Just days before the start of the 2025 NFL season, the Denver Broncos' front office and Nik Bonitto reached a four-year contract extension worth up to $120 million. At the time, some Broncos fans were on the fence about this signing, contemplating whether Bonitto would live up to such a steep contract.
Fast forward to just five games into the 2025 season, and the Broncos' front office seems to have nabbed yet another steal in Nik Bonitto. Compared to the other elite pass rushers across the league, Nik Bonitto is playing on the cheap.
Myles Garrett, T.J. Watt, and Micah Parsons all have contracts with an annual average value of over $40 million per season. Bonitto's yearly average salary ranks tenth among the NFL's top pass rushers, but his production is leading the league.
Nik Bonitto quickly proving Broncos' front office right with his dominant start in 2025
Bonitto is the AFC's reigning defensive player of the week and is on track to be one of the top candidates for defensive player of the year for the second year in a row. Bonitto's best season was in 2024, where he totaled 13.5 sacks, scored two touchdowns, and changed the outlook on a couple of games.
Topping that kind of season will be difficult, but Bonitto is off to a blazing start with seven sacks through the Broncos' first five games of the 2025 season. From a contractual standpoint, the Denver Broncos have two incredible values with Bonitto and 2024's defensive player of the year, Patrick Surtain II.
If Nik Bonitto. If he maintains his current pace, he could break the single-season sack record with 24 sacks. While it's worth noting that Bonitto will have an additional game to achieve this record, it is nonetheless an impressive accomplishment.
Another eye-popping statistic from Bonitto's incredible start, he leads the league in quick pressure rate, at 17.4%. Leading by a wide margin, the second-highest percentage for quick pressure rate is just 11.2%. Bonitto is second in the league with quick pressures, not just quick pressure rate, with 14
Bonitto's 31 total pressures are leading the league, along with his 20.5 sacks since the start of the 2024 season. Bonitto is doing this all while playing fewer snaps than other premier pass rushers, just logging 109 pass rush snaps on the season.
If Nik Bonitto continues to play at such a high clip, the Denver Broncos may find themselves looking at having back-to-back defensive players of the year for the first time in franchise history. It would be the first time this has happened in the NFL, dating back to the early 2000s when Ray Lewis and Ed Reed won the award for the Baltimore Ravens.
Kudos to the Broncos' front office, who have Surtain and Bonitto on the books for an annual average of roughly $50 million per season, just a few million more than Micah Parsons alone.