How Broncos GM George Paton cut his losses and built Denver into a contender

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — For days, George Paton sat by his old friend’s bedside and waited for him to rest. But Jim Bonds would not fall asleep. There were memories — and tears — to be shared.

In October 2020, Tom Bonds had called Paton one morning and said the family was taking brother Jim home from the hospital for hospice, after a long battle with cancer. So Paton, then the assistant general manager for the Vikings, hopped on a flight from Minnesota to California before the Vikings were set for a rivalry game with Green Bay in a week’s time. No questions asked. This was Paton’s college roommate at UCLA, fraternity brother, revered high school coach in Southern California and longtime friend.

Paton came to Jim’s house in Valencia and stayed. At one point, Paton drove 45 minutes across Los Angeles to a hospital to retrieve some medicine for Jim. He told the family — wife Tricia, and children James and Katie — that he’d be there for them. He regaled the kids the night he arrived with stories of their dad, and after Jim died the next week, his kids have said that the day Paton spun memories with them was one of the most impactful days of their lives.

“That,” said Brian Schwartz, another longtime friend and UCLA fraternity brother, “just exemplifies George.”

Years later, Paton is now in Denver, coming off an AFC title-game run as the Broncos’ general manager just two years after eating Russell Wilson’s $242.6 million contract and swallowing the largest single dead-cap figure in NFL history. Many who call Paton a close friend do not attempt to explain his steadiness via the particulars of roster management or cap analysis. Instead, they mention Jim Bonds and Paton, the friend who was there until the very end and sought no shred of credit or public attention .

“I think it’s because of his personality,” Schwartz told The Post, discussing Paton’s steadiness. “His desire to not see the limelight. Just like he did with Jimmy.”

In Denver, it has created a decision-making ecosystem with some balance, partnering with a head coach who is constantly in the limelight. It did not come easy. When Sean Payton arrived as the Broncos’ head coach in 2023, he needed time at first to feel out Paton. The general manager was a very unpopular man in Denver following a couple of massive misfires — the disastrous hiring of Nathaniel Hackett and the trade and massive extension for Wilson. So Payton sought advice from longtime mutual friend and NFL insider Jay Glazer.

Glazer, also an MMA trainer and motivational speaker, told Payton he could trust Paton.

“I’ve seen a ton of GMs backstab the head coach, and vice versa,” Glazer told The Post. “And George has always had Sean’s back. Always. And that is so valuable. Especially when you’re going to try and make a lot of changes in the place.”

Three seasons with Payton and the Walton-Penner ownership group, indeed, have brought sweeping change in Denver. But the general manager has not changed. Somehow. Payton is known across the NFL for his desire to surround himself with allies he trusts, and members of Denver’s front-office regime were initially concerned Paton would get pushed out, an NFL source with knowledge of the Broncos’ building recounted to The Denver Post.

“If you ask anybody in the league … they’re like, ‘Oh, well, George’s days are numbered, that’s a bummer,'” the source said.

Instead, Paton’s days are on the verge of extension. He “never wavered,” Tom Bonds said. Paton has led the Broncos to re-sign 13 current members of their 2026 roster to new deals (according to data collected from Spotrac), add key starters from Zach Allen to Talanoa Hufanga on team-friendly deals, and found cheap young offensive production in the draft from quarterback Bo Nix to running back RJ Harvey. The franchise’s baseline foundation, suddenly, stacks up with most any across the NFL.

“I mean, I never flinched,” Paton told The Denver Post on Tuesday in a brief conversation, walking between obligations at the combine.

“Always figured we would turn it around,” he continued. “And we did. And I’m not surprised.”

Payton, across that time, has given increasingly glowing public reviews of Paton, and has privately lobbied Broncos ownership for a new contract for Paton as the general manager heads into the last year of his deal. The relationship has clicked in large part because of Paton’s nature, a man who knows the attention in Denver is centered around the head coach’s office — and who’s perfectly fine with that.

“I think they are positioned to win,” one NFL agent told The Post, “for as long as this group of people stays together.”

