The dog days of the NFL offseason are the perfect time to scour the roster for breakout candidates, cool roster stories, and potential training camp Cinderella stories to watch for. The Denver Broncos have plenty of those, but one of the most interesting characters on the roster going into 2025 is a player who technically already had a bit of a "breakout" in 2024.
Second-year player Dondrea Tillman is one of the least-talked-about players on the team, and for some pretty obvious reasons.
The Broncos saw Nik Bonitto emerge as the team's top pass rusher last year, factoring into the Defensive Player of the Year conversation while earning a Pro Bowl nod as well as second-team All-Pro honors. Jonathon Cooper is fresh off of a contract extension and the most sacks of his NFL career to date.
The Broncos also used a third-round pick on Jonah Elliss last season, a player they apparently had a very high grade on who is expected to make a jump in year two as well.
Tillman, however, played extremely well when given the opportunity and was in the top five among all rookies in the NFL last season with 5.0 sacks. Could he be poised to make a lot more noise at training camp than anyone is really expecting?
Dondrea Tillman could quietly become major pass rush threat in 2025
The Broncos initially signed Tillman out of the UFL last offseason after three really productive years for the Birmingham Stallions. He finished his first NFL season with 5.0 sacks, seven QB hits, and 12 quarterback pressures on just 242 total snaps. He also ended up playing a key role on special teams for the Broncos.
While the team can't ask for much more than that from Tillman, he's not going to sit on his hands and just expect to copy and paste those numbers again in 2025. He wants to be better, and he doesn't get enough credit for his potential progression because he wasn't a high draft pick or a high-profile free agent pickup.
But Tillman is one of those guys who is bound to be catching the eyes of onlookers at Broncos training camp in July. He's got great size, a variety of ways he wins as a pass rusher, he's strong, and he's deceptively quick for a bigger guy off the edge.
Considering he only played in 12 games last season, it's reasonable to expect that we could see Tillman's numbers make a huge jump in 2025 for a unit that already led the NFL in sacks. Head coach Sean Payton stated at the end of the team's mandatory minicamp that they need to be cautious with Nik Bonitto's snap count going forward, stating that he borderline played too much last year.
One guy who can really help with that is Tillman. And the better Tillman plays, the fresher the Broncos can keep a guy like Bonitto. Expect to read and hear about Tillman a lot in the months of July and August. He might be the most quiet breakout candidate off the edge in the league.