One can never get complacent in a general manager’s chair, as the Broncos’ George Paton said at the owners’ meetings in Florida in March.
Build every day. Or you’ll be passed up.
“Even when the draft’s over,” Paton said in March, “it’s like — ‘UFL, what’s going on there?’”
That, evidently, was no throwaway example.
Two months after the NFL draft, the Broncos are expected to sign cornerback Mario Goodrich III from the United Football League, a source confirmed to The Denver Post on Tuesday night. The move would prompt Denver’s first post-minicamp roster cut, as the Broncos currently sit with 91 players on their offseason roster (exactly at the NFL’s countable cap of 90 with an international-player exception for Australian punter Jeremy Crawshaw).
A Clemson alumnus, the 6-foot Goodrich went undrafted in 2022 and bounced around the NFL for a couple of years, playing four games with the Philadelphia Eagles in 2023. After landing with the UFL’s Birmingham Stallions last winter, though, he racked up five pass breakups and three forced fumbles in six games.
Paton and the Broncos previously found success dipping into the UFL market — and specifically the Birmingham Stallions — by signing Dondrea Tillman in June 2024. The outside linebacker gave Denver’s pass rush a shot of size and juice in his first year with the Broncos, racking up five sacks in 12 games.
“It just never ends,” Paton said back in Florida, “and it never ends with the scouts.”
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