Elway’s successor

In January 2021, members of Denver’s scouting department got an email from then-Broncos GM John Elway.

“He was like, ‘Everybody needs to hop on a Zoom call in 30 minutes,'” a source in the building said. “Everybody was like, ‘What the hell?'”

Elway’s announcement — he was stepping away from his duties as general manager, and would lead a search for a new GM — sent shockwaves through the organization . The man, after all, was immortal in Denver, with two Super Bowl rings as a player and one as an executive. Elway told staff on that call he felt the search for his successor was part of his legacy in Denver, too.

Paton, a Vikings assistant GM who’d bootstrapped his way through NFL circles, was among the names floated. After a stint as a quarterback in UCLA’s program and a brief overseas career, he coached the sophomore football team at his alma mater, Loyola High School, in 1996 on a stipend of $1,000 (they went undefeated). In 1997, Paton landed a scouting job with the Bears and showed up on the doorstep of Tom Bonds’ house in Chicago, asking if he could crash in his basement for a few days (he ended up living there for 2.5 years). In the mid-2000s, when Paton was the director of pro personnel in Miami, he’d play games of four-on-four lunchtime hoops with Nick Saban.

Their squad was usually Saban, Paton, and assistant coaches Jason Garrett and Derek Dooley. Paton was a “little scrawny dude,” as friend Schwartz said, who didn’t play basketball much. But he could scrap, and always ended up on the floor. One day, as Garrett recalled to The Post, Paton couldn’t play, and Saban grew frustrated with his remaining teammates’ levels of effort.

“Nobody’s getting any loose balls!” the future Alabama mogul roared, as Garrett remembered.

Paton, too, was a grinder in personnel rooms. Equally as important, he had a sense of how to level out coaching personalities, from working with Saban to working with Mike Zimmer in Minnesota. He’d largely bided his time, outside of a push for San Francisco’s general manager job in 2017, under Minnesota GM Rick Spielman. And the Broncos’ situation in 2021 wasn’t entirely stable, since Denver was operating without a primary owner after the 2019 death of Pat Bowlen.

But Paton respected the history in Denver. When Elway got dinner with him at Elway’s Steakhouse after a formal interview in early January 2021, Elway made it clear he wouldn’t let him leave without a commitment to Denver, Paton told now-close-friend Tom Bonds the following morning.

“I think he saw a lot of the qualities of, like, an old-school football man in George,” a source who was in the Broncos’ building told The Post. “A guy that has a meticulous process that he sticks to that was calm and collected, and confident, and steady, and not erratic as a personality.”

A week before Paton’s first NFL Draft in the spring of 2021, he, Schwartz and Schwartz’s wife were out to dinner at Los Dos Potrillos. Paton’s phone buzzed. It was Elway, who was still serving as Denver’s president. Paton took the call, left, and came back.

“He just wants to know who we’re drafting,” Paton told Schwartz, as he recalled.

So Schwartz asked, too. Paton refused to tell him. Schwartz started to get frustrated. They were buddies, after all. And then it occurred to him that his friend was so quiet on all matters that he hadn’t even told John Elway, of all people, a week before the draft.

“He probably even keeps it,” Schwartz joked, “from his own son.”

The dark times

The Broncos were drafting Pat Surtain II, of course.

There was plenty of pressure back in 2021 on Paton to take a quarterback in his first draft, and he and staff sat for hours and days and weeks in April, crushing tape on Ohio State’s Justin Fields and Alabama’s Mac Jones. Paton consulted analytics. He consulted scouts who’d visited Ohio State. And he kept coming back to one conclusion: Alabama cornerback Surtain was the cleanest player, regardless of position, in the draft.

Paton is “beloved” in the personnel community, Glazer said, for his aptitude in collegiate scouting. Paton was a key voice in the Vikings drafting longtime Vikings difference-makers like safety Harrison Smith, tight end Kyle Rudolph and defensive end Brian Robison, former Minnesota head coach Leslie Frazier told The Post. And Paton has a near-photographic memory, friend and former Broncos quarterback Matt Mauck said, to recall specific traits and medical history from most any player in any draft class.

