ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Jeff Hulme was among the millions of Americans on Saturday who watched from afar as the Denver Broncos defeated the Buffalo Bills in overtime of a thrilling divisional round playoff game.
He watched Broncos quarterback Bo Nix lead a go-ahead drive in the fourth quarter and then author the game-winning march in overtime. He watched as Nix was interviewed on the field and then walked toward the tunnel, raising his arms to an adoring crowd. Then, Hulme went about his business.
So the longtime high school football coach in Texas was plenty surprised when he received a text message shortly thereafter from one of his former assistants.
Hey, the best scout team quarterback in Texas is about to start the AFC Championship Game.
Broncos coach Sean Payton delivered the stunning news, about an hour after Saturday’s game ended, that Nix had suffered a broken bone in his ankle on the final drive and was scheduled for surgery that would end his season. It meant Jarrett Stidham, the 29-year-old backup, would be starting against the New England Patriots in his first career playoff game, a berth in the Super Bowl on the line.
“Stiddy’s ready,” Payton declared.
It immediately took Hulme, in his mind, to a time nearly 10 years earlier, when Stidham was a quarterback without a home. It was the fall of 2016 and he had left Baylor months earlier following the firing of head coach Art Briles amid an investigation into the program’s handling of a sexual assault scandal. This was before the free-transfer era that exists today, so rather than burn a year of eligibility while playing at an FCS school or a junior college, or redshirt at a new FBS program, Stidham decided to sit out the season and work out on his own as he awaited a chance to start at a new major-conference program the following spring.
Life after Baylor saw Jarrett Stidham working with a high school team until he could resume his college career. (Tim Heitman / Imagn Images)
Only Stidham couldn’t handle the solitude. No amount of games he watched or workouts he did with a trainer could satiate his desire to play football.
So twice a week, the quarterback would hop in his pickup truck and point the tires toward Midway High School in Waco.
“I knew Jarrett through a mutual friend, and he said, ‘Can he come throw a little bit?’” said Hulme, Midway’s head coach at the time. “I said, ‘Sure.’ So I met with Jarrett, and I said, ‘Hey, I can’t give you any equipment, but bring your own helmet and shoulder pads and you can come out here and throw with our receivers and be the scout-team quarterback and go against our defense.’”
The scene may as well have been a precursor to Chad Powers, Eli Manning’s undercover quarterback character, who brings a pro’s arm to a college campus. On Stidham’s first day practicing with Midway, players walked to the field from the locker room and saw a 6-foot-2, 200-plus-pound quarterback who was “zipping the ball in a way you definitely don’t see in high school,” Hulme said.
“A couple of my quarterbacks were saying, ‘I’m never going to get to play because of this guy,’” the coach added. “At some point, he took his helmet off to get a drink of water or something, and they’re like, ‘Hey, that’s the Baylor guy.’ There was some relief.”
That anonymous fall in central Texas could be viewed as a microcosm of Stidham’s career — or at least the portion of it that took place before this week. His journey toward the national-stage moment he’ll have Sunday has taken place largely behind the scenes. His teams have played in 121 regular-season and playoff games since he entered the NFL as a fourth-round pick of the Patriots in 2019. Stidham has started only four of those. He has never thrown a pass in the playoffs. From Tom Brady to Russell Wilson, he has played behind quarterbacks who have been named to the Pro Bowl a combined 33 times. Every year Stidham has been in the NFL, the QB1 in front of him has started at least 15 games.
The door had simply never swung open.
“I guess it was kind of ironic, just speaking with his agent” before free agency last spring, Patriots coach Mike Vrabel said. “They’re like, ‘Well, if you don’t want your starter to get hurt, sign Jarrett.’”
As close friend and Broncos right tackle Mike McGlinchey put it: “Stiddy has been waiting for this moment for the entirety of his career.”
One year after his scout-team work at Midway, Stidham was the starting quarterback at Auburn as the team entered a daunting period of its SEC schedule with its eyes on a berth in the conference championship game. First up were the second-ranked and undefeated Georgia Bulldogs. They were to be followed two weeks later by the No. 1 and also unblemished Alabama Crimson Tide. As the quarterback prepared for what at that point were the biggest football games of his life, Wilson Appleton just remembered how unbothered he was by it all.
“He just handled the dynamics of the room really well,” said Appleton, a redshirt quarterback on that 2017 Auburn team. “That showed up at moments like that in the football building. He could just make everyone laugh and (relax). … And then, obviously, when we got on the field, the talent was there. In those games against Georgia and Alabama, it felt like he didn’t miss.”
Stidham completed 73 percent of his passes in back-to-back conference victories against two of the nation’s best defenses. He accounted for five touchdowns in those wins and ran for 51 yards in the Iron Bowl victory against the Crimson Tide.
