DENVER — Bo Nix can see the future.

He can feel a moment months ahead through his fingertips.

Or in the way his feet shuffle and settle.

Or the way his hips flip to the exact angle his brain intuited.

In the Alabama summer swelter or under the baking Colorado sun, Nix can be transported from a solo training session to an all-eyes, nationally televised moment deep in the year.

A crisp autumn Sunday at Empower Field or a frigid Christmas night in Kansas City.

“We call it ‘creating future memories,’” Ben Neill, a longtime Nix quarterback trainer, told The Denver Post recently. “Like, when you’re training and you’re on the field and you make this great play and you move and you rip it in there and you just kind of flash in your head, ‘Man, that’s going to happen in a game this year.’”

Nix created many actual memories during a historic rookie season as the Broncos’ quarterback.

He won the starting quarterback job for coach Sean Payton and almost just as quickly won over the locker room with a combination of confidence, authenticity and playmaking.

He started all 17 regular-season games, generated 34 touchdowns and helped lead Denver to its first postseason appearance in nearly a decade.

Along the way, Nix became a beacon of hope for Broncos fans who have seen a revolving door at the position since Peyton Manning retired. He became the pupil who will make or muddy the second act of Payton’s career and, eventually, his Hall of Fame candidacy.

He became the most recognizable ingredient in a mix of many that put Denver on the map as a contender this fall.

Now the expectations are massive.

So, how did Nix set about preparing to raise both himself and his team to the next level? To elevate himself into the rarefied air Payton thinks he can reach, and also back up his coach’s ardent belief in this team as a Super Bowl contender?

By doing less.

By slowing down, at least in pockets.

By trusting a process he’s never actually followed before, at least not quite like this.

By betting that a move or two he mastered in the thick, southern summer will help Denver when the NFL herd starts getting thinned in December and January.

Nix took what he’s come to believe about himself — that he doesn’t have to be anything other than himself to catch everything he’s after — and put it to work for the first time in a true NFL offseason. He channeled confidence and doubt, familiarity and new methods, laser focus on the moment and a broader sense of where he’s headed and came out of the most unique offseason of his career to date ready to take the Broncos to new heights in 2025.

“There’s this kind of almost in-between mindset of that genuine confidence that, ‘I can play and I can compete,'” Neill said. “But at the same time, ‘I’ve got a lot of improvement to do and a lot of getting better to do.’”

A unique offseason

For all but one team each year, the NFL season ends with blunt force.

One day you’re playing, the next you’re cleaning out your locker.

Nix, who had a minor ankle procedure after Denver’s wild-card loss to Buffalo and thus was around the team’s facility, had trouble downshifting after playing in 20 games — two preseason, 17 regular season and the 31-7 playoff loss.

“The first couple weeks, you could tell he was still itching,” Broncos quarterbacks coach Davis Webb told The Denver Post. “I was like, ‘No, no, buddy. It’s done.’

“Now it’s time to debrief. You need to go to Aspen or Vail for a weekend and then go somewhere else. Get away.”

One of the underrated factors for NFL rookies is the long road they travel before they ever get to playing in a game. Nix’s senior year at Oregon began in August 2023 and didn’t end until January 2024. Then he went straight into draft prep and training for the NFL combine. Meetings, pro day, private workouts. Zoom calls and Payton’s all-nighter quarterback test. Two weeks after the draft, he was at rookie minicamp, beginning the race to try to digest a playbook and win the starting job.

After that came 20 games, transverse process fractures in his back, an ankle injury and the accumulating wear and tear of what amounted to an 18-month sprint.

Nix knew he needed the recovery time. He also, though, knows himself well. He’s wired to always work. Always throw. Always do a little bit more.

He headed himself off at the pass by putting a plan in place well in advance.

When Nix first got drafted, Webb gave him an extensive guide to the NFL that included offseason schedules used by his old teammates and pupils like Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Baker Mayfield and Eli Manning. Webb then reiterated those ideas in a 3-page postseason to-do list for Nix.

The No. 1 thing: “This is your first big boy offseason,” Webb said. “You don’t need to throw 10,000 throws in February and March.”

