In the 18 months since Sean Payton’s hire as Broncos head coach, Denver has sometimes been dubbed New Orleans West.
Payton had so many years and so much history with the Saints that he figured to bring along several coaches and players with whom he shared history.
The extent of that migration has been perhaps even greater than anticipated. There are double-digit coaches who either coached with or played for Payton in the Bayou on Denver’s 2024 staff and a handful of former Saints added to the roster over last year and this summer, too.
This offseason, the Broncos also made a key front-office hire from New Orleans in new vice president of player personnel Cody Rager. He paired with former Stanford head coach and new senior personnel executive David Shaw as new additions to general manager George Paton’s front office in recent months.
Rager was seen as a rising figure in the Saints’ front office and immediately becomes an interesting figure in Denver because of his role and also because of his history with Payton. The pair spent seven years together, and Payton called Rager maybe the Saints’ best talent evaluator, saying earlier this offseason he’s “someone who I think is really good.”
He’s not the only one who believes that.
“He was a big part, really, of what was going on with the draft in New Orleans,” Carmichael, who spent 18 years with the franchise, told The Post. “(Assistant general manager and college scouting director) Jeff Ireland ran the draft, but Cody was his right-hand man sitting next to him. Cody, his experience, his knowledge, his ability to evaluate, and he’s not afraid to share his opinion, whether it’s the same as somebody else or different.”
Rager was hired in late January, just as the Broncos’ front office was kicking into high gear on the collegiate all-star game front. One of his first stops was the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., along with several of Denver’s scouts. Among the players in that game: quarterback Bo Nix and cornerback Kris Abrams-Draine, whom the Broncos drafted in the first and fifth rounds, respectively.
“It was a critical hire for them,” Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy told The Post. “These coaches and even the GMs — George, most GMs don’t have time to watch a ton of college tape in the fall. They really don’t. So to have somebody, if you’re Sean Payton, that you have history with — it’s nothing against anybody in Denver on the staff, they’ve got really good people in that personnel department — but it’s just the trust factor.
“When Cody goes to Sean, ‘Hey, you’ve got to look at this guy. He’s just like so-and-so we had in New Orleans,’ that carries weight. It gives Sean a peace of mind, and you’re the organization or you’re the ownership group and you’ve got a hire that gives your head coach peace of mind, make the hire. To me, that’s an easy one.
“Losing Cody in New Orleans, that was a loss for the Saints. He does a great job and that was a big win for Denver.”
Paton said he likes Rager’s “conviction,” and clearly he’s honed the ability over a decade as a scout to find players that fit particular roles within Payton’s system.
“He has a great eye for talent,” Payton said. “He probably, in my opinion, was our best evaluator in New Orleans relative to college players. … There’s the old term, you evaluate the evaluators. Over time, then, you begin to build a resume, positively or negatively. So he was one where, probably, if you looked at the middle rounds — if you just did, ‘Hey take the second through the sixth rounds in a 10-year stretch there and just look at the data there’ — (he rated highly).
“I don’t care who it was we read (reports on), I would turn to Cody and if he hadn’t seen him, I would want to make sure he saw him.”
Shaw, of course, brings a different perspective. The former Stanford head coach has been around most of training camp for Denver. Paton said he brings unique insight given the success he had at the collegiate level and the NFL talent he identified from a young age, early in the recruiting process. Now he’s trying, for the first time, to channel that experience into a personnel role at the professional level.
“We have a good group. I think Cody adds. I think David Shaw brings a different perspective, from a coaching perspective,” Paton said. “David Shaw has built really good teams. He’s a team-builder. He’s recruited a lot of NFL players to Stanford. Not easy. Bringing in guys like that with different perspectives adds to the group.
“We’re not getting stale.”
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Originally Published: September 1, 2024 at 5:45 a.m.
