Jeff Legwold
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Nine weeks into the 2025 season, the Denver Broncos‘ defense is the NFL’s leader in hitting quarterbacks, affecting them and generally making their lives miserable. The Broncos have sacked opposing signal-callers 40 times, 12 more than the next-best team, putting them on pace to break the NFL’s single-season record of 72 set by the 1984 Chicago Bears.
Nik Bonitto, a fourth-year edge rusher, leads Denver with eight sacks. And the 2024 second-team All-Pro is one of the league’s most dynamic rushers and the leader of the NFL’s best pass rush because, more often than not, he wins the first step.
“That’s how you come off the ball, he’s first over and over again,” Washington Commanders edge rusher and Broncos franchise sacks leader Von Miller said of Bonitto. “All those guys [Jonathon] Cooper, Zach Allen … they have the get-off. They win the first step. But Nik Bonitto, he may not even know why he is so good yet because he’s young. But it’s good.”
His teammates know it, too. Broncos right tackle Mike McGlinchey said, “I’ll tell you right now the guy across the locker room [Bonitto] has one of the best [first steps] I’ve ever seen, and then he has elite quickness after it. He’s speed-to-speed; that’s rare.”
Bonitto’s ultraquick first step has him squarely in the Defensive Player of the Year award race as the 7-2 Broncos get set to host the Las Vegas Raiders on Thursday (8:15 p.m. ET, Empower Field at Mile High, Prime Video). He’s on a quest is to eclipse his 13.5-sack mark from last season and help Denver to its first AFC West title since 2015. But how good is his get-off speed, and how did he go from a late-Round 2 pick in the 2022 draft to one of the NFL’s most feared pass rushers?
“I’m always trying to be the first out [after the snap],” Bonitto said. “That’s hard in our group — lot of good first steps in here — but the goal, all the work you do, is to be first out. And then finish.”
MCGLINCHEY IS IN his eighth NFL season, his third with the Broncos. He has faced some of the league’s best pass rushers, including Bonitto and the rest of the Broncos’ pass-rush group in training camp. As McGlinchey settles in for a pass protection snap, he knows he must win what he calls “the first touch” from his side of the equation.
“Here’s how it goes: 99% of the time, the guy I’m trying to block is a better athlete than me and I’ve learned, let’s say 90% of the time, if you’re late off the ball in this league, you lose,” he said. “… Winning first touch matters, and most of the time after that you can battle your ass off.”
So, for rushers like Bonitto and blockers like McGlinchey, winning “the cadence” — as McGlinchey calls it — could determine how often the quarterback is sacked or hit. Home games give the blockers a slight advantage because they can hear the quarterback’s final “hut,” “set” or “go.” But when the defense is at home, the noise will often envelop an offense.
Cooper said those moments are when Bonitto excels. As the defense gathers to review game video each week, Bonitto will have several snaps on which he moves the instant the ball is snapped, even before the blocker across from him comes out of his stance.
“You do all the things you can to physically be as explosive as you can be, of course, but there is a feel to it, about the snap, about when to take your biggest chances, about the guy across from you, the time of the game, all of it,” Bonitto said. “My goal is to be as close to simultaneous with the snap as possible.”
Among pass rushers with at least 150 rushes this season, Bonitto’s get-off speed is third at 0.76 seconds, per NFL Next Gen Stats. But he isn’t the only standout in the Denver locker room; Cooper is actually first at 0.73 seconds.
But even Cooper said it’s Bonitto’s snap-to-whistle quickness, the top-end speed he has after the elite first step, that sets him apart. It has helped Bonitto rank third in the league in pressure percentage among players with at least 150 rushes, just 0.1% behind the Green Bay Packers‘ Micah Parsons at No. 2. He’s also second in the league in quarterback hits with 17, behind his teammate Allen’s 25.
“He’s awesome, I think he’s the best pass rusher,” Cooper said. “… His instincts are off the charts, his get-off … he’s smart out there, his instincts, the way he’s able to constantly rush. I’ve said, you think his rush is over, but it’s not, it’s a spin back, a counter back, and with his speed, he’s super gifted, super athletic.”
BONITTO IS A case study in the idea that the first step, although rooted in the athleticism a player has when he arrives to the NFL, can be improved.
“This story is always the one, but after my rookie year, [Broncos defensive coordinator Vance Joseph] said he wanted me to come up to his office, and he said I could be a double-digit sack guy every year. And I was like, ‘Are you sure you got the right guy in here?'” Bonitto said. “He had that vision, but I had to work. More than quickness or whatever, but all of it, footwork, my hands, get stronger. But get to work.”
