A few days before the first game of Jahdae Barron’s NFL career, one of his old coaches sent him a reminder: Your best day will be somebody’s dream.
A month later, Barron is still far away from his best day, as the blue-chip corner has begun his NFL career as a backup.
In Week 1 against the Titans, he played the fewest snaps of any active first-round 2025 draftee outside of Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart. Veteran incumbent Ja’Quan McMillian won the primary nickel job for a third straight year, and it’s tough to earn time in Denver’s secondary, first-round pick or not.
Still, the 23-year-old cornerback recovered the game-sealing fumble against the Titans in Week 1 and carried the football around the locker room postgame like it was his child. He sat at his locker this week with no hint of panic.
“I don’t listen to anybody’s expectations they want from me, or think I should have,” Barron told The Denver Post. “I have a standard for myself, and I’m reaching my standards.
“At the end of the day, it’s a process. And it’s not their life. It’s my life. So I’m just going to keep living how I’ve always been living.”
That’s a tough process, too, for defensive coordinator Vance Joseph. Denver has to play its first-round pick in 2025. Anything else would be fairly unprecedented. But there’s no supplanting Defensive Player of the Year Pat Surtain II at CB1, and Riley Moss just allowed three catches in eight targets as CB2 in Week 1. McMillian sealed the win over the Titans with a strip-sack. The rotation is air-tight.
Joseph, for one, is trying to spin too much of a good thing into just a good thing.
“Sometimes, you can play guys too soon, and you can have too many public failures,” Joseph told reporters Thursday. “And they can’t recover from those. So it’s been a luxury to kind of bring him along slow.”
The Broncos staff is still trying to find in-game reps for Barron in “certain packages,” as Joseph said. The solution for now: a lot of dime with six defensive backs. Barron played 21 reps against Tennessee in his regular-season debut Sunday. Twelve of those came as a fourth CB on the field.
It’s an alignment he’s familiar with, as Joseph’s cousin Terry Joseph — Barron’s secondary coach with the Longhorns — threw him in a bunch of defensive back-heavy looks at Texas.
“Whatever they need, I’m willing to do,” Barron told The Post. “But it’s cool for them to just put me in pieces, and put me in different positions.”
The majority of such looks came on third-and-long situations, with Joseph able to load up in coverage against obvious pass situations for the Titans and rookie quarterback Cam Ward. The fourth quarter, though, provided a four-down tease of this specialty The Death-by-Dime Lineup that Joseph can trot out at any time: Surtain, Moss, McMillian and Barron.
With Tennessee at its 36-yard line with a minute left, Barron lined up in a variety of alignments on a sequence of Ward dropbacks: at off-ball linebacker next to Alex Singleton, dropping back in the box, covering from the slot. He gave Ward a tight window on a third-and-10 incompletion up the seam to tight end Chig Okonkwo.
The Titans went four-and-out and lost. Death-by-Dime successful.
The rookie could easily get a larger slice of the pie Sunday, as the Broncos try to figure out how to contend with Colts rookie tight end Tyler Warren. This would normally be Dre Greenlaw territory. The inside linebacker signed with Denver in free agency for his coverage abilities. But Greenlaw missed practice both Wednesday and Thursday, and the Broncos can’t fully rely on Singleton or Justin Strnad to handle the multifaceted Warren in coverage.
“He’s a special player,” Joseph said. “I mean, the size, the ball skills — I told Sean (Payton), he’s got some Taysom Hill in him.”
The antidote for Warren on Sunday might be Barron in specific spots. Late in the second quarter against the Titans, Joseph subbed the rookie in for Strnad on a third-and-goal. Ward’s first read was to Barron’s slot matchup, receiver Chimere Dike. Barron jammed Dike up, Ward had nowhere to go, and the quarterback ended up taking a sack.
Barron is physical and fast enough to give Warren a challenge. It’s a strange alignment for a first-round pick to be a situational gadget weapon. But this Broncos secondary is far from ordinary.
“As we get into game plan, we’re trying to put him in positions to succeed,” secondary coach Jim Leonhard said of Barron in camp, “because we have a lot of pieces that we really like.”
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