They smile, when they hear the record. There is no surprise, no eyebrow-raising, at the mention of 72. The number drifts through the hallways in Dove Valley, and passes from phones to lips to ears, this Broncos defensive line knowing they can reach out and yank it down if they just yank down a few more opposing jerseys.
Star pass-rusher Nik Bonitto nodded Sunday night, tugging on a shirt in the Broncos’ locker room after another win and another step toward history.
“We’re trying to get that balance of getting there, and — being able to be smart at the same time,” Bonitto told The Denver Post. “So, I mean, we know the goal. And we keep rushing the right way, we’ll do it.”
Forty-one years ago, when the Chicago Bears went to Detroit in the final game of the 1984 regular season and put the Lions’ Eric Hipple and John Witkowski on their backsides 12 times, defensive end Simon Fletcher was a 22-year-old soon-to-be draftee of the Denver Broncos. He saw Chicago finish with 72 sacks as a team, just a couple years after the NFL started counting them as an official stat. Fletcher saw Denver’s roster, with All-Pros Karl Mecklenburg and Rulon Jones, and figured: We can do it, too.
“We were having fun playing football,” Fletcher recalled, “and so we thought — anything was possible.”
Fletcher played 11 seasons and set the Broncos’ all-time mark for sacks (eventually surpassed by Von Miller), and was a part of multiple AFC championship pass-rush units. He always had Chicago’s record in the back of his mind. But Fletcher’s Broncos never got there. Nor has anyone for four decades, those Ditka-era Bears authoring one of the NFL’s all-time marks.
Forty-one years later, though, a different group in Denver is now clawing after it. After three second-half sacks in a 34-26 win over the Packers last week, this 2025 Broncos defense sits at 58 sacks through 14 games. They need 15 in their next three for history. The city of Denver is watching them. The NFL world is watching them. The now-63-year-old Fletcher is watching them.
This Broncos group feels it. As the takedowns stacked up into November, defensive end John Franklin-Myers reflected, Denver’s pass-rushers focused so much on that ’84 Bears number that they actually began chasing it for a game or two. Too much. They averaged 4.5 sacks in their first 11 games; just 3.0 in their last three.
“Half the time, it’s not so much in the building,” Franklin-Myers told The Denver Post on Thursday. “It’s everybody else. We don’t talk as much about that sack record as — every time you hop on this social media, somebody’s talking about it. And naturally, it’s, ‘Oh, man, we’re that close. Anything I can do.’”
What they can do — as defensive-line coach Jamar Cain reminded his group in a Thursday positional meeting — is what they did to get here. Bonitto, Franklin-Myers, Jonathon Cooper, Zach Allen and the rest of the room have spent two years together in a Vance Joseph scheme that demands they feed off one another. This group is predicated on that concept of “rushing the right way,” as Bonitto said. Each has their lane to fill. At their best, they squeeze pockets from enough angles to pop opposing quarterbacks right into someone’s waiting arms.
“It’s like they’re rushing on a string,” said Nate O’Neal, a longtime NFL pass-rush development specialist who works with Cooper. “Everyone’s supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there.
“They’re rushing four men as one man. And it’s eating people alive.”
Do the work. Don’t focus on the record.
This chance to print their names as the most tenacious pass-rush in NFL history won’t come by straining too hard to touch the past. Or by peering too hard into the future.
“If we rush together and don’t worry about the record, it’s gonna come,” Cain repeated Thursday.
“It’s gonna come.”
In mid-October, as the Broncos’ sack artists were painting their first strokes, head coach Sean Payton brought in Hall of Fame pass-rusher DeMarcus Ware to speak to the team. Ware watched practice and saw flickers of aggressiveness that reminded him of another great pass-rush in Denver: his 2015 Super Bowl champions.
Ware saw more reminders of that group, too, in how tight-knit this room was.
“I was like, ‘So, how are you guys gonna get pressure?’” Ware recalled in October. “And they were like — ‘All of us are gonna get pressure, bro! We’re all making plays.’ And I wanted to hear that.”
