How Broncos WR Troy Franklin started ‘stopping like a Tesla’ en route to Week 2 breakout

At first, when Jonny Bridgewater suggested his two millionaire clients play red light-green light, Troy Franklin and JL Skinner looked at the man like he was insane.

Bridgewater, a longtime movement specialist at Kula Sports Performance, is “cool,” Franklin said. But definitely interesting, the Broncos receiver added. The trainer is an enigma, a self-described neuroscientist who spends as much time explaining the brain’s gamma waves as he does the body’s muscle fibers.

He identified Franklin’s main issue right away, when they began working together this spring.

“He’s always been a cannon,” Bridgewater said. “But I felt like Troy was a cannon on a canoe. Because he didn’t have that stability that he needed to basically shoot the explosivity that he had.”

Franklin may not describe himself as a cannon. But he knew this concept held him back in a quiet rookie season, the former Oregon standout showing nothing close to the same chemistry he’d had with Bo Nix as a Duck. When he sat with Sean Payton for year-end meetings after a 263-yard 2024, Payton told Franklin he wanted him to work on his deceleration.

“He talks about having Tesla starts,” Franklin said, “and stopping like a Tesla.”

A year later, Franklin is stopping fast. Faster than ever. The receiver’s Payton-predicted leap materialized throughout camp and preseason and has sprouted wings early in 2025 after a career-best eight catches for 89 yards in the Broncos’ loss Sunday.

The 6-foot-3 receiver’s improved deceleration showed most obviously in a star-making second-quarter drive, when Franklin caught four balls, including a 42-yard heave from Nix. It showed more quietly on one third-quarter grab. Franklin caught a short pass and turned it into a 9-yard gain after simply absorbing and discarding contact from a Colts defender.

And at the heart of Franklin’s deceleration is Bridgewater and this funky offseason work. The receiver shot his trainer a text after a two-touchdown preseason performance in August.

“The work is working,” Franklin wrote.

One day, as Franklin brought along Skinner to train at Kula, Bridgewater brought out a medicine band. Both players, the trainer noted, had natural burners. But they couldn’t stop on a dime. It cost Franklin separation on his routes in his rookie year, the receiver said. It cost Skinner tackling angles when he realized he couldn’t position his body the right way.

So Bridgewater introduced this red light-green light drill, modeled after the kids’ playground game. Franklin would tug on a pair of straps, the band dangling behind him. Skinner would grab the other end of the band, almost like a carriage to a horse. The two would have to sprint in tandem when Bridgewater yelled “green light!” — and suddenly stop when he shouted red.

This was not initially received well.

“They were just kinda looking at me, like ‘Are we five?’” Bridgewater remembered.

As with most of his drills, though, the rationale made sense to Franklin once Bridgewater explained it. The game taught him how to better absorb force. To plant. To drive into the turf.

“Lightning generates in the core of the earth,” Bridgewater said. “But you see it in the sky. So if we don’t generate the power from the ground up, you won’t be seen in the sky at all.”

It worked for Skinner. When asked if all this paid off, the safety grinned and pointed out he’d made the 53-man roster for the first time in his Broncos career. And it worked for Franklin, who Skinner said took so naturally to the deceleration work that the safety tried to copy him.

Franklin’s Week 2 performance was on the horizon a mile away to anyone inside the Broncos’ building since May. The receiver added visible muscle in the offseason in an effort to improve his physicality at the top of his route. And he’d do what Bridgewater called “death drop-off” box jumps, trying to build elasticity in his lower body.