In February, they ran into each other in the House that Prime Built, two ships that could’ve just passed in the Colorado night.
A couple weeks before the Buffaloes began spring practices, ex-Colorado defensive coordinator Robert Livingston ventured south to interview as the Broncos’ defensive passing-game coordinator. He was particularly “excited,” as Colorado offensive coordinator Brennan Marion recalled to The Denver Post, about the prospect of coaching Denver’s 2025 first-round cornerback Jahdae Barron. A day later, Livingston was back in the Buffs’ building in Boulder.
There, walking in around noon, was Barron — there to catch up with Marion, who was the receivers coach at Texas in 2022 while Barron was a junior cornerback.
“The synergy of them two just meeting at the same time — being right there, right after (Livingston) was at the interview the day before — sometimes, God just syncs things up that way,” Marion said.
Barron talked ball with Marion and cousin Naeten Mitchell, a safety who recently transferred to Colorado. He ventured into the Buffs’ secondary room, too, to break down tape. And eventually, as Marion recounted, he and Livingston wandered off to go watch film together.
Barron stayed until 8 p.m.
“I haven’t met a person yet who doesn’t like Jahdae,” Marion said. “I mean, he’s kinda like a quarterback from that standpoint, where — he has that infectious personality.
“So him and Rob hit it off pretty easy, pretty quick.”
Colorado defensive coordinator Robert Livingston looks on in the second half of an NCAA college football game against Iowa State, Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Boulder, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
Shortly thereafter, the Broncos officially hired Livingston to replace the departed Jim Leonhard. It marked a professional reunion with Denver DC Vance Joseph, who Livingston worked with in Cincinnati in 2014 and 2015. It also marked a new figure in Barron’s development. And the development of their relationship will shape one of the most important questions awaiting the Broncos in 2026 and beyond: how can Denver extract first-round value from its 2025 first-round pick?
Finding a fit in a crowded secondary room
None of the dozens of Barron’s friends and family watching the NFL Draft last year, as his old high school coach Jason Cecil said, expected the Broncos to be the team to call in the first round. Denver — a team with established starters at every cornerback spot — simply felt he was the best player available, and took him “out of a place of luxury,” as Leonhard recounted to The Post.
Barron, according to data reviewed by The Denver Post, played the fewest percentage of his team’s regular-season defensive snaps (30%) of any first-round defensive rookie in 2025, when active. He played just 17 snaps combined in two playoff games.
“He was obviously upset,” Marion said of Barron, “from the standpoint that, he wanted to have a better year.”
Leonhard’s greatest challenge with Barron in his first NFL season, as the ex-Broncos coach told The Post last summer, was getting the rookie to actually turn his brain off. To understand his assignment at nickel — sometimes fitting a run gap, sometimes checking a tight end, sometimes fluid until a play developed — and stay within that. Read. React. Don’t cheat and try to apply learned collegiate tendencies to the NFL game.
At times, Barron looked like the instinctive ballhawk he was advertised to be; at times, he also looked like a 2001 iMac desktop trying to process five billion lines of code before triggering a decision.
Denver’s staff anticipated this, yo-yoing Barron between nickel and outside assignments from the start of his rookie camp.
“The vision was, he’s going to come in and challenge,” Leonhard, now the Bills’ defensive coordinator, told The Post this week. “But it wasn’t this, like — ‘There is a glaring hole in our secondary that he has to fill.’ We just thought he complemented the room great, and we were going to be able to create ways where he can impact games as he’s growing into what his eventual every-down-player role is going to be in that system, and the NFL.”
Entering Year Two, though, the Broncos need to solidify where Barron’s strengths fit best, both for his own development and for the future of their secondary. CB2 Riley Moss is entering the last year of his contract. So is Ja’Quan McMillian. Barron may well have a better shot at competing with Moss at outside cornerback in camp, but the organization has expressed a mixed view of his abilities there.
Head coach Sean Payton said multiple times last season that the Broncos view Barron as a nickel “with outside flex.” Lynch, meanwhile, pounded the table to Denver brass in the pre-draft process in 2025 that Barron could play outside corner in the NFL. Leonhard said this week, too, that he felt Barron proved in 2025 he could “be an every-down player on the outside.” But both Lynch and Leonhard are gone.
