly, did he sign up for?

Even as he’s publicly inherited play-calling duties from Payton, Webb made clear to reporters Thursday that Denver is still operating under Payton’s offensive philosophy. Through OTAs, Webb has run the unit through practice similar to how previous offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi did in previous years. And Denver’s offensive style hasn’t looked markedly different through OTAs than it did in 2025, when the Broncos ran sizeable doses of screen and mesh concepts.

In his first offseason media availability Thursday, though, Webb offered a few glints as to how the Broncos’ attack will eventually function differently — and made clear he feels ready for the pressure of becoming the new face of Payton’s offense in Denver.

“Yeah, I think so,” Webb said, when asked if he feels he has thick enough skin to handle play-calling duties. “My dad was a coach for a long time, so I heard that. I was a backup QB for a while. Everybody likes the backup. It just, it is what it is. That kinda comes with it.

“Our whole deal is, ‘Let����ap score some points, let����ap have some fun, let����ap have a different attitude on offense. Let����ap get up with some excitement, celebrate with your teammates, no dumb penalties. And let����ap just play clean football.'”

Between the lines, those comments clearly pointed to a fatal flaw in Denver’s offense last season: operational speed. Webb largely played the wait-and-see card when asked how his own offensive ideals would fit into Payton’s scheme, noting that the Los Angeles Rams — as an example — decided to move to heavier personnel groupings midway through last season. But Payton himself acknowledged in February that a reason for passing off play-calling was “being quicker,” as the Broncos’ 14th-ranked offense alternated between pockets of up-tempo flow and sluggish starts amid constantly rotating personnel groupings.

On multiple��occasions in 2025, quarterback Bo Nix became��visibly frustrated with Payton for not getting play calls��from the sideline fast enough. That’s been an early emphasis of Webb’s planning in Denver, through OTAs.

“Right now, we’re just teaching the installations and making sure we get the bad football out of our system,” Webb said Thursday. “Break the huddle efficiently, get to the ball fast, and allow the QB to see the game.”

That can play to the benefit of the Broncos’ franchise quarterback, on simple precedent. Nix’s efficiency took a leap in both yards-per-attempt and quarterback rating in no-huddle looks in 2025, a situational comfort that’s played out since he began his collegiate days at Auburn.

In perhaps the worst year of Nix’s football life — a disjointed 2021 season at Auburn — Nix simply didn’t respect then-head coach Bryan Harsin and his offensive system “at all,” as former Auburn offensive analyst Kendall Simmons recounted to The Post. The saving grace in a 6-7 season came when Nix could simply see the defense and react without a play call in late-clock situations.

“You (could) just see the frustration on a normal play-call of, ‘OK, why are we calling this? Because the defense keeps presenting X to us, and we’re going all the way back to A, and it����ap not working,'” Simmons recalled. “And so when we went up-tempo and Bo could go with himself, you can see the confidence. And I almost felt like we should’ve done more of it, instead of calling plays — we should’ve done more up-tempo, and letting him get the feel and call things out.”

The same realization appears set to play out in Denver in 2026, in a much more stable situation. And Webb, now, will have a new toy to play with in receiver Jaylen Waddle, who has the physical tools to win matchups faster than any receiver Nix has had in two seasons in Denver.

“He’s good,” Webb deadpanned when asked about utilizing Waddle.

In 2020, Webb was a backup quarterback with Buffalo when the Bills traded for Stefon Diggs as a new weapon for a rising Josh Allen. Allen, in his subsequent third NFL season, promptly earned an All-Pro nod and a second-place MVP finish. And Webb drew a connection between the Allen-Diggs pairing and Nix’s partnership with Waddle in Denver’s offense — as Nix readies for his third season, himself.

“There’s some similarities of what����ap starting to happen here,” Webb said. “Doesn’t mean it����ap going to. We got a long way to go. But man, he’s good. And I’ve just enjoyed the person, and just watching him work. He is a blessing to be around. He is a multiplier. He is a thermostat.”

The heat, with Denver swinging on Waddle amid Super Bowl aspirations, has been turned up on Webb. He is no longer an idea, a hotshot offensive mind hidden behind a play-sheet; he is a reality, one of the most important figures in this Broncos offseason. And he’ll be directing traffic that’s still operating on Payton’s grid system, as the 62-year-old head coach just signed a new five-year contract Thursday and can yank back play-calling duties with one fell swoop.

But Webb said Thursday the “most attractive thing” about staying in Denver, ultimately, was leaning on Payton.

“I trust him, he trusts me, we think very similar,” Webb said. “I know how he wants the game to be played. It����ap the same offense for the most part. There’s some little tweaks here and there.

