The past in Denver is still fresh, practice fields and golf courses, the memories that pop up every now and then on Josey Jewell’s phone. But the present has taken him far from there, moving between cities, a never-ending quest for answers on how to fix his brain.
Carolina. Minneapolis. Iowa. UCLA. Flights. Specialist after specialist, trying to race against his own symptoms.
“I’ve just tried to find the answer of, what’s wrong with me, how to fix it?” Jewell said this week.
After a standout six-year Broncos career as an inside linebacker, Jewell signed a three-year deal with the Panthers in March 2024. In Week 16 against the Cardinals, he suffered a concussion. He never cleared protocol, and Carolina released him in July.
Jewell doesn’t want to specifically disclose what these past few months have brought. He doesn’t want to be pitied. But everything’s progressed “downward,” he said. And no treatment, no kind of rehab he’s tried, has worked.
“I’m not a quitter,” Jewell said. “And I’m going to keep on looking for the answer.”
The 31-year-old doesn’t like to talk about his problems. He prefers, instead, to talk about others’ successes. To this day, Jewell has remained active in a group chat with Broncos linebackers Alex Singleton and Justin Strnad. He has not told them about his symptoms. Instead, they sometimes send photo memories of the 2022 and ’23 days, three musketeers in a Denver locker room that was only just sowing seeds of greatness.
On off days, sometimes, they’d form a golf party with Courtland Sutton and Justin Simmons and hit greens around Denver. Sometimes Arrowhead Golf Course, in Littleton. Sometimes Sanctuary, in Douglas County. It was always a toss-up. Sutton was usually the most consistent. Simmons would get “pissed off” from slicing a drive somewhere foreign, Jewell chuckled.
The veteran has watched this current group most every Sunday, the men he knows well climbing to 14-3 and heights not reached in Denver since the Manning days. It brings elation. It also brings pain, sometimes.
In the three years since Broncos head coach Sean Payton arrived in Denver, he and general manager George Paton have filtered this roster at their respective whims to largely momentous results. Much of the heartbeat of Payton’s original roster in 2023 remains: nearly 60% of the initial 53-man group that season is still in Denver, as the No. 1-seeded Broncos head into the AFC playoffs.
Two heartbeats of that first-year Payton Era roster, though — two golf-squad mainstays — are now on the outside looking in. Jewell is trying to heal. Former All-Pro safety Simmons, meanwhile, has remained a free agent for the entirety of the 2025 season. Both still lament the missed opportunities in their respective tenures in Denver.
Both, still, are pulling for the locker room they once knew.
“You kinda wish you were there,” Jewell said. “You wish you were with the team. You’re like, ‘Ah, that looks like fun, man.’
“It’s a little tough every once in a while,” he continued. “But at the same time, it’s rewarding.”
Simmons was a four-time All-Pro safety in Denver, a 2016 third-round pick who caught the tail end of Gary Kubiak’s tenure and the very beginning of Payton’s. He existed in purgatory, starring in the era between eras, playing under six different head coaches. In March 2024, the Broncos cut bait with one of their franchise stalwarts. They’ve ascended ever since.
Still, Simmons’s Twitter feed is stuffed full of Broncos content and Denver-specific Pro Bowl retweets. He has promoted this group at every turn, from appearances on DNVR to Kay Adams’ “Up and Adams.” His only regret, he told The Denver Post in December, was that he couldn’t get Denver back to the playoffs in his own eight-year tenure.
“Of course I’d love to be there like Courtland, like Garett (Bolles), to be able to celebrate them with me being in the postseason and being back to like, what we know the Denver Broncos are,” Simmons reflected, referring to these Broncos’ two-longest-tenured veterans.
“But,” he continued, “there’s no bitterness or hate or ill will towards anything or anyone in the organization. Like, I consider myself, and always will consider myself, a Bronco and a part of Broncos Country. And I literally watch every single Sunday, Thursday, Monday, whatever it is, and I’m jumping out of my seat, excited for the guys.
“I can’t be more proud of the group and how they’ve rallied and how well they’re playing, and it just makes me so happy and so proud,” Simmons finished. “I just, like — I’m elated. I’m full of joy. And I’m so happy for the guys, man. And I just hope they continue to have the utmost success, because they’re great humans, they’re great people, and they’re tremendous football players. And I hope they keep grinding and rising to the top.”
Jewell sees it much the same, a fourth-round pick in 2018 who started next to Singleton for two years in Denver. Payton, Paton and the Broncos elected not to re-sign him when he became a free agent in 2024. And Jewell wishes, too, that he had more coaching consistency in his years in Denver.
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Life has rolled several unforeseen developments his way, after that late-2024 hit. The good ol’ days have become good ol’ days quicker, perhaps, than Jewell intended. He misses it. He wants to be a part of it.
He still is, in a sense.
“I hope the guys,” Jewell said, “make it all the way.”
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