How Broncos’ Bo Nix raced ahead of the curve: From 8th-grade starter to rookie QB1 (2024)

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Bo Nix studied the photo as he stood in a shaded corner of the Denver Broncos practice facility after a scorching, mid-August practice. As the corners of his mouth bent into a smile, he allowed himself, if only for a moment, to drift back a decade.

The caption of the image shown to the rookie quarterback didn’t include a date, but Nix knew it: Oct. 10, 2014.

In the picture, a lanky, young quarterback in a black-and-white jersey has the football held high in his right hand as he runs in that direction. His left leg is bending at a 90-degree angle as his right cleat digs into the ground. His eyes are steadfastly scanning the field in front of him.

As Nix stared at the screenshot image on a reporter’s phone last month, it all came rushing back, a succinct memory preserved.

“I was very prepared for that game,” he said. “For whatever reason, I had a good calm about me.”

The description of how he felt in that frozen moment may seem unremarkable. That is until you unroll the other details. The picture was snapped during Nix’s debut as the starting quarterback at Scottsboro High in Alabama, which then was playing in the state’s highest classification.

And Nix was in the eighth grade.

“From my standpoint, as a running back, there was nothing I had to do to get Bo ready,” said DK Billingsley, who was a sophom*ore at Scottsboro the night Nix made his first start in what would become the most prolific career for a quarterback in Alabama high school history. “Bo was Bo. When the moment arrived, he turned it on.”

When Nix was named the Broncos’ starting quarterback two weeks ago, a job that will begin with Denver’s Week 1 opener on the road Sunday against the Seattle Seahawks, his matter-of-fact reaction told the story of a player who has grown accustomed to racing ahead of the curve.

Five years after starting midway through the season as an eighth grader at Scottsboro, Nix became the first true freshman to start a season at quarterback for Auburn since 1946. Five years later, he will be the first rookie starter to open a season for the Broncos since John Elway in 1983.

To have watched Nix closely during his climb to those various milestones was to understand there was no secret sauce. Rather there was a constant collecting and tinkering with ingredients.

“I just remember Bo, from the second he stepped foot at Auburn, we might be going to the pool or doing something like that and he was very driven to stay in the (facility) and watch film and meet with coaches and get extra work in,” said Wilson Appleton, a backup quarterback at Auburn during Nix’s freshman season. “All the things guys like that who are ahead of the curve do. It’s all preparation.”

Football, of course, is in Nix’s blood. His father, Patrick, was his high school coach. Before that, he was a star quarterback at Auburn in the 1990s. Patrick is also the son of a coach, Conrad Nix, who guided Northside High in Georgia to five state championship appearances and two titles. After Patrick’s playing career ended, he became a college coach, exposing the game to his oldest son from his earliest days. Bo Nix would wear out VHS tapes of his father’s time as a college quarterback, repeatedly rewinding big plays. Auburn history quickly became one of his favorite subjects.

“We have the quarterbacks over to my house … and Bo talked about, like, a 1987 game where we caught a fade ball or something,” Kenny Dillingham, Nix’s offensive coordinator during his freshman year at Auburn, said shortly after Nix won the Tigers’ job in 2019. “I go to a book I have of Auburn history, and he’s over here telling me about things that happened before he was born. I’m like, man.”

Nix’s appreciation for the game was a foundation for the work he put into it. Patrick Nix made clear his role as Scottsboro’s coach guaranteed nothing for Bo. If the young quarterback wanted his shot early, he’d have to earn it. He’d have to gain the trust of teammates who were three and four years older.

It didn’t take long.

“Nobody really questioned it,” Billingsley said. “He had been with us all that summer (before the 2014 season). He’d get a drive here or there (in practice), and it was like, ‘Woah, Bo is really talented.’ You had people who thought he probably should have started earlier in the year at quarterback. When it came time for it to happen, to be the quarterback, everyone was just like, ‘Here we go. We’re ready. If he’s ready, we’re ready.'”

Nix took his lumps that first fall. In his first start, he completed 10-of-27 passes for 120 yards with two touchdowns and an interception against Fort Payne High. But improvement came swiftly as Nix, still two years away from getting his driver’s license, adjusted to the speed of players who were getting ready to head to college.

