Some draft decisions haunt you forever, like a ghost. For John Elway, former general manager for the Denver Broncos, this ghost wears No. 17 for the Buffalo Bills and carries a cannon for an arm. Picture this: back in 2018, the Broncos legend sat in the war room with the fifth overall pick. Across the table from him lay a scouting report on Josh Allen, raw, athletic, inaccurate, but brimming with potential. But the coaching staff tilts to another star, and Elway caves.

Years later, when the question comes up on Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast, that decision calls for regret from Elway.

“I really liked him,” admitted Elway on the podcast. “The way I worked is, I wanted buy-in from the coaching staff, and I couldn’t get the buy-in from the coaching staff. I couldn’t get everybody on the same page with it… When he was coming out, he wasn’t perfect. He was very raw, and I could see his accuracy was the biggest question. Just athletic as hell, big, strong, competitive, and all those types of things. I regret it because I didn’t overrule everybody and say, ‘I’m taking him’.”

The admission cuts deep because it reveals a rare truth about NFL front offices—something the best talent evaluators lose because the front offices run on consensus, not conviction. The room wanted Bradley Chubb, a solid edge rusher who became that draft’s first defensive end selected.

But Buffalo didn’t hesitate. They traded up from 12th overall to 7th and grabbed Allen, betting on the Wyoming quarterback’s ceiling rather than his floor. Needless to say, the payoff was pure gold. With tutelage from former Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll, Allen transformed from a project to a perennial MVP candidate, posting a historic 149.0 passer rating in the 2021 postseason. He tied the single-season record with 15 rushing touchdowns in 2023 and owns the record for most career rushing touchdowns by a quarterback: 79.

Meanwhile, Denver cycled through quarterbacks like a revolving door. Case Keenum, Joe Flacco, Drew Lock, Teddy Bridgewater, and Russell Wilson—none of them stuck. The franchise that Elway built into back-to-back Super Bowl champions as its quarterback in the late 80s wandered the quarterback desert for nearly a decade.

Elway’s regret isn’t just about Allen’s individual brilliance, though. It’s about the process. “You have to have the right coach to coach him up,” Sharpe noted on the podcast, pointing to Daboll’s impact on Allen. And Elway agreed.

“Correct,” he said. “That’s why if you don’t have buy-in on that offensive side… that’s one regret as a GM.”

For years, that miss hung over Mile High like a storm cloud. Every Allen highlight twisted the knife a little deeper. Every Bills playoff run amplified the what-ifs. But football has a way of course-correcting, and sometimes the answers just arrive late. And now, Bo Nix feels like the answer the Broncos might have been waiting for all this time.

The Bo Nix redemption arc of it all

Bo Nix, the 2024 first-round pick quarterback, is rewriting Denver’s narrative in real-time. While John Elway’s 2018 decision haunted Mile High, Nix has exorcised those demons with surgical precision. The Oregon product has guided the Broncos to AFC West champions for the first time in a decade, engineering an 11-game win streak that’s catapulted them to the top seed in the conference.

The Broncos are mostly locked into the AFC’s top seed with their 13-3 record heading into Week 18. The only thing that can stop them now is if they fall to the Los Angeles Chargers in the regular season finale. And the irony? Buffalo, Allen’s kingdom, is stumbling through an uncharacteristic rough patch this season. They’re locked into the No. 6 seed in the AFC, but their dominance has cracked in unexpected places, going 11-5 into Week 18. Meanwhile, Denver is ascending with the poise of a team that’s found its long-lost identity.

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Maybe the football gods orchestrate these things. Perhaps Bo Nix was always destined to usher in Denver’s new era, making John Elway’s 2018 hesitation a necessary detour rather than a devastating mistake. But one thing’s certain: if Elway had overruled his coaching staff back then, the Broncos might have changed their franchise in 2018 instead of the 2025 season. Sometimes the right decision comes late. Sometimes it arrives exactly on time.