It was only a few days into Denver Broncos training camp, but Jonathon Cooper was ready to share a lofty goal. The fourth-year outside linebacker was coming off a season in which he recorded a team-high and career-best 8 1/2 sacks. In 2024, he said, double-digit production was the expectation.
But Cooper wasn’t only providing a projection for himself. He was laying down the gauntlet for everyone in a Broncos uniform charged with pursuing quarterbacks.
“It’s 10-plus sacks across the room. That’s the goal,” he said. “Nothing short.”
The declaration in early August initially seemed, well, optimistic. The Broncos, after all, haven’t had a single player reach double-digit sacks since 2018, when prime Von Miller and all-rookie linebacker Bradley Chubb had 14 1/2 and 12 takedowns, respectively. Now, multiple players were going to reach that benchmark?
“I feel like just with everybody being healthy is key,” he said. “It’s everybody being healthy, us just developing as players, getting more comfortable under the system, rushing together and having similar guys out there together. We always want to do better.”
Seven games into the season, Cooper’s projection looks far from outlandish. The Broncos lead the NFL in sacks entering Sunday’s games with 28 — six of which came in Thursday night’s 33-10 demolition of the Saints in New Orleans. Five different Broncos have at least three sacks: Nik Bonitto (five), Cooper (4 1/2), Zach Allen (four), Justin Strnad (three) and John Franklin-Myers (three). Rookie Jonah Elliss has added two. It’s the most sacks the Broncos have had through seven games since the 2015 defense — a pretty decent unit, it turned out — had 29 at the same milepost.
“It’s a race to the quarterback,” said Allen, whose 39 pressures this season are second in the NFL behind injured Detroit Lions defensive end Aidan Hutchinson. “You have to make sure you’re winning and winning fast or a guy like Bonitto is going to beat you there. The standard is high and we just have to keep on pressing.”
Sometimes, the race is a tie. On a third-and-13 play for the Saints in the fourth quarter Thursday, Allen started inside over the left guard and then stunted to the outside to get a matchup with rookie left tackle Taliese Fuaga. Just as Allen beat Fuaga inside, Elliss won on the other end against right tackle Trevor Penning. Allen and Elliss met rookie quarterback Spencer Rattler at the exact time. They stood up and celebrated together, happy to share the credit.
“Everybody eats,” linebacker Cody Barton said Thursday after a career game in which he had a sack, a forced fumble, a fumble recovery and his first NFL touchdown.
CODY BARTON PICK SIX!
📺: #TNFonPrime pic.twitter.com/8cvp88LPte
— Denver Broncos (@Broncos) October 18, 2024
That internal competition has helped fuel Denver’s pass-rush renaissance. Allen has raved about the atmosphere around the team’s defense since the early days of camp, and he has routinely called it “a special group.” Players have genuinely enjoyed seeing many teammates join the sack party. As Cooper spotted Bonitto from across the locker room after Thursday’s game, he shouted, “Five in a row!” in a nod to Bonitto’s streak of consecutive games with at least one sack, which is tied for the second-longest in team history behind Miller’s six-game stretch in 2018.
Right now, it’s Bonitto setting the pace in Denver’s in-house competition. The 2022 second-round pick jumped from 1 1/2 sacks as a rookie to eight last season. He’s now setting the pace in the race to 10 and beyond.
“The only guys I really remember having a run (of sacks) like that is maybe Chandler (Jones) and Haason (Reddick) in Arizona,” said Allen, who was a teammate of both players with the Cardinals before joining the Broncos as a free agent in 2023. “We’ve been saying he’s a special talent for a while. To see him put it all together, he’s doing a lot of good stuff on second downs, too. It’s not just pass-rushing. Really proud of that guy.”
The Broncos have had 12 different players record sacks this season, and there is not a first-round pick among them. It’s indicative of the defense as a whole, which doesn’t have a single player selected in the draft’s opening round outside of All-Pro cornerback Pat Surtain II .
Broncos defensive coordinator Vance Joseph said recently he has enjoyed coaching a band of “self-made guys that are just grinders.”
“That’s helped our process of working hard, being smart, studying and just doing it right,” Joseph said. “Playing together and being team-first guys. It’s a group of self-aware, young, hungry guys who are still trying to reach for more. So I don’t have a problem motivating guys, keeping guys humble, because it’s there every day. Again, we have one guy, Pat, who’s a first-rounder. Everyone else are just self-made guys who want to get better every day.”
Cooper is scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent this offseason and is seemingly hiking up his future earnings every week. The Broncos have not done an in-season extension for a player since handing wide receivers Courtland Sutton and Tim Patrick new contracts in 2021. But it may be prudent for the Broncos to extend Cooper, who is 26 and has missed only four games in his four NFL seasons, to extend the 2021 seventh-round pick sooner rather than later if both sides can find common ground.
Baron Browning, who played 28 snaps Thursday after returning from a four-game absence due to a foot injury, also will be an unrestricted free agent after this season. So, too, will defensive tackle D.J. Jones, who has been a critical, space-eating force along the interior of Denver’s defensive line this season. The Broncos will have tough choices to make with the personnel going forward. For now, though, they focus on the races to the quarterback at hand.
First to 10 wins.
(Photo by AAron Ontiveroz / The Denver Post)