All that aside, though, the city of Denver — a quarterback town — was not particularly pleased with the Surtain pick at No. 9 at the time in 2021.

“He’d be like, ‘Oh, (expletive), why you got The Fan on?'” the NFL source with knowledge of the building said, referring to Denver sports radio station 104.3 The Fan. “Those guys are killing me.'”

The city of Denver was pleased, of course, with the following year’s blockbuster deal for Wilson. Paton had gone to see North Carolina’s Sam Howell and Pitt’s Kenny Pickett in person, the source said, and was largely unimpressed with the crop of quarterbacks in the 2022 draft class. The Wilson deal was a win-now move, meant to catapult a struggling franchise behind a 10-time Pro Bowler; Paton already promised Wilson’s agent Mark Rodgers during trade negotiations that he’d extend Wilson, and Paton kept his promise.

The rest is ugly history. Wilson didn’t fit with Paton and Denver and especially Payton, after Paton hired and then fired young offensive mind Nathaniel Hackett in less than one season in 2022. The Broncos benched Wilson with two games to play in 2023, and ate a record $85 million in dead cap money . Wilson later accused Denver of threatening to bench him midseason if he didn’t adjust his contract.

Rodgers himself, the former agent across the table, remains a genuine fan of Paton despite it all.

“I have a very positive feeling about George,” Rodgers told The Post. “And some people might be surprised by that. But I think if you’re going to stay in sports, you have to be able to separate the people from the problem.”

The Surtain pick was made with the philosophy that there would be no shortcuts, after Paton assumed the helm of a franchise that had gone 32-48 in its five seasons since winning Super Bowl 50. The Wilson trade was an attempted shortcut, though, for an executive who has always made his money more from scouting collegiate talent and high-upside pro personnel than gambling on high-leverage deals.

“I think — if you just look at George, I think you would say that’s out of his character a little bit,” Schwartz said, reflecting on the Wilson trade. “Because he’s so much about the draft … he’s like an encyclopedia about people that he didn’t draft.”

Hackett came and went. Wilson’s contract became an albatross. New ownership and a culture-changing new coach arrived at the beginning of 2023. And Paton’s own friends worried privately for him. After an 8-9 season that invited promise in 2023, though, Paton went to a happy hour at Ocean Prime with Mauck, who marveled at the fact that the general manager had stuck around.

“This is gonna sound really bad,” recalled Mauck, who’s now the team dentist for Denver. “But I said, ‘The fact that you still have a job lets you know how good you are at what you do.’

“And I think that’s true. He was able to survive something that a lot of people wouldn’t.”

In those days, Tom Bonds and his wife, Julie, tried to visit Denver and attend games as many times as they could when the “times were the darkest,” as Bonds put it.

“Because,” Bonds said, “it felt like that would signal to him that we’re in this forever. Just like he was with us, as Jimmy was in his last days.”

The Payton partnership

At the time, the Hackett hire made some sense. So did the Wilson trade. So did the Wilson extension, even. All were swings that didn’t connect.

“He took a big swing on Nathaniel Hackett, and you could make – just objectively speaking – you could say that was a swing and a miss,” Rodgers said. “And he took a big swing on Russell Wilson, and at the end of the day … some people would say that was a swing and a miss.

“But I’ll be damned if he didn’t take a swing at Sean Payton,” Rodgers continued, “after those two situations.”

Payton’s arrival brought even more potential instability. Inside the Broncos’ building, as the NFL source recounted to The Post, any player who was a previous Paton draftee was “put under a microscope.” The head coach wasn’t initially sold on 2022 second-round pick Nik Bonitto, for one. And Payton verbalized his frustration over the Wilson deal, the source said, done before his arrival.

Payton, though, had a couple of trusted connection points to Paton in Zimmer — who Payton worked with under Bill Parcells in Dallas in the mid-2000s — and Glazer. Paton trusted in Payton’s ability to build Denver’s locker room. And he didn’t waver, even in private, multiple friends told The Post.