This Broncos season is the perfect confluence of team construction and individual development. The 25-year-old Bonitto, who’s on pace for a career high in sacks after an All-Pro nod last year, has learned how to get jumps on offensive linemen like few rushers across the league. Cooper, whose own production has slowed after a torrid start, has combined power with newfound speed. And Allen, who has become the second defensive lineman in NFL history to record 40 QB hits in back-to-back years, is continuing to find new ways to attack on the interior next to Franklin-Myers.
A year and a half ago, Cain sat down to watch Franklin-Myers’ tape as the Broncos were mulling trading for the defensive end from the New York Jets. He saw an interior defensive lineman who could play in any alignment. And play off Allen. And break down the entire side of an offensive line next to Cooper.
“Bringing him,” starting nose tackle D.J. Jones said of Franklin-Myers in July, “was the last piece of the puzzle.”
O’Neal has studied plenty of tape of this Bronco rush. And O’Neal, who spent last year as the defensive line coach of the CFL’s Edmonton Elks, respects Joseph’s scheme — “so much.” Each member of this pass-rush quadrant has their role to play, as O’Neal listed in a conversation with The Post. Cooper shrinks the width of the pocket with power off one edge. Bonitto turns the corner on the opposite edge. Allen, Franklin-Myers, Jones and key defensive tackle Malcolm Roach work to collapse the pocket vertically.
“You’re pushing the depth, you’re pressing the width, and you’re literally taking those five offensive linemen and folding them around the quarterback,” O’Neal said.
This scheme often functions to “cage the quarterback,” as Joseph described after an October win over the Eagles. The Broncos have played an endless stream of mobile QBs this season, from Hurts to the Jets’ Justin Fields to the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes, and allowed just 198 rushing yards in 14 games this season to opposing signal-callers.
Their most porous game of the year? Washington in Week 13, when backup QB Marcus Mariota scrambled for 55 yards on 10 carries as these Broncos too often abandoned their rush lanes. That Bears mark was weighing, coming off a bye.
“It was just kinda on the forefront of our minds,” Franklin-Myers reflected.
Creation of a ringleader
Growing up in Florida, a young Bonitto didn’t much like football.
“It wasn’t something he loved,” said trainer Javon Gopie, a fellow Florida product who’s watched Bonitto since youth ball. “But he loved to compete.”
Some decade and a monster contract extension later, Bonitto is the ringleader of an outside-linebacker group in Denver that verbally accost each other inside the locker room (mostly just Bonitto and Cooper, and mostly in jest) and compete in most every rep inside the facility. During Thursday’s practice, as Bonitto lined up for get-off drills alongside Cooper and reserve Jonah Elliss , Bonitto chided Ellis to not jump early: Can you back up? Can you back up?
They took off on OLBs coach Isaac Shewmaker’s hard count, and quality-control coach Brian Neidermeyer declared Elliss the victor. Elliss yelled. Bonitto jumped around the turf in semi-mock frustration. Some version of this happens every Thursday.
“If I give him a time, if I give him a weight, if I give him any type of objective number,” Bonitto’s offseason trainer Rich Pruett said in the fall, “then he wants to be No. 1.”
Early in each game week, Gopie pores through film of upcoming opponents and hops on a FaceTime with Bonitto to discuss his matchup’s tendencies from recent weeks. How does he set? How many kick-steps does he take before punching his arms out? Does he punch with two hands? Together, they create a pass-rush plan.
They’ve been doing it since Bonitto arrived in Denver in 2022, then a raw second-round rookie. The difference from then until now, Gopie believes, is sheer confidence. One has to be mentally tough enough to lose as a pass-rusher for 17 straight reps and still “go out and hunt,” Gopie preaches, on the 18th.
Bonitto hunts, now. He takes his risks. His calling card will always be his first step; he has ascended to the NFL’s elite by sharpening that first step with preparation. Bonitto told The Post in September he’s been studying tape of opposing quarterbacks’ cadences to get a better jump, and Gopie now sees him anticipating the play-clock, breaking off the line as the seconds tick down.
In the second quarter in Week 4 against Cincinnati, Bonitto glanced up — presumably at the scoreboard — as the play-clock hit single-digits. He bent and flew forward on the very twitch of the snap, an elastic band yanked to its limit and then released. Bengals tackle Orlando Brown Jr. didn’t even have time to get a single slide-step down before Bonitto already had two steps towards Cincinnati quarterback Jake Browning.
