Broncos’ pairing of GM George Paton, HC Sean Payton enters critical second season: “It feels like we’re rolling”

George Paton stepped to the microphone on a sunny March day in central Florida and did his best to sell the eye roll.

A few hours earlier, head coach Sean Payton met with reporters and just happened to mention that the Broncos had worked out Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy not long before. Payton laid out how the day went. After McCarthy finished his pro day workout, Denver sent him materials, tested him the next morning, then worked him out and took him to dinner.

Paton later told reporters he wasn’t going to talk about details of the team’s quarterback visits.

“I’m glad Sean told everyone,” Paton said. “But (McCarthy)’s a very nice young man.”

Payton’s dalliance into detail about McCarthy smelled like a smokescreen at the time — especially considering there’d been a persistent rumor tying him to the Michigan quarterback in the month or so between the NFL combine and March’s spring ownership meetings — and it turned out to be just that. By late March the Broncos had already been to Oregon to work out Bo Nix, too, and Payton came away smitten.

The important part of all this is whether Payton, Paton and the Broncos got the quarterback call right. Another interesting layer, though, is that the spring put the coach and general manager on the same plane and in the same car extensively on the quarterback roadshow in addition to their normal, extensive joint film work in the pre-draft process.

“It’s been great,” Paton said then. “Sean and I have a really good relationship. We talk, I don’t know how many times a day. … We’ve been on the road. It’s always fun, as you can probably imagine.”

Paton’s added this bit to the routine during his relatively small set of news conferences where he’ll throw a little zinger at Payton, who is himself notoriously unafraid of delivering such lines.

Before the draft, Payton made a comment about a podcast he’d heard Bill Belichick on and a Netflix series about the Manhattan Project. Not long after, the usually straight-laced general manager noted he “probably doesn’t listen to as many podcasts as Sean does, but it’s good to have a pulse of the league.”

After Denver traded up early on the third day of the draft to land Oregon receiver Troy Franklin at the top of the fourth round, Paton said he knew Payton really wanted to make the move because the coach usually sleeps in but this time had texted him early in the morning.

“I knew when I got a text at 6 a.m. that said ‘Let’s get this player’ that we had to figure this one out,” Paton said.

The quips and jokes are in some ways trivial. But these are the men tasked with trying to jump-start the Broncos after eight straight seasons outside the playoffs. The better they work together, the better the Broncos’ chances. They each report directly to owner and CEO Greg Penner, meaning neither makes the decision on the other’s long-term fate with the franchise.

Really, though, this is the reality in the NFL: Wins often make the final decision clear one way or another. Paton, the fourth-year general manager, knows it. Payton, the second-year head coach, knows it.

They indicate regularly that their football brains are wired in similar ways, even though their personalities couldn’t be more different.

Now, the question is if this pairing has staying power.

“Just the day-to-day, it takes a bit to get into a groove,” Paton said. “GM-head coach or GM-owner. It just takes a bit. It was good from the start but now it feels like, man, the partnership is really good. With player personnel, the coaching staff, really everybody.

“It feels like we’re rolling.”

George Paton’s GM tenure

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