“I knew he was going to win, and I knew the culture he would bring,” Paton told The Post in Indianapolis. “I didn’t feel like I had to prove — I just had to be myself. And just do what I’m doing, and come together, and develop a process together.

“And it wasn’t about me,” Paton added. “We just wanted to win.”

That was made slightly more difficult by the Wilson deal, which impacted how the Broncos shaped their offseason approach. From Payton’s first season in Denver, the Broncos focused on “building this up front,” as former Broncos assistant GM and now-Jets GM Darren Mougey told The Post this week. Denver shelled out over $138 million to bring tackle Mike McGlinchey and guard Ben Powers into the fold in 2023 free agency. Beyond that, their payroll was weighed down under Wilson’s cap number.

“We had to really be decisive in who we were bringing in,” the source with knowledge of the building said. “Because you don’t have room to miss, in that situation.”

Paton arrived every day to work, still, at 6 a.m. Free-agency meetings ran later. Denver let defensive lineman Dre’Mont Jones walk in 2023’s free agency to sign a three-year, $51.3 million deal with the Seahawks. The Broncos instead signed Zach Allen for three years and $45.8 million. He’s become a two-time All-Pro in three years in Denver. The Broncos then found major value in safety Brandon Jones and defensive tackle Malcolm Roach in free agency in 2024.

Paton’s superpower in Minnesota, former GM Spielman recalled, was his ability to relate to all members of the coaching staff. Former Vikings HC Frazier remembered feeling “symbiotic” with Paton, and Paton working to understand what Frazier and the rest of Minnesota’s staff were looking for in defensive talent. Much further into Paton’s career, that same understanding has built with Payton, as the Broncos’ general manager has grown well aware of the player profile (smart, tough) that Payton favors.

“I think he treats it just the way he would any other coach,” Schwartz saidof Paton’s relationship with Payton. “His thinking, at least what he’s told me, is, his job is to — know the coaches. And know, and have real good communication with them on what they need. And then he goes out and executes that.”

The Pa(y)ton relationship, now, is about balance. Payton loves trading up. Paton loves accumulating capital. Payton attracts the spotlight. Paton sits a comfortable distance outside of it.

“He’s the face,” mutual friend Glazer said, of Payton. “And George wants him to be the face. That’s kinda rare.”

Next steps

Recently, Schwartz asked former UCLA buddy Paton what he thought about the Bruins’ hire of new football coach Bob Chesney.

“What do I know,” Paton joked, as Schwartz recalled, “about hiring a coach?”

Jamaal Stephenson, a longtime Vikings personnel staffer, noted that Minnesota’s building “felt different” after Paton took the Denver job in 2021. He brought levity, Stephenson recalled, in a league of serious moments.

“We missed him,” Stephenson said, now a senior personnel executive with the Vikings. “We missed his personality, we missed his evaluating, we missed his friendship.”

Talk around a potential Paton reunion in Minnesota has swirled since the Vikings fired former GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah in late January, with Paton’s original six-year deal in Denver heading into its last season. Several of Paton’s friends who spoke with The Post, though, said the general manager is quite happy in Denver.  And staff who’ve been inside the Broncos’ building believe owner Greg Penner sees the value in Paton’s balance in personality to Payton, as Penner said at an end-of-year news conference he believes their partnership is “complementary.”

“Find me the head coach and the GM tied at the hip, and then you got a chance, you know?” Payton said in January.

Tom Bonds would once go to Empower Field and hear boos rain down from the Broncos’ own fanbase — boos Bonds couldn’t help but think were reflective of Paton, given his seat at the table. The dark times have passed, now.

When Bonds does come to games, he usually rides into Empower Field with Paton. The general manager will park and walk into the stadium, and straight onto the grass, Bonds said.

“Just so that he gets to take it in before the stadium’s filled up, and before the people are there … and just look around and appreciate how far that he’s come,” Bonds said. “And that the Broncos are almost there.”

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