“I was definitely the youngest on the field at all times, but that’s probably where I grew up the most,” Nix said. “You don’t have a choice. You’re playing with older guys and the team is depending on you to go out there and do your job. That’s kind of when I was thrown into the fire and that became a norm for me as I kept going.”

Scottsboro squeezed into the final playoff spot in 2014, which drew the school a matchup against Clay-Chalkville, the undefeated, No. 1 team in the state. The squad from just outside Birmingham was loaded with future college players and a future NFL star, Houston Texans wide receiver Nico Collins. Clay-Chalkville had given up only 19 points per game in the 10 regular-season games leading up to that first-round matchup.

They were ready to come after the eighth-grader.

“He dropped back and we got after him and hit him,” said Jerry Hood, then the head coach at Clay-Chalkville, “He just kept throwing it. … You could see flashes of his ability to move around, and he could throw it on a dime.”

Nix threw five touchdown passes in the game, tying a Scottsboro record set in the 1950s. Clay-Chalkville won, 85-50, the highest-scoring game in Alabama state playoff history. It was “a literal track meet,” Billingsley said. Clay-Chalkville, which featured seven future college players on its offense, went on to win the state title and complete a perfect season.

But Nix’s performance lingered.

“You knew he was special,” Hood said. “In the eighth grade, you don’t know if he was NFL special or just high-school or college special. But, buddy, by the time his junior and senior years rolled around in high school, you knew this kid was destined to be somebody we talk about for many years to come.”

Scottsboro hadn’t won a state playoff game since 2004 and had produced only two winning seasons since. But by the time Nix was a sophom*ore in 2016, Billingsley said, “we were off to the races.”

Nix earned all-state honors as he led Scottsboro to a 12-1 record. He had developed a commanding presence, even if he was still an underclassman. Billingsley remembers a game against a regional rival, Etowah, midway through the season that demonstrated the young quarterback’s command. Both teams carried eight-game winning streaks into the matchup.

“It’s the second drive, and Coach actually called a run play for me,” said Billingsley, who played college football at Troy and is now an assistant coach at Central High in Alabama under Patrick Nix. “But Bo read the defense so perfectly that he pulled the ball and took it into the end zone from 35 yards. He went crazy, pumping up the crowd, saying, ‘These boys don’t want this!’ It was almost scary. I’m like, ‘I don’t know if somebody said something to him or if he’s just ready to go because of the magnitude of the game.’ I was like, ‘OK, we’re about to win.'”

After Scottsboro ended its season in the state quarterfinals, Patrick Nix was offered the head coach job at Pinson Valley High. Father and son went 28-1 and won two state championships in two years together at the school. A handful of those victories came against Clay-Chalkville, the school that had beaten Nix as an eighth grader in the state playoffs. He returned the favor by knocking Clay out in the state semifinals in back-to-back seasons.

“He’s the reason I don’t have multiple state championships,” said Justin Burdette, an assistant at Clay-Chalkville since Nix arrived at Pinson. “He’s the best high school quarterback I’ve seen with my own eyes.”

Burdette recalled one play during the 2018 playoff matchup in which Nix single-handedly crushed his team’s title dreams. It was late in a tight game, and Pinson Valley was facing a third-and-long. The snap from the center sailed over Nix’s head and landed 10 yards behind the quarterback. As the defense closed in, Nix appeared trapped.

Until he wasn’t.

“He picks the ball up, running to his right, and heads straight for the sideline,” Burdette said. “He avoids a tackle, keeps going toward the sideline. Then, he sticks his foot in the ground and seems like he threw it 150 yards back to the left sideline. He finds a guy wide open. We end up tackling him, but they move the sticks. It’s one of those plays where you’re thinking, ‘OK, we’re going to get the ball back and have a chance to go win and play for a state championship.’ But because of Bo Nix, that didn’t happen.”

Dillingham made clear at the start of Auburn’s offseason program in 2019 that he wouldn’t allow their quarterback competition to breed animosity.

“He really put an emphasis on, ‘Let’s try to be the closest room in the country, no matter if we’re competing or not,'” Appleton said.