Enter Livingston, now, who has a decade-long track record back in Cincinnati of developing young secondary talent in veteran-laden rooms — as the Bengals had a habit of drafting a cornerback “every other year,” former Cincinnati defensive coordinator Paul Guenther recalled.
“I’m sure he can teach (Jahdae) how to play the position a little more instinctually,” Marion said. “The thought process of, ‘OK, they’re in 13-personnel, it’s 3rd-and-3, this is what plays are coming.’ Or, ‘They’re in 11-personnel, 3rd-and-8, this is what plays are coming.’
“And they’ll be able to play a little bit faster, with the knowledge that Rob has.”
Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce runs after catching a pass as Denver Broncos cornerback Jahdae Barron (23) defends during the first half an NFL football game Sunday, Nov. 16, 2025, in Denver. (AP Photo/Jack Dempsey)
An up-and-down rookie year
The 24-year-old Barron’s motivation has never been in doubt, and comes from one primary source. In the fifth grade, he helped his mother, Techonia Davis, chuck Austin-American Statesman bundles out of a Chevy Trailblazer on her paper route. Slightly older, he and his siblings manned the nacho station and barbecue pits with their mother at a local baseball-field concession stand. In the eighth grade, he told Davis he’d retire her one day, and he meant it.
“I just know the kid that he is – the faith-based kid that he is, how hungry he is to prove and take care of his mom and all of this stuff that he has to do and he’s responsible for — I know he’s going to get it done,” Marion told The Post last week. “The hard part is knowing, will he be able to get it done there, because of the talent in the room?”
Pat Surtain II is, well, Pat Surtain II. McMillian had a career year at nickel. Moss tied for the most-penalized cornerback in the league in 2025 (12) but also led the league in passes defensed (19). Barron vacillated between playing deep in situational dime packages, fitting run gaps as a veritable off-ball linebacker in big-nickel packages, covering tight ends man-to-man, and even started a game at safety.
During one conversation last year, Leonhard reminded Barron that Surtain, who came out of Alabama at the No. 9 overall pick in 2021, actually didn’t start in Week 1 of his 2021 rookie year. And Leonhard would confirm to Barron, from the staff’s side, that there was no frustration with his development.
But there was frustration, of course, from Barron’s own standpoint, a player who Leonhard said has “extremely high standards of himself.”
In a Week 11 win over the Chiefs, the rookie cornerback turned in his best game of the year: four tackles, a pick-six that was called back, and a few reps of excellent coverage on Kansas City legend Travis Kelce. A few days later, Barron posted an Instagram story poking fun at Kelce’s even-more-legendary fiancee: “Tell swift (sic) put me on a song RIGHT NOW.” His confidence was soaring. Temporarily.
Two weeks later, Barron called Marion one late night after a sloppy Broncos overtime win over the Commanders.
“One week he’s riding high and thinks like, ‘Man, I’m killing it,’” Marion said. “And the next week, he’s like, ‘Damn, Coach — I messed up on this situation, I messed up here, I was supposed to be on this guy.’”
A film review of that Barron performance showed no real glaring errors, in his 24 snaps against Washington. He was a step too slow on a couple routes covering tight end Zach Ertz. He took a poor angle on a first-down scramble by Commanders quarterback Marcus Mariota. He communicated well on multiple other snaps, and nearly jumped a route for a would-be game-sealing pick in overtime. But Barron played more than 40% of Denver’s snaps in just one more game (Week 17 against Kansas City) the rest of the season.
“In no way was it a punishment thing — like, ‘He wasn’t doing what we asked him to do,’” Leonhard said, asked about Barron’s declining snaps down the stretch. “Just plays out sometimes, when you’re not a starter, that way.”
Barron, the 2024 Thorpe Award winner as the best defensive back in collegiate football, is not cursing circumstance. He is of the mentality, as Marion described, to shape his own results.
“From a parent situation, you want your kid to be on a great team sometimes, just to see what greatness looks like,” Marion said. “And they can match that, and then it takes their game to a whole new level. So, I think that’s what that did for him, right? Seeing, like, ‘I can’t make a mistake. These guys aren’t making any. I can’t slip up. I have to be on point at all times.’”
“He took that as a challenge. He didn’t take that as a crutch, or crippling his development. He’s taking that as like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna prove it.’”
