Baby No-fly Zone all grown up
How the Broncos’ Justin Simmons and Will Parks made the jump
Reality had yet to fully set in, but 72 hours after learning he would be the starting strong safety for the Broncos, Justin Simmons stood before Boulder High School’s football team and told the players how this wasn’t supposed to be.
He wasn’t supposed to be taking over for threetime Pro Bowler T.J. Ward, who was released.
He wasn’t supposed to be starring in the Broncos’ No-fly Zone secondary after only a year as a pro.
He wasn’t supposed to be getting paid to do a job he never fully considered three years ago.
“For a small-town kid like me from South Florida to be able to make it,” he began, “you know, growing up I wasn’t the fastest, the strongest, the most athletic. All that stuff I just had to work at.”
After a whirlwind week — and past 18 months, really — the tale seemed hard to believe, but true nonetheless.
Simmons, one of the most athletic defensive backs in the 2016 draft, literally leapt onto the scene with his 40-inch vertical and top finishes in multiple drills at the NFL scouting combine, landed in the lap of the Broncos in the third round of the draft and has exceeded expectations of those football minds who saw his potential.
Simmons has defied his own odds. Maybe others’ too.
Five months ago he and fellow second-year safety Will Parks crowned themselves the Baby Nofly Zone. “We’re still in the works,” Simmons said at the time. But the kids have grown. Simmons is the freshest face on the Broncos’ league-leading pass defense, and Parks is the Broncos’ new starting “dime” linebacker. And since 2013, when their football fates intertwined in a college bowl game, they have shared a spotlight in Denver and together forced the Broncos to clear a path for their continued rise.
“It always comes down to football decisions,” general manager John Elway said. “With the young guys, they were playing well and it really wasn’t anything to do with T.J. It was just the fact that the young guys played well and that was the best football move for us.”
Ready to move up
It was called The Bunker, and for much of his time in college, Simmons and former Boston College defensive coordinator Don Brown could be found there, poring over game film.
There is where the foundation for Simmons’ football teachings were laid.
“Before, I used to just go out there and play. I still did that a little bit in college, but with him, he helped me digest film and really help me to look at what I need to be looking at,” Simmons said. “So now, with these guys, it’s a whole other level.”
When Simmons and Parks arrived in Denver, they soon learned the film was their bible. They watched cornerbacks Chris Harris and Aqib Talib, who relied on the tape to wreck opposing offenses and critique their own play. They learned from Joe Woods, Denver’s former defensive backs coach who was elevated to defensive coordinator this year, how to home in on the film — to know what to look for and how to digest it.
And they asked questions. A lot of questions, picking the brains of Ward and Harris, Talib, Bradley Roby and safety Darian Stewart.
“One of the vets told me, in college, you really just play football, but in the league, you learn football. Obviously it’s not the case for everyone, but I found that to be really true,” Simmons said. “Here, I’m actually learning offenses. I’m learning tendencies. I’m learning offensive coordinators’ likes and dislikes when they’re at a certain yard line on the field; if they’re at the plus or the minus. If it’s second-and-10 or second-and-7. It’s things like that they all know which makes them so successful instead of just going out there and playing the coverage that’s called.”
A glimpse at the Broncos’ recent history with defensive backs reveals these things: They like the smart ones. They like the tough ones. They like the versatile ones, who can cover and hit with the best of them, who can play in high zone and in the box near the line of scrimmage.
And they really like the ones who appreciate the details — the littlest details — on tackles and reads and footwork.
Simmons checked all the boxes, and many more with his play on special teams. Parks did too.
NFL dreams emerge
Taryn Simmons is still coming to grips with this, because a year and a half ago she was planning for a wedding and a life unknown.
On April 1, 2016, she married her high school sweetheart in Stuart, Fla. On April 29, 2016, she watched him slip on an orangeand-blue hat and hop on a plane for Denver, some 2,000 miles from their Fort Lauderdale home.
She would join him two months later, but she had no idea what she was really joining. There’s no handbook for the NFL lifestyle, no road map to guide her as she left friends and family behind.