“But this is a Sean Payton-coached football team.”

He’s been putting pictures and other office items in boxes over recent days, preparing for the Broncos’ move across their practice fields to a gleaming new team headquarters, and wondering how long it will take to get used to the new digs.

That, though, is the only professional move Payton has to ponder any time soon after he and the Broncos agreed to a new five-year deal on Thursday.

“Sean Payton has led an impressive turnaround over the past three seasons, instilling a winning culture with high expectations,” Broncos owner and CEO Greg Penner said in a statement announcing the deal. “I appreciate the close partnership he shares with George Paton along with the alignment and stability across our football operations.

“We’re thrilled for Sean to continue leading our team as head coach, building on our progress during such an exciting time for the Broncos.”

The contract runs through 2030, aligning the contract terms for Payton and general manager George Paton, who signed a new extension earlier this spring. Payton was believed to be one of the highest-paid head coaches in the NFL on his initial contract in Denver at around $20 million per year and almost certainly will continue to be, though his exact salary on the new deal was not immediately known.

“I’m super appreciative of that opportunity,” Payton said Thursday after Denver’s OTA practice. “I said this earlier, that triangle of ownership —��the Walton-Penner group, Carrie and Greg — and then George and working with him, I’ve been spoiled. I had a real good experience in New Orleans with ownership and (general manager) Mickey (Loomis). And to go two-for-two in this league is hard.

“I’m thankful they want me back and we’re going to do everything we can to keep winning.

The Broncos have done little else since Payton took over following a disastrous 2022 season that finished 5-12 and saw Nathaniel Hackett fired 15 games into his tenure.

Beyond just one calamitous year, Payton took over a team that had lost its way for nearly a decade since Peyton Manning retired after Super Bowl 50.

Denver went 8-9 in his first season but made the decision to take on a record $85 million in dead cap to cut quarterback Russell Wilson afterward.

Then Payton and Paton drafted Bo Nix at No. 12 overall in the 2024 draft and Payton engineered a 10-7 season that resulted in a wild-card playoff berth in Nix’s rookie year.

Last fall, the Broncos broke through with a 14-3 regular-season record, powered by an 11-game winning streak. They won in the postseason for the first time since their last Super Bowl year, beating Buffalo in overtime in the AFC Divisional round. Then Denver lost at home to New England in the AFC Championship Game without Nix, who fractured his ankle against Buffalo.

Now the Broncos are firmly back on the map. They believe they have a championship-caliber team, they have an ascending power in their ownership group, they have a new stadium in the works and they have Payton and Paton in place long-term atop the football operation.

“There’s always pressure and that����ap kind of the unique thing of sport,” Payton said, “especially at the professional level where you’re graded on each game and each performance and that����ap OK,. That����ap kind of how you prefer it. A place here with such traditions and expectations, that����ap a good thing.

“It����ap a lot better than hoping you can fill a stadium with fans or any of that other stuff.”

Payton is 32-19 in the regular season in Denver and 1-2 in the postseason. His 184 overall regular-season wins are No. 13 all time and second among active coaches behind only Kansas City’s Andy Reid (279). If the Broncos return to the postseason this fall, Payton will find himself in the top 10 in regular-season coaching wins.

Along the way, the Broncos have built one of the deepest and most talented rosters in football thanks in large part to Payton’s conviction on the types of players he wants and Paton’s ability to identify and acquire them. Payton called “aligning with George” on his contract term a critical component to the equation.

“We enjoy the process and coming to work together and going through this together,” Payton said. “I think we think a lot alike.”

Payton had two years remaining on his original deal, which ran through the 2027 season. The new pact, then, runs through 2030 and would take the veteran head coach through his 67th birthday.

Payton said he hasn’t given much thought to how much longer he wants to coach, but recounted a story from last season when Nix asked him that very question.

“Bo had asked me how long and I was like, shoot, plenty of time. Eight years, nine years, whatever,” Payton said. “And then we had one of those gameday moments (in Las Vegas) and I said, ‘well right now it feels like one year.’

“I’ve not really given any thought to the end game. I think I’ve got a lot of juice left and I enjoy what we’re doing.”

The Broncos offensive lineman showed enough during training camp to make the 53-man roster despite going undrafted in the spring of 2023.

He was placed on injured reserve after the roster cutdown, and remained there for the entire year and didn’t appear in a game.

Palczewski would work out on Denver’s rehab field on a daily basis, wondering what the future might hold.

In November that year, the Broncos announced plans for a new, cutting-edge $175 million training facility and headquarters project. The next summer, they broke ground on it.