Dillingham, now the head coach at Arizona State, fostered that environment by inviting the quarterbacks to his house, creating an avenue for the group to bond outside of football. He had them over to play card games one night. Before they began playing, though, Dillingham showed off a couple of magic tricks he had recently picked up.

Nix’s reaction gave Appleton an insight into how the young quarterback was wired — and why he’d ultimately win the job at Auburn that season.

“Bo would just not let it go on how Coach Dillingham was doing the trick,” Appleton said. “He was very adamant on trying to figure it out. ‘What is he doing? Where is the card going that he is pulling out? How does this trick work?’ And then when we actually started playing cards, you could see the fire. It doesn’t matter — name a card game — anytime he lines up against somebody, you’re going to see the fire in his eye.”

Nix made his first start for Auburn on Aug. 31, 2019, a top-25 matchup against Oregon at AT&T Stadium outside Dallas. Like his first start at Scottsboro, there were rocky moments. He threw two interceptions. He completed only 13 of his 31 pass attempts. But as the pressure of the closely contested game mounted, Nix found that calm about himself once again.

Auburn, trailing by one point, got the ball back at its 40-yard line with just more than two minutes remaining in the game. With 1:21 left, the Tigers faced a fourth-and-3 at their 47-yard line. The play called for Nix to move to his right and find one of the two receivers coming across the field. Both were covered. Nix, as was the case in that state semifinal game against Clay-Chalkville months earlier, appeared to be trapped. Then, he found a crease, turned up field and dove headfirst through a defender for the first down.

Appleton can still feel the sideline roaring for Nix after the play.

“You watch a lot of quarterbacks and you get labeled a prima donna or this and that, whatever it is, because it’s a unique position,” Appleton said. “You get to wear a different-colored jersey at practice and coaches scream at the defensive guys when they come near you and things like that. But when it came time to play, there really wasn’t anything he wasn’t willing to do to win the game.”

In the long slog of NFL training camp, where one practice bleeds into another, it can be hard to isolate a-ha moments.

Javonte Williams, though, remembers when he realized Nix had a chance to start right away for the Broncos.

“I’d start just by the way he was able to get the play out in the huddle,” Williams said. “Some of them plays be five, six seconds long. For him to remember it (quickly), that’s just crazy, for real. The way he carried himself, you could tell he’s been ready for this moment for a long time.”

Ja’Quan McMillian, Denver’s rising star defensive back, was sure he and his unit had Nix pinned early in camp. They were about to bring a blitz that would funnel pressure up the middle. McMillian thought the defense had the plan well-disguised.

“Then, he checked out of it, got the offense right and made a good pass on an out route,” McMillian said. “You could just see him looking better each and every day.”

Cornerback Pat Surtain II points to a more audacious moment from Nix that got his attention. It was during one of the first OTA practices in May. Nix sent the defense one way with his eyes, then fired a no-look pass to his receiver in another direction.

“Everybody was like, ‘OK, he’s coming in with that mojo, that swagger,'” Surtain said during an appearance on the “Up and Adams” show during training camp. “It was good to see him coming in with that confidence.”

The command in the huddle. The defensive recognition. The improvisational plays. They were all born of the wealth of experiences Nix has had across the past decade.

“People don’t realize how much high-quality football that kid has played,” said Stuart Floyd, who also faced Nix as an opposing coach at Clay-Chalkville. “From Alabama high school football to the SEC to the Pac-12. He’s just played a lot of football and his IQ is just unbelievable.”

Not everything has been as smooth as the back-to-back state titles or the SEC Freshman of the Year campaign at Auburn in 2019. Two challenging years at the school followed. The COVID pandemic, frequent coaching and scheme changes, the legacy pressure of following his father into the quarterback role at Auburn. It forced Nix to keep growing. In 2022, he transferred to Oregon and put together two of the most prolific seasons in school history.

“I like the fact that he had some adversity,” Broncos coach Sean Payton said.

Through it all, Nix has landed ahead of the curve once again. He’ll start as an NFL rookie on Sunday, just shy of a decade after the night an eighth grader walked onto the field in Alabama, a sense of calm washing over him.

“It’s really the same,” Nix said. “It’s just football.”

(Top photo: Todd Rosenberg / Getty Images)