But then again, the NFL only became a real possibility a year before, during Justin’s junior year at Boston College. He was on track to get his degree in communications to possibly pursue a career in sports broadcasting.
He eyed a life behind the camera, not in front.
“Every guy dreams about (the NFL), but he just didn’t really see it as a reality for himself,” Taryn said. “Then some of his coaches asked, ‘Hey, have you thought about it?’ He put some thought into it, but it was still option B. Some agents reached out to him and that boosted his confidence and we both decided, ‘Hey, why not? Go for it and if it doesn’t work out, we’ll go live a normal life. But if it does, we’ll do it.’ ”
As a senior, Simmons started all 12 games at safety for the nation’s leading defense (254.3 yards allowed per game) and notched 67 total tackles and five interceptions. He played well at the East-west Shrine game, met with Broncos officials informally, then headed for Indianapolis, where he put on one of the most athletic displays in recent years at the NFL combine.
“The thing that’s interesting about Justin is in his college career he played corner and safety,” Woods said. “So you can tell he had that long build like a corner, you could see he had that coverage skill set and the thing I liked about him was, not that he was a knock-back tackler, but he was a very consistent tacker. Then when we went to the combine, his numbers were off the chart.”
The Broncos wanted Simmons, but they masked their true interest. He never visited Denver and never worked out for the team ahead the draft.
But the Broncos needed only seconds on draft night to turn in their card and make their selection of Simmons at No. 98 official.
“You want flexibility at safety in this league,” then-head coach Gary Kubiak said. “Guys have to be able to cover. They have to be able to come down into the box and do those types of things. He’s a very smart young man, so we’ve added a big piece to the puzzle.”
Spotting their potential
Ahead of the 2016 combine, Woods and his future defensive backs coach, Marcus Robertson, had conversations about their future players. Neither knew they would all align months down the road, of course, but their eyes were on Simmons and Parks, the 6-foot-2 hybrid from Boston College and the 6-1 “spur” out of Arizona.
“Getting an opportunity to come over and coach them, I felt like I had a chance to develop two young players into some real high-level defensive backs in the NFL,” said Robertson, a former all-pro safety who played 12 years in the league. “When you look at Justin Simmons, he’s a guy who has an opportunity to be an outstanding safety in this league, given his football IQ and his ability to cover grass, or range, and he has outstanding ball skills. I think Will Parks is a little bit more of a strong safety, he’s able to play in the box, he can play high, has a little more versatility but is a real tough and rugged type of guy.
“The thing you love about those guys is football is important to them and they put in the work and, as you can tell, the results are starting to come.”
Expectations were met last year, when Parks played in all 16 games and Simmons played in 13, starting the last three.
In the last two games of the season, when the Broncos were still in playoff contention, Simmons was called upon as Ward recovered from a concussion. It was an unofficial test, of sorts, and Simmons passed it, tallying two interceptions, three pass breakups and six total tackles in those games, while finishing the season as the only safety in the league without a single missed tackle and at least 200 snaps played, according to Pro Football Focus.
But more than the stats was the versatility that both Simmons and Parks offered. Last year Simmons moved around from safety to corner to dime and back again.
“That’s what we said when we first drafted him: We want to dictate how we play the game defensively, not the offense to dictate to us,” Woods said. “And he gives us the ability to that.”
The decision to release Ward came as a shock to many in the Broncos’ locker room, Simmons and Parks, included. But hints of the changing of the guard have been dropped since that fateful month of April 2016: their playing time as rookies, their extended reps during minicamp and, most recently, their usage in the preseason, when Ward nursed a hamstring injury.
Simmons was used often and in multiple ways, and impressed with his improvement in the box and consistency in coverage.
And it didn’t take long for Parks to read all the signs about their very near future.
“Justin would probably say the same thing — who wouldn’t want to start in the NFL?” Parks said. “Who wouldn’t want to go out there and make plays and be a difference-maker for their defense or their offense or whatever?
“I’m excited. I mean, that’s a rival (the Chargers). Monday night, prime time, only game on TV at that time. It’s time to go out there and make some plays, for real, for real.”
The kids are grown.