Bo Nix has already done enough to demand a louder national conversation.
The Denver Broncos quarterback just finished a second season that ended with a 14-3 record and a trip to the AFC championship game, yet he still landed at No. 19 in Pro Football Focus’ top quarterbacks of 2026 rankings. Dalton Wasserman and Max Chadwick explained it this way: “It can be easy to forget about Bo Nix in the 2024 quarterback class, especially when Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels and Drake Maye were all selected with the first three picks.
But Nix has developed into a quality starting quarterback. He led the Broncos to the AFC championship game but missed it after suffering a fractured ankle the previous week,” PFF wrote.
That framing doesn’t really hold up against what Nix has actually put on the field. Among the 2024 quarterback class, he has the most passing yards, touchdowns and career wins. He also tied Russell Wilson for the most wins through a quarterback’s first two seasons in NFL history, and he is the only NFL quarterback ever to clear 7,500-plus passing yards, 50-plus touchdowns and 20-plus wins through his first two years.
The odd part is that Nix’s only real gap compared with his rookie-class peers is in the awards column. Even there, the numbers tell a story. He threw for more yards and touchdowns than Jayden Daniels as a rookie, but Offensive Rookie of the Year voting wasn’t close.
If someone wants to argue Daniels had the bigger signature moments in Year 1, that’s fair. Daniels also went deeper in the playoffs. But Nix answered with a second season that was packed with the kind of plays and wins that stick.
The Broncos ripped off an 11-game winning streak, and Nix kept delivering in the biggest spots. In Week 7, he put 33 fourth-quarter points on the board in a comeback win over the New York Giants. In that game, he became the only player in NFL history to rush for two touchdowns and pass for two scores in the same quarter.
Before that, he helped engineer a comeback upset of the then-defending World Champion Philadelphia Eagles on the road. Later in the season, he beat a Houston Texans defense that had been frightening people all over the league in their own building.
Then came Week 15, when the Green Bay Packers came into Mile High as the favorites against a Broncos team riding a 10-game winning streak. Nix beat them and walked off with a line that will stick in Broncos lore: “We’re the overdogs!”
He kept stacking those moments. Nix out-dueled several top quarterbacks last season and capped his second year with a standout performance against the Buffalo Bills in the divisional round. He played better than Josh Allen, then paid for it by fracturing his ankle on the third-to-last play of the game.
Even with that injury, he still got the Broncos to the AFC title game. The question now is simple: what more is he supposed to do?
PFF pointed to some of the underlying numbers in its ranking, noting, “Nix’s 89.3 PFF passing grade from a clean pocket ranked seventh among qualifying quarterbacks last season, while his 77.6 career PFF passing grade ranks 14th among qualifiers. He also displayed a veteran-like ability to work through his progressions, ranking third in PFF passing grade on throws to his next read (78.1),” PFF wrote.
The issue, though, is that those grades haven’t lined up neatly with the results. Nix’s performance has shown up in wins, in the standings and in the way games changed once he started cooking.
He’s still growing, sure. But he’s not some finished product, either.
PFF also had C.J. Stroud ahead of him at No. 17, which only added to the head-scratching.
The bigger point is that Nix has already earned more respect than he’s getting. His peers seem to know it. NFL Network ranked him No. 64 in its top 100 players of 2025, and that number figures to climb.
The league has seen it, too. Nix is 3-1 against the Kansas City Chiefs, with his only loss coming on a blocked field-goal attempt as time expired from chip-shot range. In just two seasons, he helped wrest the division crown away from Kansas City after nine straight years of the Chiefs ruling the AFC West.
That’s not easy to forget.
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