One problem: Cooper was already at the scene of the crime when Bonitto arrived.
“I see ol’ Coop coming from the other side … I was like, ‘Aw, damn,’” Bonitto joked after the game, on a split-sack for both.
Cooper improved his own jumps off the ball with reaction-time work in the summer. He and Bonitto’s ability to capitalize one-on-one matchups is the single most important factor on the march towards the Bears. And yet they still pick their spots.
In mid-November, Joseph said on ESPN reporter Peter Schrager’s podcast that Bonitto could have “double the sacks” if he was allowed to simply try to beat his man every play. Instead, he and Cooper often create shared opportunity for Denver’s entire defensive line by containing quarterbacks from escaping around the edge.
“We probably have the best connection, I feel like,” Bonitto said in early October, “in the league.”
Interior telepathy
When Franklin-Myers was seven years old, his grandfather, Billy Ray Myers, adopted him out of foster care in California, and instilled in him one foundational lesson before he died.
If you’re going to do something, you’re not going to quit.
“I wasn’t born with a quit button,” Franklin-Myers told The Post in September. So, win, lose, draw, I’m ready for a war.”
Across eight years in the NFL, the 29-year-old Franklin-Myers has been cut by the Rams the year after playing in the Super Bowl, and traded by the Jets after three years as a starter, and now may be left hanging again by the Broncos. He wants sacks. Sacks mean millions on the open market.
He has only five, in 14 games. He hasn’t chased them. Chasing them throws the operation in jeopardy, and he would not quit on the operation. He has enhanced it, across his year and a half in Denver, by becoming a foil and another half to Allen.
Allen said Monday he’s “forever grateful” for Franklin-Myers, and that it’s no coincidence his career has taken off in Denver since the former Jet joined the fray in 2024.
“Them two out there, it’s low-key telepathic,” marveled rookie Jordan Miller.
“We understand each other better than anybody in the league,” Franklin-Myers said.
Countless examples litter this 2025 tape of the two opening doors for each other. And, importantly, opening doors for edge rushers. On a 3rd-and-12 against the Raiders in November, Allen drew both Las Vegas center Jordan Meredith and guard Dylan Parham to the right side of the line, leaving Franklin-Myers and Bonitto with one-on-ones on the left side. As Bonitto dusted Raiders tackle DJ Glaze, Franklin-Myers shoved Las Vegas’s Jackson Powers-Johnson back so deep that quarterback Geno Smith had no space to step up.
Bonitto brought Smith down, and Allen threw his arms up to the sky.
“We always find ways to find who’s going to get the 1-on-1, or help the guy out, or whatever the case may be,” Allen said Monday, of he and Franklin-Myers. “And Coach Cain and BT Jordan have done a hell of a job, too, at helping us out with that.
At times, Cain says, sitting on a bench after the Broncos’ practice Thursday, his wife DeCarla will have to remind him he’s doing something pretty good. College coaches tell Cain that they’re using these Broncos for teach-tape. Colleagues across the NFL text Cain with questions about his rush approach against specific teams.
“And I’m just present,” Cain says, laughing. “I’m like, ‘We’re not that good.’”
Cain rattles off a list of complaints. Franklin-Myers, he says, could have three more sacks. Allen, sitting at 6.5, has missed one. Bonitto’s missed some. Cain’s still pissed off, too, about a 40-yard touchdown run by Packers running back Josh Jacobs from last Sunday’s win.
“My goal, personally, is to be known as the best,” Cain said. “And I want to finish first in rushing yards per game. First in sacks. I want ones, ones, ones. ”
At the same time, there’s not a long way left for this room, with Franklin-Myers’ contract set to expire.
“Sometimes I always think about, like, ‘This is a special group,’ and we won’t be the same,” Cain says. “Lord knows what happens to John. You know what I mean? So I have to do a better job of living in the moment.”
That is the key, ultimately, to any Broncos hope of actually snagging the crown from the 1984 Bears. Each and every member of this defensive-line room, as reserve ILB Levelle Bailey told The Post this week, wants that sack record. But they will not break it by chasing too hard after the past, and veering from the present.
They went into halftime against the Packers last week with no sacks, Cain reminded the room Thursday. Rush together, he reminded them.
“If we get to this record,” Cain says, “we all eat together.”
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