“He was put in a lot of high-pressure moments because we were playing for a shot to go play in the SEC Championship Game,” said Appleton, who later in his career backed up Nix at Auburn. “It may not be as big of a scale as the NFL, but in Alabama, it’s as big of a scale as there is in college football. He just has a lot of those same traits that those big-game performers have, just an enormous amount of confidence in those moments.”
Stidham and the Tigers lost the rematch to Georgia in the SEC title game, but that two-game stretch helped put Stidham on the NFL map. After finishing his college career with a five-touchdown performance in a bowl game victory over Purdue in 2018, the Patriots drafted Stidham with their fourth-round pick the following spring. That put him in a quarterback room with Brady during the future Hall of Famer’s final season in New England and Josh McDaniels, the offensive coordinator at the time who serves in that role now under Vrabel.
“I’m very appreciative of New England for giving me a shot in this league and drafting me,” Stidham said Wednesday. “There are still front-office guys who were there when I was there. I’ve only had two play-callers in my life, Sean and Josh, so I’m super appreciative of them for sure, but I’m just really fired up for this opportunity and the guys in this locker room.”
Jarrett Stidham’s NFL career started as an understudy for Tom Brady. (Douglas DeFelice / Imagn Images)
The Patriots brought in Cam Newton as a stopgap starter in 2020. They drafted Mac Jones in the first round in 2021. Stidham’s opportunities were largely limited to training camp, the preseason and spot appearances late in blowouts. But when McDaniels was looking for depth at quarterback during his first season as the head coach of the Raiders in 2022, Stidham was his first choice, and he dealt a seventh-round pick to acquire him.
Stidham may have been a backup, but he was no wallflower.
“I got to go against him practice all the time because he was the scout-look quarterback, and we got into it all the time,” Raiders All-Pro pass rusher Maxx Crosby said this week on an episode of the “Let’s Go” podcast. “Because I can’t help myself, I’m hitting the backup quarterbacks all the time. … Stidham, the one thing I respected the most about him is that he didn’t back down whatsoever. He was talking s— back to me. I was like, ‘OK, I like this guy. I know I can go in the foxhole with him and he’s going to fight back.’”
Crosby’s impression was solidified when Stidham made his first career NFL start in Week 17 of the 2022 season after the Raiders benched Derek Carr. Stidham threw for 365 yards and three touchdowns in an overtime loss against a San Francisco 49ers team that ranked first that season in total defense and scoring defense.
The flashes in that game helped make Stidham a priority signing for Payton when he took over the Broncos’ job in 2023. He called the quarterback an “ascending player” who was “quietly, an important signing for us.”
The 2024 offseason brought a quarterback competition between Stidham and Nix, selected 12th in that spring’s draft. Stidham was pained when he was told the job was going to Nix, but the competition only strengthened his resolve.
“I know I’m a starting quarterback in this league,” he said. “I have zero doubts about that. It just didn’t shake out my way. I know what kind of player I am and the person I am. I’ll be ready to go if I need to be.”
The disappointment didn’t impact how Stidham showed up for Nix during the quarterback’s rookie season. He created a Thursday night tradition where the quarterbacks and their significant others would gather to enjoy a cooked or catered dinner, watch “Thursday Night Football” and generally unwind from the pressures of a given week. Appleton visited Stidham and Nix, his two former teammates at Auburn, during OTAs last season. He was struck by how little had changed in the way Stidham interacted with everyone around him.
“Getting to watch the dynamic of their room and them practicing together, and then talking with them afterward, they were just big supporters of each other,” Appleton said. “That helps in a moment like this, because with Bo going down and having two guys in that room who have an extreme amount of confidence not only in their own ability, but are also big supporters of each other, a team rallies around that.”
Jarrett Stidham and Bo Nix have built a strong rapport in their two seasons together. (Isaiah J. Downing / Imagn Images)
Stidham, the past two seasons, has also often served as the locker room D.J., carrying around a giant boombox that blasts out tunes of all genres. Stidham, a self-professed “vibes guy,” named the stereo Mr. Turtle. But when Payton was asked earlier this season about the good-time vibes Stidham delivered for the quarterbacks’ room, the veteran coach made clear there was a different reason the team had signed Stidham to two different free-agent contracts.
“Man, forget how they’ve been in the room,” Payton said of Stidham and third-string quarterback Sam Ehlinger, who will be the backup to Stidham in Sunday’s game. “They’re really good players. That’s most important. You can be the greatest guy in the room, but if you can’t play, then you just got to be the greatest guy in someone else’s room.”
Now, Stidham is at the front of the room, a starting quarterback for a team one win away from the Super Bowl. A sold-out Empower Field at Mile High will be a long way from the empty practice field in Waco, but in many ways, little has changed for Stidham since earning the unofficial title as the greatest scout-team quarterback in Texas. Payton expects the quarterback to “rip it,” just like Stidham did when he was helping a high school defense get ready for Friday nights.
“I’ve prepared every single week like I am the starter,” Stidham said. “Obviously, it just hasn’t been that way. My preparation hasn’t changed one bit … At the end of the day, it’s still football.”