Nix took some of the advice and then molded it into a schedule tailored to his liking.

“I wanted a good foundation, good ideas, and then I wanted to make it my own,” Nix told The Post. “Do things that I’ve been comfortable with in the past, but understand I’m also new to the NFL, new to the offseason, new to the schedule.

“I wanted to see what other guys had done, what other guys had found success with.”

Nix anticipated that he’d want to push the envelope quickly, but could also feel that he needed the change in pace.

“It was difficult at the beginning because what I’ve always done is just thrown,” he said. “But as I got into it, I felt better, my body felt better, I felt myself getting stronger without throwing. So I just trusted the process and understanding that a lot of other guys around the league use the same process. So seeing that it’s been done before, I didn’t have to press or wonder if I was doing something that I wasn’t supposed to be doing or overworking.

“Our nature, sometimes you can overwork and you’re not really getting any better. You’re just spinning your tires. For me, it was trusting the guys around me, trusting my plan that I had put in place already, and don’t make any decision out of emotion because of what I want now.”

So often, what Nix wants in the moment is to feel like he’s doing enough.

Sprints. Throws. Playbook study. Nutrition optimization. Leading. Opponent scout. Self-scout. Weights. Film. An NFL quarterback has a broad constellation of disciplines to master before ever thinking about marketing, community involvement or any of the countless other endeavors that fill up a calendar.

None of it can ever be truly conquered. There is always another tendency to sniff out, another set of shoulder strengthening to do, another spin through the rolodex of play calls, checks and signals lurking.

They loom constantly, especially in the relative quiet of the offseason, as reminders that failure could be right around the corner.

“For me, I think it’s more of the fear of not being ready, not being enough for the team,” Nix said earlier this offseason. “That’s what continues to drive me.”

Neill calls it “the burden of being hyper-competitive.”

It’s a common two-way street for high-level performers, but Broncos right tackle Mike McGlinchey says Nix’s ability to navigate the traffic stands out.

“You want to be able to control that to where it’s not a detriment to you because your greatest strength sometimes, if you’re undisciplined, can become your greatest weakness,” McGlinchey said. “But Bo has handled that line so well.”

Process and processing

Nix throwing less this summer shouldn’t be confused with stasis.

Instead, he continued refining his knowledge of Payton’s playbook. He linked up with former Saints QB Drew Brees, the foremost expert on quarterbacking for Payton, to talk shop and life as the face of a franchise.

The time he spent with Neill at QB Country in Alabama over the course of the offseason zeroed in on the mental side of the game.

“We talked about seeing the field and how the field is made up of individual players who have individual assignments and zones,” Neill said. “But as you get used to seeing certain defenses, you can kind of start seeing the big picture of the defense instead of seeing individual players. That’s an area of improvement that he feels like he’s growing in and made but wants to keep going. …

“Mentally, he knows the stuff, he knows the offense, he knows the defenses, and he knows how to put the pieces together. It’s just a matter of seeing the big picture so you can see it faster.”

That’s been the book on Nix so far through training camp and the preseason.

He didn’t show up with overhauled mechanics or a big weight change or more horsepower on his fastball.

Instead, the change is about tempo. It’s about feel.

“In and out of the huddle, you can see how good it is compared to what we’ve had,” general manager George Paton told The Post this summer. “He was good last year with it, but just accelerating those things will be huge for his growth.

“He’s mastering that, and he’ll grow and build off that. It’ll be fun to see where it goes.”

Nix, though, still ventures too far into perfectionist mode sometimes.

“He’s got to fix some of his self-talk. That’s part of my deal with him,” Webb said. “But yeah, he cares, and that’s awesome. You’d rather have it that way than the other way. Everyone struggles with that at some point; all athletes do, whether it be self-talk or being too hard on yourself.”

Webb tells Nix frequently, “I’m not going to be thinking about this when I go to bed, so you shouldn’t, either.”

The paradox: That trait isn’t far removed from one that those who know Nix best say makes him special. One of his true superpowers.

Once Nix does something, feels something, makes a correction on something, he’s got it locked away. Period.

So one play, he might be cursing himself out for a mistake, but then the next might generate a future memory.