Bonitto showed flashes as a rookie in 2022 but had only one sack on 165 pass rushes and 338 defensive snaps. His first step off the snap that season was 0.84 seconds, an eyelash quicker than the average first step over the past two seasons for rushers with at least 200 pass rushes (0.86).
As Bonitto worked to add strength and explosiveness, he improved to an average of 0.78 in 2023, when he had eight sacks. He continued to lower that number to 0.76 dating from the start of the 2024 season, a period in which Bonitto has 21.5 sacks in 26 games.
“I feel like it’s an accumulation of all things,” Bonitto said. “It’s being better at how you study the cadence of the teams that you’re playing, understanding the play clock and being more comfortable in who you are as a player to take some of those chances sometimes.”
Bonitto also had to learn what Joseph believes is the simplest of concepts, but not one young pass rushers always put into practice: You don’t sack the quarterback, per se, “you sack the ball.” It’s about the finish of a rush, too.
“With Nik, the explosiveness was always there. It was a refinement, adding some strength,” Joseph said of Bonitto, who entered the league with questions about his power and ability to take on NFL offensive tackles. “And he worked hard, he worked smart, he just did all the work. And then it was about a finish; he was getting there, but now he attacks the elbow, attacks the ball. … Those are sacks now.”
Bonitto said he has tried to refine movements in his workouts to help with reaction time — things like resistance training in short, explosive sprints. But simply getting stronger than he was in his final season at Oklahoma has enabled him “to just be on the field more, get more opportunities because I could hold the edge and play in more situations.”
During practice, Bonitto, Cooper and the team’s other edge rushers often compete in one-on-one races over 5 yards to see who can be the quickest off the snap. The margins are razor-thin, but the celebrations are often loud.
“I always work on the things physically in getting out [after the snap] and being explosive,” Bonitto said. “But I always feel like it’s more study and refine to make those improvements. … And then in this group, everybody works, everybody gets out quick [after the snap] — you don’t want to be the last guy there. But physically there is quickness and all of that, but the real differences are studying and knowing when to take that chance.”
Since 2018, Miller has organized an annual pass rush summit, where the league’s best sack artists can gather to exchange ideas and work on techniques to add to their totals. He said he begins and ends each summit with sessions on the first step.
“Pass rush is from the feet up,” Miller said. “Everything starts with your feet. You need to jump out of your stance, not soft step or roll. All the false steps, short steps, that shows up at the end of the rush. They take a crucial 0.3 [seconds] off the rush; if you jump out, you add 0.3. It’s the math of it.”
Sometimes that math involves a penalty or two for players like Bonitto. Three of Bonitto’s four penalties this season were for being offside.
“It’s like paying taxes; it comes with it,” Miller said. “When you’re living on the edge like that, and you’re anticipating the ball, going with the ball, not after the ball. But the thing is, and I’ve learned and seen it, when you don’t worry about jumping offsides — and I’m not saying get penalties and don’t care — but when you just worry about your technique and your work, you jump offsides less. When you worry about penalties, you jump off all the time.”
THE BRONCOS BELIEVED enough in Bonitto’s progress, work ethic and results to sign the 26-year-old to a four-year, $106 million contract extension that keeps him in Denver through the 2029 season. Much like what happened at cornerback after Pat Surtain II signed his contract extension with the Broncos last year, the pass rusher market has exploded around Bonitto.
Just before Bonitto signed in September, Parsons inked a four-year, $186 million deal with the Packers. Aidan Hutchinson then signed a four-year, $180 million extension with the Detroit Lions last month. But Bonitto said earlier this season that when he factored the monetary side of the deal into how he had developed with the Broncos, Joseph’s presence on the staff and the optimism he had for the team’s future, “It just kind of all added up to ‘why wouldn’t I sign to stay here?'”
Bonitto said one of his favorite things about the current Broncos defenders is that they pursue goals the way they seek sacks — “together, one unit” — and that their biggest goal is to be the league’s best defense with the chance to play in the Super Bowl as many times as possible. And it might be Bonitto’s approach to it all — his desire to be first off the ball and first in sacks, combined with what Joseph has called “a rare humility” — that gives the Broncos confidence there is still so much more to come in the edge rusher’s career.
“I said earlier [this season], I think there has been a lot of times in life you can kind of get tied into results,” Bonitto said. “And I know I fell into that a little bit my rookie year maybe, not getting that production I wanted that year or the snap counts. But now it’s about getting better.
“I mean, I always watched Von growing up … to think ‘Dang, one day I could be in those shoes’ would be pretty cool. I know there’s more out there for me, and I have the biggest of goals, so you keep chasing it as hard as you can.”