Now the building is nearly complete. Team employees are set to be moved over in less than two weeks. Broncos players will be in their new locker room and digs for training camp next month.

Palczewski last week leaned against a bench after wrapping up the first week of OTAs and looked across at the gleaming new building and smiled, recalling “vividly,” he said, when he first heard about the plans.

“I was like, ‘Oh, it����ap going to be open in 2026?,’” he recalled. “That’ll be pretty nice. I hope those guys enjoy it.”

Turns out, ‘Palcho’ is going to enjoy it, too. Perhaps for many years to come.

The versatile offensive lineman got his biggest opportunity yet in 2025, starting 10 games for injured Ben Powers at left guard — a position he’d never played before —��and excelled. This spring, the Broncos rewarded him with a two-year, $9.5 million contract. It came with a $2.5 million signing bonus, $5.75 million in guarantees and can be worth up to $11 million based on incentives.

It also came with a clear message from the club: We may not have a starting job for you at the moment, but you’re a big part of the plan going forward.

‘I’m thankful every single day’

Palczewski was an offseason priority for Denver’s coaching staff and front office. His deal was finalized on March 5 and had been in the works for about a week before that. That meant it was done before the club’s retention run of four more signings closer to the start of free agency, plus Palczewski was a restricted free agent, so the team could have taken more time had it wanted to.

To Palczewski, the wait from the crushing end of Denver’s 2025 season to hearing a deal was on the table felt long enough. It started with exit meetings, when he asked head coach Sean Payton and general manager George Paton what his future looked like in Denver.

“It����ap so weird, you go from thinking you could go to the Super Bowl, we get our hearts ripped out and then you’ve got to do that,” he said.

They told him they’d get to him. There’s a timeline for these things.

“Then it����ap just silence. We’ll get to it when we get to it,” Palczewski said. “But when it happened? I mean, I’m ecstatic. Looking back at the road, especially being an undrafted guy, I’m thankful every single day.”

Even more rewarding for the Mount Prospect, Illinois native: Since he went undrafted, he chose the Broncos in the first place. He saw Denver generally and offensive line coach Zach Strief specifically as a place where he would get good coaching and development.

Three years later, Palcho has started games at two different positions, earned the staff’s trust and landed a quality contract.

He’s done it, he said, by consciously paring down what he puts thought and energy into.

“When I first got here my rookie year, I was just like, ‘How do I stay here the longest?’” Palczewski said. “And I kind of got into a mental, like, I don’t know how to say it without swearing. I just was, like, I just thought about the big picture too much. ‘What about this and this and this?’ A week or a week and a half in, I was just like, ‘screw that.’ I’m just going to focus on what can I get better at today? Today, today, today. I’ve got 24 hours, what can I do? And then, that way, it felt a lot more manageable.

“I didn’t have to worry about the anxiety of, what����ap going to happen at the end of camp with cuts? Well, if I worry about it and I’m too scared to play free, guess what����ap going to happen? I’m getting cut. 100% chance.”

Finding a future fit

Now the next question: Where will Palcho play in 2026 and beyond? He’s shown he can handle left guard, where Powers is back but entering the final year of his contract. Palcho can play right tackle, where Mike McGlinchey has two years remaining and is coming off one of his best pro seasons, though he turns 32 during training camp.

The Broncos brass knows it can’t have five premium-paid starters forever. They’re wary of getting old across the board at the same time. They’ve got enviable depth and versatility behind their high-priced starting quintet.

All of that means Palczewski’s time is coming. It’s a matter of when.

In the meantime, the soon-to-be 27-year-old is willing to acknowledge that starting is a goal, but he also continues to be adamant about the benefits of playing in a group that����ap been largely intact the past three seasons.

He also knows the career arc of his position coach well. Strief, a seventh-round pick in Sean Payton’s first New Orleans draft class, spent five seasons as a reserve. Then he started 85 games over six years as the Saints’ right tackle.

Palcho? Undrafted in Payton’s first Denver class. Now going into Year 4 still perhaps ticketed for reserve duty, but with a future and a contract that suggests he’ll crack the lineup at some point.

“I think Palcho is in position to be a starter for a long time,” defensive tackle Malcolm Roach said recently.

Until then, Palczewski will keep focusing on small things and trusting they’ll lead to big ones. For himself and for his team.

“It����ap simple for anyone to say, ‘I want to be a Super Bowl champion,’’ Palczewski said, using a high-pitched kid’s voice for emphasis. “OK, well can you (freakin’) back-side cutoff? Can you hit your target on a guy when his shoulders are down on a bull rush? How do you just work it and focus on the process each day?

“If you take care of that, it’ll go on further.”