As Denver’s locker room echoes with the empty rustles of equipment staffers, Jahdae Barron lingers.
The first-round draft pick leans his head back against his locker late Aug. 16, pausing in a conversation with The Denver Post. He is not where he wants to be, yet. He is not where the Broncos’ fanbase wants him to be, yet. He has not won a starting nickel job, yet. Barron just played 21 snaps in a preseason game against Arizona, a workload reserved mostly for reserves and players trying to crack the roster.
Barron says he hasn’t seen the social media chatter that questions his fit in Denver. But the cornerback is savvy enough to feel it.
“The crazy thing about it is — it’s like this,” Barron tells The Denver Post, eyes searching for the words somewhere on the ceiling.
“I’ve said this before. God, he works in mysterious ways. And nothing happens overnight. Anybody that’s, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant … ” — he catches himself — “… obviously I’m not comparing myself to the top two, premier…”
But you want to be there, he’s prompted.
“No, obviously,” he continues. “Most definitely. But it didn’t happen overnight for those guys. And it takes time. It’s a journey, it’s a process. And a lot of people don’t see it.
“As fans, or people that’s watching,” he continues, snapping his fingers repeatedly, “they want it to happen now.”
The breakout hasn’t happened. Not yet. The 2024 Jim Thorpe Award winner has gotten beaten on a few routes throughout camp, including a visible one-on-one go-ball in a joint practice with San Francisco. He hasn’t picked off any balls or broken up many passes. There have been “tough days,” Barron told a group of reporters after the Arizona game. He’s also quietly flashed first-round talent on a number of less-sexy reps: forcing Bo Nix out of bounds as a spy, leaping to two-hand bat a pass in a joint practice with Arizona, reading a gap to blitz for a would-be sack in a joint practice with San Francisco.
That intelligence is Barron’s greatest current strength, and the reason Denver’s staff feels he’s special. It’s also his greatest current flaw, a young man whose mind will race ahead of his own two feet. Joseph has put a heap on his plate throughout camp, trying to get him to work out the kinks of playing at inside corner in the NFL. Barron will try to see the pitfalls before they actually appear and overcorrect.
“Like, ‘I’m smart,’” as Joseph describes to The Post. “‘I shouldn’t make that mistake.’”
But the Broncos have wanted him to make mistakes in camp. To simplify his own approach. And the 23-year-old is learning, as both a first-year corner and a rookie beyond his years, to open himself up to failure.
“They would be a fool,” Barron tells The Post, speaking on external perception, “if they think anybody can be great overnight. You have to learn, and you have to adapt. And that’s how greatness comes within.
“I have my confidence already,” he continues, voice rising with conviction. “It’s already there. Right now, I’m just learning, and I’m learning, and I’m learning, and eventually it’ll all click. And everything takes time. A plant doesn’t grow in one day. It doesn’t. It’s impossible. It needs sunlight, it needs water.
“Right now,” he finishes, “I’m just getting my water. I’m getting my sunlight. The water is the playbook, and the sunlight is the coaching staff.”
•••
A couple of states away in Austin, Texas, Barron’s high school coach Jason Cecil chuckles when hearing of Barron’s “water and sunlight” metaphor.
“Yeah, that absolutely does sound like him,” Cecil says. “He’s a highly intelligent kid. Raised right by his momma … he knows it’s a process. I think he’s always aware that it’s not just gonna happen.”
Still, Barron was so naturally talented early in his time at John B. Connally High, Cecil recalled, that he could get by with simply getting by. Cecil harped constantly on his wandering eyes. In one game in high school, Barron abandoned his assignment completely to jump a route and nab a pick.
When he returned to the sideline, Cecil barked at him, an equal mix of atta-boying and scolding for leaving his own read wide open.
“Coach,” Barron responded, as Cecil recalled, “I’ll make that play too, when that time comes.”
After a couple of quiet years at Texas, Barron’s career took off as he resolved to learn every spot in the secondary from defensive pass game coordinator Terry Joseph (Vance Joseph’s cousin). Barron began to understand defensive variations, he said in his introductory news conference in Denver, as “playing chess.”
Nobody in the stuffed Airbnb of Barron’s draft-party in late April, though, thought the Broncos would call ahead of pick No. 20. They thought Miami, at No. 13, or Tampa Bay, at No. 19. Teams that actually needed a corner.
