DENVER — The smile crackles through Junior Adams’ retellings of the glory days in Eugene, Ore., of the quarterback who saw the game a move ahead of the headsets on his own Duck sideline.

Why is he checking this play? Adams and staff would wonder, watching Bo Nix stroll to the line of scrimmage and scrap the system. Why is he checking this play?

“One thing about Bo, man,” said Adams, Oregon’s former co-offensive coordinator, “in the game — the game is slow to him.

“It’s like he’s played the game already. And he knows exactly what’s about to happen.”

He knew on Nov. 19, 2022, when Nix and Oregon faced third-and-short up three on Utah with exactly 1:46 left. He checked, on the game’s most pivotal play, into a power-read. Running back Jordan James flared left, readying for a pitch. Except Nix pulled the football down, dodged, and dove across the first-down marker to ice a win.

In the past several years, defensive coordinator Morgan Scalley has seen three of the six first-round QBs from 2024’s draft multiple times. He schemed for Nix twice, including that game in 2022. He schemed for the Commanders’ Jayden Daniels, the NFL’s 2024 Offensive Rookie of the Year, twice when Daniels was at Arizona State. He schemed for the Bears’ No. 1 pick Caleb Williams three times, back at USC.

“In my opinion, having faced those guys,” Scalley told The Denver Post recently, “Nix was probably your highest football-IQ guy.”

He was born for this, Adams said. The son of a quarterback. The son of a coach. And that “brilliant mind,” as Adams put it, has carried Nix since he was named Mr. Alabama in high school. He learned from a new play-caller in Kenny Dillingham in 2019 at Auburn, from Chad Morris in 2020, from Mike Bobo in 2021, Dillingham again at Oregon in 2022, Will Stein in 2023, and was handed a 15-page guide by Broncos QBs coach Davis Webb to try and speed up the NFL learning curve in 2024.

“If anybody is going to pick things up quickly,” said Ben Neill, one of Nix’s longtime QB trainers, “it’s going to be him.”

And yet, the prevailing fact remains: Nix has ridden this journey as a blue-chip QB, from 2023 Heisman Trophy finalist to a 2024 Offensive Rookie of the Year finalist, without having the same play-caller for back-to-back years since high school.

Until now.

“It’s huge,” Nix said, standing at a podium for Year 2 of Broncos OTAs Thursday.

“It’s kinda weird, going back, first install — it’s not new verbiage, and new things.”

There’s been little secrecy in Nix’s approach to his first true NFL offseason. No massive mechanical tweaks after a down-then-up rookie year, throwing for 3,775 yards and 29 touchdowns in 17 games. No massive psychological shifts.

Instead, for the first time in two years — his 2023 season at Oregon flowing directly into 2024 draft prep — he rested his arm. He went to Italy. He zipped a first-pitch strike at a Rockies game. And in the shadows, he’s begun the process of planning for defenses that now know how to prepare for him, the key to Nix’s Year 2 lying in the improvisation off the foundation that’s already been built.

Same play-caller, as Nix pointed out at OTAs, in Sean Payton. Same QB coach, in Webb. Same receivers, mostly. Same center. Same offensive line.

“I mean, that being the same, it’s going to be — it’s hard to even explain,” Nix said Thursday. “You’re going to see it in ways that you can’t even understand.”

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The truth of the matter, at this exact time last year, was that Nix was tired.

There is simply no time to ever stop throwing, as Nix explained Thursday, on the college schedule. Training camp, into season, into spring ball, and back around again. Oregon’s 2023 slate went into December, and then Nix went immediately into pre-draft prep, repping deep-intermediate throws and quick-footed drops with QB Country founder David Morris. The Broncos took him with the 12th overall pick last April, and he went straight into preparing for offseason activities and fall camp.

Neill could tell Nix was “carrying a lot of mileage” last offseason, as he put it.

“There were days that I could tell that Bo was not in the mood,” Neill said. “But he was disciplined enough to be like, ‘I gotta get this done.'”

They’ve thrown less this offseason than in years past, Neill said, after he and Morris — with program QB Country — began working with Nix at Auburn in 2021. That was by design. They focused more intensively on fundamentals, as Nix said Thursday, eventually honing in on a concept Neill calls “mechanical resiliency.”

By now, Nix is a fairly fine-tuned product. But mechanical resiliency, as Neill explained, involves identifying Nix’s occasional bad habits and drilling them in situational work. He could occasionally be a “front-arm rip guy,” Morris said, with moments of undisciplined stability causing a less compact motion. And his footwork, generally, is the biggest key.

“When his feet are good, he’s usually very, very accurate,” Neill said. “And when his feet are not good, that’s when he can tend to miss sometimes.”

Nix has come into Denver’s voluntary offseason activities feeling “sharp.” And beyond mechanics, he’s been able to mentally rep more situational looks. There’s no new offensive voice in his ear. No new terminology or concepts eating up offseason hours.

“It’s basically like, you have to spend your first year learning how to read,” Neill said.

Now, Nix can anticipate. He and Neill have embarked on conversations this offseason trying to hone his mental process. For a young NFL quarterback, each play presents a different tree: hundreds of branches of outcomes split off based on a particular defensive look, the progression of reads and the individual execution from 21 other men on turf.

Impossible to rep everything. Simpler to categorize a defense in three ways, as Neill explained: zones with one safety deep, zones with two safeties deep and man coverage. Land on that, and that would open a set of specific options to variations within that category.

“I think that’s one thing that will allow him just to play a little faster, and a little more confidently,” Neill said.

The story of Nix’s football career, from Alabama to Oregon to Denver, is a “guy that plays free,” Morris said. He learns. He prepares. He lets it rip. He’d repeat the same messaging to Nix throughout his rookie year with the Broncos, through a rough first four weeks in the NFL.

You’re the best player on the field. No hesitation.

Nix got to that place — that freedom — down the stretch last season, posting a QB rating of 108.0 in his last eight games. And he enters team activities in Year 2 armed with a greater mental recognition of potential outcomes, no longer focused on his own terminology or his own mechanics.

“It’s a lot more enjoyable not thinking right now,” Nix said Thursday, “as opposed to what I was doing last year.”

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Last year, you’d have to repeat a script twice to Nix, Payton put it Thursday.

This year, through exactly three team practices in OTAs, it feels as if the “plays can roll off his tongue,” Payton said.

“It’s just, it’s a lot different,” Payton said.

The 25-year-old is a veteran now, made so by both the Broncos’ ascension as a franchise and his own positioning. Linebacker Dre Greenlaw came to Denver in free agency in part because he saw a stable quarterback situation. So, too, did safety Talanoa Hufanga, who clarified Thursday that was “no disrespect” to former 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy. So, too, did tight end Evan Engram, who was impressed by Nix assuming the role of Broncos ambassador, Engram’s trainer Drew Lieberman said.

“You see a guy who started off the year a little shaky, but that’s the beauty of it,” Hufanga said on Thursday. “He bounces back and shows up each and every week, even when things aren’t slotted in his way.

“Watching a guy that battles through adversity is something that I admire, by watching him do it each and every day. We’ll go out there and try to do it again this year.”

Beyond those three, and a handful of rookies, there’s little difference in the environment around Nix as OTAs have hit. It’s an advantage, one he hasn’t had since playing for his father back in his Mr. Alabama days. And Nix is determined, as he pointed out Thursday, to not “get stuck” in Year 2 and beyond.

He and a friend on the Broncos, the quarterback said, talk about it constantly.

You’re still a nobody. You haven’t done anything yet.

“He’s right,” Nix said. “I haven’t done anything up until this point. And I got a lot to prove.”

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