“He can dial it in and put it in his library for later,” Webb said. “We’ll talk about it enough to where there’s a cue or a word with that play that he can quickly come back to it, good or bad. The bad ones are fun because that never leaves your brain, but that can be in a good way.

“You already lived the worst, so you’re ready for the next.”

The leap

What’s next for Nix?

Payton sees his quarterback’s trajectory arcing toward the stratosphere.

He had no qualms telling Yahoo Sports he thinks the No. 12 overall pick in the 2024 draft will be in the “top four or five” among NFL quarterbacks in the next two seasons.

Of course, there are four quarterbacks in the AFC alone who are on Hall of Fame tracks in Mahomes, Allen, Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson and Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow. That’s before defending Super Bowl champion Jalen Hurts in Philadelphia and Washington’s rookie of the year Jayden Daniels, Los Angeles Chargers stalwart Justin Herbert and any number of other talented signal-callers.

Asked to defend that ground recently, Payton pointed to Nix’s preparation and work ethic and said, “There’s not one specific thing. I think he’s wiser to red zone, wiser to third down, the cadence. There are some nuances that, when you get real comfortable — maybe in Year 1, your snap count is this, and then pretty soon it’s more of a weapon.

“A number of things like that.”

Neill sees the possibility, too. He said the first time he worked out with Nix years ago, the thought crossed his mind that this could be an all-time great player. There are countless factors that can break in countless directions, but one worth hanging the future of a franchise on.

“I think if you had to nail it on one thing that gives Bo the ability and probably gives Sean Payton the confidence that he’ll improve in all of those things, it’s his mentality,” Neill said. “… He takes it that seriously and he works that hard. He has that Tom Brady mindset. I can see Bo eating avocado ice cream one day.

“He’s not going to do anything that would jeopardize the success that he wants to have, and he’s going to not leave any stone unturned. If he thinks something can give him a competitive edge, he’s going to do it.”

Now the question is how fast that translates on the field.

Webb’s theory: For most quarterbacks, the biggest difference between Year 1 and Year 2 is consistency.

“Then Year 3, in my opinion, is more of a player jump,” Webb said. “That’s just my experience personally and with my friends. Everybody talks about Year 2, but I think that’s just the world rushing like we do with everything. We have seen Year 2 jumps, but Rich Gannon’s was at 36 (years old). So everyone’s different. It depends on the situation you’re in, the village you’re around, the play-caller, your defense playing good, your o-line’s protecting you, guys are catching it and you’re executing. There’s a lot of domino effect there.

“I think (Nix) is doing good for his Year 2 development, and then next year will be another set of teaching that we’re not going to worry about right now.”

Webb is big on “the village.” He thinks far too much is made about the quarterback himself. But he’s been around a lot of franchise-carriers, too. He knows what it looks like.

“The great ones are consistently good every year,” Webb said. “So this is Bo’s first opportunity to go back-to-back and grow. His first year, it was great for his first year. But there’s still some things he can work on.”

Nix has a lot going for him.

A good village. Terrific defense. Veteran offensive line. Stability in the coaching ranks.

Not every young quarterback has it so nice. Two of Nix’s fellow 2024 first-rounders, No. 1 pick Caleb Williams in Chicago and No. 3 pick Drake Maye in New England, are already on their second head coaches. No. 8 pick Michael Penix, Jr. in Atlanta only started the final three games of last year, and No. 10 pick J.J. McCarthy in Minnesota missed his whole rookie year due to injury.

Nix, like 2024 No. 2 overall pick Daniels in Washington, leads a team that had no idea exactly what to expect a year ago and now finds itself getting Super Bowl buzz.

Village or not, that comes with remarkable pressure.

The Broncos’ rookie quarterback window is open.

The roster is stacked.

The conference is, too, but teams don’t get long runways in this league.

Can Nix take his game to the next level?

“I’ve got a lot ahead,” Nix said. “A lot to learn from. A lot to transition to. I’m just excited. It’s a great opportunity, and I’m really excited about where I’m at right now.

“I think Year 2 will be a lot of learning again, but it will be a lot more fun.”

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