The campus, nestled roughly 1,000 steps from the edge of Gardner Lake in Connecticut, was a frothing cauldron of testosterone.
Before St. Thomas More welcomed its first class of female students in 2021, it was an all-boys college prep boarding school of about 125 young men. Roughly 50 of them played football. The teenagers who bounded through the door and into dorm rooms puffed up their chests, trading war stories of the previous campuses they’d conquered.
A young Miles Scott, as St. Thomas More football coach Ernest Anderson tells it, was a breath of fresh air in this cloud of hormones.
One night in the 2020 season, Anderson was walking around the halls for bed checks, knocking on doors for lights out. Kids, as usual, were fiddling with controllers, playing NBA 2K or Madden. Then Anderson cracked open the door to Davis’ room.
A transfer from St. Laurence in Chicago who had come for his senior season of high school ball, Scott was lying in bed, listening to Marvin Gaye to wind down.
“That’s when I knew he was an old soul,” recalled Anderson, formerly Scott’s defensive coordinator. “And it was really that he was here for one reason.”
Scott, an Illinois receiver-turned-safety whom the Denver Broncos drafted in the seventh round in April, never has been particularly fast. He is well-built and strong. He is smart enough that Yale once offered him a scholarship. But his best trait, as former Illinois teammate Kenenna Odeluga said: Scott takes a “pursuit of learning, in everything that interests him, to the highest level.”
He is a talented singer and plays the piano. He is remarkably good with geography. He became fluent in Spanish in college. And every game week in his final two seasons at Illinois, Scott tracked down Illini defensive analyst Myers Hendrickson for one-on-one film sessions to study the upcoming quarterback’s tendencies.
Those traits first endeared Scott to Illinois as an unknown walk-on wide receiver out of St. Thomas More in 2021. They first endeared Scott to the Broncos as an unheralded safety in 2025. Scott, Odeluga said, “would give you the skin off his back if he could.” The Illini and Broncos both keyed in on him for that same reason.
That is not a coincidence.
“A lot of scouts, all of them ask a lot of the same questions,” Illinois receivers coach Justin Stepp said. “As far as Denver, they ask a lot of the same questions that we ask when we’re out recruiting kids.”
A pipeline is building from shared philosophy. Blue-and-orange to blue-and-orange. Scott is the third Illini player in the last four years, after Alex Palczewski in 2023 and Pat Bryant in 2025, that the Broncos have targeted. All are completely different football players. All are the same kind of football player.
“They might not have been the five-star guys,” said Odeluga, who played with all three at Illinois. “They’re not the guys that you’ll see … all the hoopla around them. But these are guys that bring their lunch pail to work every day, do what the coaches tell them, do it to the best of their ability and then are there when the team needs them the most.”
Tough, smart, dependable
In five seasons under coach Bret Bielema, Illinois has advanced from perennial Big Ten loser to Big Ten contender, despite landing just four four-star recruits from 2021 to 2025. In Champaign, Bielema hires, recruits and begins and ends team meetings with the same three-word motto: tough, smart, dependable.
These are not exactly novel foundational values. But they happen to be nearly identical to the same principles Sean Payton brought as the New Orleans Saints’ first-year head coach in 2006 and brought to Denver to rebuild the Broncos in 2023. And they are the same principles that Payton’s mentor, Bill Parcells, operated by
“Bill really helped and still helps Sean with personnel, as far as knowing what he needs at O-line, D-line, different positions around the team as a head coach,” former Saints linebacker Scott Shanle said last year. “There’s no doubt about it — you would never be in the Bill Parcells doghouse if you knew what you were doing, you executed, you played hard and you didn’t get hurt.
“Bill hated hurt players. Sean hates players who are hurt.”
Intangible values have become tangible roots, intertwining across the 1,000 miles from the Rockies to the Midwest. Palczewski, the first Bielema-era product to land with Payton’s Broncos, is a 6-foot-6 offensive lineman who looks more like a freight handler than a football player at first glance. But he authored the most starts in Big Ten history (64) over a six-year Illinois career and became a Broncos roster lock in the 2023 preseason after going undrafted.
“Tough, smart,” Payton said of Palczewski then. “He’s played a lot of football. It’s not always pretty, but there is this quality of — he gets the job done.”
As the 26-year-old Palczewski has become an indispensable part of Denver’s offensive line and earned himself a two-year extension this offseason, Bielema has saved a tweet of that very Payton quote on his phone. Every time Illinois hosts an offensive line recruit on campus, Bielema pulls up that tweet and shows them Payton’s words about Palczewski.
