Jonas Griffith is reveling in rediscovery.
The half-hate, half-love grind of training camp. The anticipation before the ball’s snapped and the reaction to what happens next. The joy of hitting somebody. The sting of missing an assignment.
The Broncos inside linebacker has not done any of this for a long time.
In fact, the last time he played in a game was Nov. 13, 2022, at Tennessee. Denver had just returned from a win against Jacksonville in London, and Nathaniel Hackett still had seven weeks left as the Broncos head coach. Griffith was putting together a productive season as a rotational player with Alex Singleton and Josey Jewell.
Then he broke his foot and missed the rest of the year.
Healthy again last summer, he looked primed to contribute but tore his ACL early in training camp. At first, he thought perhaps it was just a tweak.
“When the results came back, I didn’t really know how to react, honestly,” Griffith told The Denver Post this week. “Football, I care about it so much. Just being without it for a whole year when you’ve trained all offseason and you go to sleep early, you eat the right things, you’re training your butt off. And when it’s gone you’re kind of like — you have an identity crisis, if you will. You’re just like, what do I do with myself? What’s my worth? That was kind of tough for me.”
Now, Griffith is back again for training camp. If he’s apprehensive about staying healthy, it doesn’t show.
The 27-year-old out of Indiana State is vying for a starting job in a competition with Cody Barton and rookie Levelle Bailey. Listed at 6-foot-4 and 250 pounds, Griffith said he’s added muscle but has dropped about five pounds total over the course of his rehab.
“There have been several (plays made) during camp, and he’s in the thick of that competition right now,” head coach Sean Payton said of Griffith last week. “So it’s good to see him outside. I’ve seen a lot of him inside. By no fault of his own, but you know he’s someone that’s worked extremely hard to get back in this position.”
Griffith is working his way back into shape. He’s trying to make the roster, win a job, get back to being a potential impact player. His absence was so extended, though, that sometimes it’s not easy to keep clean track of what each waypoint should be or when he should arrive at the next one.
“It’s really different because I haven’t played in so long,” he said. “I’m trying to push myself every day to get into as much game shape as possible, get used to the physicality of it and things like that. I feel like the coaches do a good job of pushing us. But I think the biggest thing for me is it’s me versus me every day. I’m just pushing myself and if you do that every day and you fight the man in the mirror every day to be better than you were the day before, there’s no limits to what you can do.
“That’s the biggest thing for me is trying to be better than I was the day before and correcting things that I didn’t do right the day before.”
One thing he has realized: Tendencies don’t disappear even after 15 months. He finds himself thinking similarly, reacting similarly. Playing similarly. And that comes with a powerful affirmation.
“I was injured, but I don’t think I lost who I was as a player,” Griffith said. “I’m still physical, I’m fast, I can run around and bring energy. It’s kind of cool to be out here again and to just be myself again. There was a part of me that I kind of shunned off for a year and now I can just run around at recess with the kids again.
“It’s really fun. I missed that part of me.”
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Originally Published: August 8, 2024 at 2:20 p.m.