But Denver didn’t take Barron as the second coming of Pat Surtain II. They saw Barron as a “nickel with corner flex,” as head coach Sean Payton described this week, capable of mastering Joseph’s complex scheme from an increasingly important position in an NFL secondary.
“I worry sometimes, with the corners, that if you’re defending every route, you’re defending no route,” Payton said in May after Barron arrived. “And he’s real savvy as to a tight split. He eliminates 80% of what could be run. And so, man, you feel a veteran player.”
At times in camp, though, Barron has looked lost in his own smarts. The wheels turn, and then his body moves as he tries to anticipate. But there are situations against NFL-level offenses, as Broncos defensive pass game coordinator Jim Leonhard told The Post, where you can’t anticipate. Can’t cheat. Don’t think. React.
“I think a big challenge that I’ve had with him is teaching him, sometimes, to turn his brain off,” Leonhard said. “Just focus on the technique. Trust your ability to win, without the information.”
This has been the push and pull of camp, varying within days and minutes. Sometimes, Joseph and Leonhard will put Barron outside, where he doesn’t have to lead defensive communication and can play off his instinct. Sometimes, they will put Barron at nickel, where he’s entrusted to digest and disseminate adjustments based upon offensive formations.
It’ll naturally cause ups and downs, Leonhard said. But Barron’s role will become more streamlined by Week 1 against the Titans. Staff have had to trust, as Leonhard said, that he can “push his way” through inconsistency.
“Just to trust myself,” Barron says, speaking on his communication with Leonhard. “I don’t have to go look for anything. I don’t have to go try to make a play. The play’s just going to come to me.
“When you try to do too much, it doesn’t look right.”
•••
Barron is his mother’s son. Techonia Davis grew up as the third of four siblings, and the only one to graduate high school and college. Her own six kids — Barron the youngest of three boys — became her motivation.
She taught them to want. To express what they wanted. And she has held them to it. Barron believes deeply in manifestation and chasing his goals. He is also deeply religious, and places his football journey in a greater spiritual timing. Both concepts exist at once.
“How many people you think was in the stadium today?” Barron asks after Broncos-Cardinals, responding to a question about wanting more.
40,000? 50,000? (It was actually roughly 63,000).
“If I ask any person in the stadium today, ‘Do you want a million dollars right now?’” Barron responds. “Anybody would say, I’d put 100% chance … they’d say yes. But it doesn’t work like that. You have to go to work every single day.”
Joseph has told his protégé roughly “85 times,” he estimated, that failures are necessary to be a great cornerback in the NFL. At first, Joseph reflected, Barron struggled with the simple reality of making mistakes. There is pressure that comes with being a first-round pick, whether he feels it or not.
In that game against Arizona, though, Barron slowed down and sped up all at once. He made a few tackles in coverage and read one run by the Cardinals’ Michael Carter perfectly, wrapping up and riding him out of bounds for a 1-yard gain. He had a hurry on a blitz, too, a role he’s picked up quickly.
“We were like, ‘That’s the guy we drafted,’” Joseph told The Post.
He’s the “right person” for this level of responsibility, Leonhard said. The locker room trusts him. The trick for Denver’s staff is to create a role that maximizes Barron’s ability to play free, while also maximizing his intelligence. And in a stacked secondary — and with Ja’Quan McMillian the incumbent starter at nickel — Joseph knows it’s a “luxury” to not immediately need to toss Barron into a fire.
“He wants to get it all now, and that can get in the way of improvement if you don’t open your mind to mistakes and correcting them,” Joseph said. “At first, he wasn’t that way. He was blocking it. But he’s open now.”
Barron shows no physical signs of frustration, and never really has. He’ll remind anyone, his mother says, that what they’re going through in life is not actually as big as they think it is.
He now has to remind himself, too.
“It’s football, it’s my job,” Barron says. “But at the end of the day, I’m more than that. I’m a young man. I’m a young man to … I’m a son, I’m a brother, I’m an older brother, little brother, and things like that. So I’m just enjoying life, honestly. Not worrying about the he-say, she-say, honestly. Just putting on a smile, because everything’s gonna click.
“And when everything clicks, it’s just gonna be fun.”
Denver Post reporter Parker Gabriel contributed to this story.
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