“Tough, smart, dependable has nothing to do with your ability — it has to do with the way you think and act,” Bielema said. “And here’s Sean Payton saying two words that we preach every day.”
Since Palczewski’s arrival, the Broncos have created a new, direct tie to Illinois with each passing year. In 2024 they hired Jim Leonhard — who had been a senior analyst at Illinois — as their defensive passing-game coordinator.
In Denver, Leonhard fed Payton and the Broncos offensive staff information on Bryant, an ascending 6-2 receiver and a hand-in-glove fit for Payton’s utilization of wideouts. Payton credited Leonhard for his insight into the makeup of Bryant, a clutch target and avid blocker who Stepp said would often beat Bielema to Illinois’ building in the mornings.
Roughly a month before the 2025 draft, members of the Broncos staff called Illinois with specific requests of film on Bryant. One, Bielema said, was a cut-up of one-on-one practice reps of Bryant working against Seattle Seahawks Pro Bowl cornerback Devon Witherspoon, an Illinois All-American in 2022. Such tape, Bielema said, showed Bryant was “very successful” against Witherspoon.
The Broncos had another specific request for Illinois with those tapes, Stepp recounted: Do not tell another team they’d requested that film, for fear of tipping their interest in Bryant.
“I would tell you the Denver Broncos — in my opinion, they know who they are and they know who they want to be,” Bielema said. “And they target players and do an unbelievable amount of recon to try and make sure that what they’re looking at is the reality of what they’re going to get.”
On Denver’s radar
Enter Scott, the latest Illinois-to-Denver tie — and one that quietly had been brewing for a while. In 2025, shortly before the Broncos drafted Bryant, the Illini hired Mike Neu as an offensive assistant. Neu is a longtime Payton associate, having served as a scout for the Saints in 2006 and later their quarterbacks coach from 2014 to 2015.
Shortly into Neu’s time at Illinois, he reached out to Payton and asked if he and members of the Illini staff could shadow in the Broncos building during offseason activities.
Payton acquiesced. Bielema, Stepp, Neu, offensive coordinator Barry Lunney Jr. and former defensive coordinator Aaron Henry (now at Notre Dame) spent three days during the 2025 offseason with the Broncos, observing in meeting rooms and watching practices.
Stepp was struck, he said, by how similarly Denver structured practice to Illinois. Neu sat in on quarterback meetings and wound up taking some bunch-formation concepts back to Champaign for quarterback Luke Altmyer’s senior season. Henry spent time picking the brain of Broncos defensive coordinator Vance Joseph and implemented concepts from Denver’s schemes against 12 personnel (two tight ends) into Illinois’ system.
And during that excursion — nearly a year before their seventh-round selection rolled around in this draft — Broncos staffers asked Bielema about Scott.
“I knew this was a guy,” Bielema said, “that had been on their radar for a while.”
True to the Broncos’ attempts to camouflage their interest, Scott said at rookie minicamp that he “didn’t have a clue” they were interested in him until they reached out to host him on a top-30 visit.
In many ways, his journey to Denver was unlikely. Scott walked on at Illinois after receiving only two college scholarship offers, then spent two years as a backup receiver. After his second season, Bielema told Scott he would put him on scholarship if he moved to defensive back.
Scott looked at Bielema like he had grown three heads. But a scholarship was a scholarship.
Over the next three seasons, Scott started 37 of a possible 38 games at safety, intercepted seven passes and was named captain twice. His journey embodied Bielema’s foundational ideals. So did his personality, a quiet and multitalented individual who captured pin-dropping silence when he spoke.
“If there’s a guy that I would say that I could lean on to give me the pulse of the locker room — offense, defense or special teams — it was definitely Miles Scott,” Bielema said.
In a rarity, Henry entrusted Scott as Illinois’ green-dot play caller from his free safety slot. And Scott’s on-field transition should be easier, Henry anticipates, because of similarities in Illinois’ and Denver’s defensive schemes. Both the Broncos and Illini, Henry explained, run a lot of “bare” formations — a five-man rush with three defenders deep.
“Miles was the catalyst of that,” Henry said. “He was very, very, very intelligent and knew exactly what I wanted to get done.”
He’s also the latest Illini player who could fit neatly into the Broncos locker room. Palczewski has become a beloved figure on the offensive line for his versatility (and remarkably colorful mouth). Bryant has become a beloved figure in the receiver room for his fearlessness (and remarkably colorful mouth). The 24-year-old Scott now will find his own corner.
“That night on draft day that Denver selected him,” Neu recounted, “I kind of got chills. Just because I know he’ll be such a great fit.”
