PALM BEACH, Fla. — Ask Sean Payton where his team improved most from his first year to his second in Denver, and the list gets long quickly.
Quarterback play is up there. So, too, is just about every defensive metric from sacks to pressures and red zone defense.
Another major change: Payton insisted from the start of 2024 that the group had better leadership and more chemistry.
That manifested in a 10-7, playoff-drought-ending season that took most around the NFL by surprise.
As the Broncos now try to vault into true contention in the AFC, Payton and general manager George Paton sought more of the same in free agency this spring.
After landing a group headlined by tight end Evan Engram, linebacker Dre Greenlaw and safety Talanoa Hufanga, Denver believes it found further upgrades both on the field and in the locker room.
“I was really pleased,” Broncos CEO and owner Greg Penner said Monday. “I thought George and Sean put together a really good plan and executed it well. I think we got better on the field and, frankly, the makeup of the team improved with the guys that we brought in.”
Perhaps nobody knows better what Denver is getting in Greenlaw and Hufanga than San Francisco head coach Kyle Shanahan. Each played his entire career — six seasons for Greenlaw, four for Hufanga — for Shanahan’s 49ers before signing with Denver last month.
“Those are two great players that helped us a ton,” Shanahan said Tuesday morning. “Two great people, two of my favorite guys to work with. It was really tough losing those guys. Denver got two great players and two great people.”
The 49ers wanted Greenlaw back badly enough that Shanahan and general manager John Lynch flew to Texas to try to convince him to return to San Francisco even after he’d verbally agreed to a three-year deal with Denver. Eventually, they outbid the Broncos, too, sources told The Denver Post last month.
Because Greenlaw had been under contract with San Francisco, they could have face-to-face contact with him during the two-day negotiating window while the Broncos could only speak with his agent.
Shanahan said he’d never boarded a plane in such a situation, but that he thought it made sense.
“That was a first. It just worked out that way,” he said. “I would have done that in the past if it came down to it, but when you’re going through the recruiting part of it and he committed to somebody else, we went to see Dre face-to-face. He happened to live in Texas, so it was a little farther than meeting at our facility.
“John and I wanted to fly down there and talk to him and give ourselves one last chance.”
He said they tried to get an extension done for the linebacker earlier, but “there’s negotiating tactics. Also, it’s not just one player at a time. You’re working 20 different things at a time. … Sometimes you see something on Twitter just like you guys saw. And then we’d still like another shot, and we took another shot, and we weren’t able to get it done.”
Said Payton: “I’m just glad when the decision is finalized. You wait on a few of these guys, and you know you don’t know all the specifics. Those guys are excited about being in Denver.”
The former 49ers pair is tasked with solidifying the middle of the Broncos defense. Each has dealt with major injuries in recent years — Hufanga an ACL tear in 2023 and torn wrist ligaments last year, and Greenlaw an Achilles rupture in February 2024 — but if they’re healthy and on the field, Denver expects each to be difference-makers.
Shanahan wouldn’t be surprised, either. His group tried hard to keep Greenlaw, and he raves about Hufanga, too.
“(Hufanga) is just a playmaker,” he said. “The way he communicates back there, he calms the other 10 guys down. He’s really great in the secondary, he’s got great anticipation. When he’s out there flying around, he makes defenses better.”
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