Barron, Marion said, respects Joseph, who’s repeatedly gushed about Barron to The Post. By proxy, Marion added, Barron will respect Livingston, who worked with Joseph in coaching Cincinnati’s defensive backs in 2014 and 2015. Many of Joseph’s current defensive principles — disguising blitzers indistinguishably from players dropping back into coverage — are similar to what Cincinnati did a decade ago, under defensive coordinator Guenther. And the “roots” of Livingston’s defenses for the last two seasons at Colorado, Guenther told The Post, are the same.
Upon arriving to Colorado, Livingston organized a turnaround from one of the worst defenses in the FBS in 2023 to a top-45 unit in 2024. Colorado slumped back to 112th in the country in opponent points-per-game in a 3-9 season in 2025. But he leaves the building with high marks from head coach Deion Sanders, one of the best corners in the history of the NFL.
“I feel like, he knows, inside, what he’s done with this program,” Sanders said. “Sometimes, we get caught up in numbers, and statistics, and not understanding personnel and knowledge and what he brought to this program. He brought a lot.”
Colorado defensive coordinator Robert Livingston, center, confers with safety RJ Johnson, left, and defensive end Arden Walker in the second half of a game against Cincinnati Saturday, Oct. 26, 2024, in Boulder, Colo. AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
A track record of molding young talent
In February, Barron met former Bengals cornerback Darqueze Dennard for the second time at the annual Thorpe Award banquet in Oklahoma City. They’d first chatted a year before, when Barron took the stage himself to accept the trophy. The circumstances, this time around, were rather different.
Dennard offered a shred of advice.
“I told him, he’s just gotta trust them,” Dennard said, speaking on Denver’s staff. “They’re mad scientists, what they’re doing. Just put the work in, and all the rest of the stuff gon’ play out how it’s supposed to.”
He would know. 11 years before Barron, there was Dennard, who was drafted late in 2014’s first round by Cincinnati after a Thorpe Award-winning senior season at Michigan State. Guenther and Joseph shifted Dennard from outside corner to nickel to eventually supplant aging veteran Leon Hall. It was not easily received.
Livingston, as Dennard recounted, was a constant support, then in his first year as a staffer after spending a couple years in Cincinnati’s scouting department.
“He saw more into me than I did, at the time,” Dennard said. “I just kinda wanted to be on my island, X-out this player, and be done with it for the day. Where, he wanted me to come in and actually be able to impact football games.”
Livingston has a track record of molding young talent trying to prove themselves, as Dennard pointed out. The Bengals took Houston cornerback William Jackson III, who played four years in Cincinnati, in the fourth round of 2016’s draft. Livingston also keyed in on future All-Pro safety Jessie Bates III in 2018, as former Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis recalled.
There’s a pattern to Denver’s approach, in retooling their defensive staff. The Broncos also brought on former USC secondary coach Doug Belk in a defensive-backs role, a one-time rising collegiate name who served as Houston’s primary defensive coordinator from 2021 to 2023. Belk’s strength as a position coach, as former Houston defensive-line coach Brian Early told The Post, falls in developing technique.
“Like, I don’t know how much he can help a 10-year vet,” Early said. “But a young one that he’s able to get his hands on and that hasn’t quite had that breakout year yet — I think you’ll see a tremendous difference in whoever the previous guy was, and how Doug is able to bring those guys along.”
Those development-focused hires, then, will set up a fascinating positional battle between three younger cornerbacks vying for two starting spots — and long-term futures in Denver. The 25-year-old McMillian is playing this season on a one-year, $5.8 million tender, and is currently set to hit unrestricted free agency in 2027. The 26-year-old Moss is on the final year of his rookie deal.
The Broncos got plenty of glimpses last season of Barron in big-nickel units, and saw him play heavier snaps outside midseason when Surtain was sidelined with a pec injury. And the rising second-year corner has a chance, this spring and summer, to make it easy for Denver to decide whether to pay McMillian or Moss long-term.
“There is learning in the NFL, but nothing’s going to be new this year that he (doesn’t) already know,” Leonhard said. “But he did prove last year, he can be an every-down player on the outside, just as much as he can play on the inside and be a nickel and dime.”
At this year’s Thorpe ceremony, too, Barron and Dennard — men of faith — bonded over Proverbs 27:17, talking about Barron’s future.
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
“Get better with your sword, get better with your crown,” Dennard said. “And that was his mindset.”
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