Justin Simmons, Denver Broncos Safety: The Full Career Story
On April 29, 2026 – exactly ten years to the day after the Denver Broncos used the 98th pick in the draft on a Boston College safety named Justin Simmons – he posted a video to Instagram and said goodbye to the NFL. “Being a Denver Bronco was more than just a team,” he said. “It was my heart, my home and my story.” The next day, he signed a one-day contract and made it official at a ceremony in Englewood, Colorado, with Hall of Famer Steve Atwater standing at the podium to introduce him. That detail alone – Atwater, who played for Denver from 1989 to 1998 and is one of the greatest safeties the franchise has ever produced – says something about how Simmons is regarded in that building.
He finished with 666 career tackles, 32 interceptions, 71 passes defended, and 134 games played. Four second-team All-Pro selections. Two Pro Bowls. He never won a playoff game. He played for six different head coaches. Thirteen different quarterbacks started games behind him over eight seasons in Denver. That’s the contradiction at the center of his career: elite individual production inside one of the most unstable franchise environments in modern NFL history.
From Stuart, Florida to the Third Round
Simmons grew up in Stuart, Florida, and attended Martin County High School, where he was a standout in the classroom as well as on the field. He went to Boston College, majored in communications, and developed into one of the more intriguing safety prospects in the 2014 recruiting class. By the time the 2016 NFL Combine came around, he was turning heads with his athleticism rather than his name recognition. His 20-yard shuttle time of 3.85 seconds was the fastest recorded at the Combine since 2006. He also tied for the best 60-yard shuttle time since 2014 and finished second overall in the three-cone drill. Draft experts projected him as a third-round pick, and that’s exactly where he landed – 98th overall, the final pick of the third round, first safety taken out of Boston College since Will Blackmon a decade earlier.
He signed a four-year, $3.06 million contract with a $645,420 signing bonus. He entered camp as the backup free safety behind Darian Stewart. Head coach Gary Kubiak named him the backup and most assumed he’d spend the year learning behind a veteran secondary that had just won the Super Bowl. That assumption lasted about eight weeks.
Eight Seasons in Denver: What Actually Happened
His first career interception came on Christmas Day 2016, in Kansas City. Simmons picked off Alex Smith on a pass intended for Tyreek Hill and returned it 38 yards in the first quarter. The Broncos lost that game 33-10, which, in retrospect, was a fair preview of what the next eight years would feel like. He made plays. The team, mostly, did not win.
His first genuine moment of national attention came two weeks earlier – Week 10 in New Orleans, November 13, 2016. Simmons leaped over the offensive line and blocked an extra point attempt by Saints kicker Wil Lutz. Will Parks scooped the ball and returned it 84 yards for a game-winning safety, giving Denver a 25-23 victory. Simmons was a backup at the time. He earned his first career start the following month.
By 2019 he was one of the best safeties in the league, and the Broncos knew it. They franchise-tagged him three consecutive years – 2020, 2021, and a third time before he finally signed a long-term extension. At his peak he was earning $16.5 million annually. He was named the team’s first Demaryius Thomas Team MVP in 2021. He tied for the NFL lead in interceptions in 2022. He recorded game-winning interceptions against the Raiders in 2018, the Dolphins in 2020, and the Commanders in 2021. In 2019 alone, the Broncos reported he had volunteered more than 3,500 minutes across 20 different local organizations.
The quarterback situation was genuinely difficult to watch for anyone paying attention. Paxton Lynch. Trevor Siemian. Case Keenum. Joe Flacco. Drew Lock. Teddy Bridgewater. Nathaniel Hackett’s experiment with Russell Wilson. Jarrett Stidham started Simmons’ final two games as a Bronco. Thirteen different starters over eight years. Simmons never publicly demanded a trade, never called anyone out, showed up as a team captain three years running. “I did my best with what we were going through,” he said at his retirement. “There was a lot of head coach turnover. There was an ownership thing happening and you have to focus on football.” He said he felt like he let people down. For the record: he ranked sixth in franchise history in interceptions, with 30 of his 32 career picks coming in a Broncos uniform.
The moment that defined him off the stat sheet happened in December 2021. Two days after Demaryius Thomas died suddenly at age 33, Simmons intercepted a pass in a home game against the Detroit Lions. His celebration – pointing upward, clearly directed at Thomas – went viral immediately. It was the kind of unrehearsed, genuine tribute that no PR team could have scripted. The Broncos won that game. The entire crowd understood exactly what just happened.
The Demaryius Thomas Game – and What It Actually Showed
The celebration itself was simple. Simmons caught the interception, looked up, and pointed at the sky. Eleven seconds of video that circulated across every major sports platform within hours. What made it land wasn’t the gesture – it was the timing. Two days. He had two days to process losing a teammate and friend who died at home from a seizure at 33, and then he went out and made one of the defining plays of his career and used it to say something to a person who was no longer there to hear it.
That game is inseparable from any honest account of who Justin Simmons was as a player and as a person. It’s the one moment that captures both things at once – the interception on the field and the human being standing in the end zone.
Atlanta, 2024: One More Season
The Broncos released him in March 2024, a salary cap decision. He was 30 years old with four All-Pro selections and had just been to the Pro Bowl. He spent the following months on the free-agent market and signed with the Atlanta Falcons in mid-August – a one-year, $8 million deal, late enough in the offseason that training camp was nearly over.
He started all 16 games for Atlanta. Final line: 62 combined tackles, seven passes defended, two interceptions. His PFF overall grade was 59.9 – 69th among 97 qualified safeties, with a run-defense grade of 53.8 that ranked 89th at the position. His coverage grade came in at 60.8. These are not the numbers of a player at his peak. The Falcons finished 8-9.
In November 2024, Atlanta played in Denver. Simmons was mic’d up for the return. The Broncos won 38-6. Simmons called it “bittersweet.” Bo Nix threw four touchdown passes. Simmons had described himself at various points that season as “miserable” being away from his family in Colorado – his wife Taryn, their two daughters, everything that had been familiar for eight years. He did not play in 2025. He said at his retirement that there were a few teams he would have considered, but the right situation didn’t come together, and at a certain point the math stopped working in favor of going back.
Career Numbers in Context
Thirty-two career interceptions over nine seasons. Multiple interceptions in every single season he played – a run of consistency that very few safeties in the modern game have matched. His 442 interception return yards place him among the most dangerous safeties after the catch in his era. He recorded 71 passes defended, five forced fumbles, and 134 games (124 starts). In Denver specifically: 30 interceptions across 118 games, 108 starts, sixth all-time in franchise history in picks.
The All-Pro selections – four of them, all second-team – are where the argument gets complicated. Four second-team selections across nine years is a strong body of work. It also means he was never voted the single best safety in the NFL in any given season, which matters when Hall of Fame voters eventually start having this conversation. Derwin James and Jessie Bates were pulling first-team votes during Simmons’ peak years. The fact that his best statistical seasons came on teams that missed the playoffs did not help his national profile.
His PFF grades peaked between 2020 and 2022. In 2022, the year he tied for the NFL interception lead, he was one of the highest-graded safeties in the league. The 2024 season in Atlanta was a visible step down – not a collapse, but the difference between a player performing at 85% of his peak and one performing at 60% is real, and PFF’s data showed it.
The Hall of Fame Question
He hasn’t been inducted, and at 32 years old he won’t be eligible for several years. The case is genuine but not bulletproof. Four All-Pro selections and 32 interceptions is a real argument. The four second-team designations (versus first-team) will give voters pause. No playoff appearances complicates the “impact player” narrative that voters lean on. Steve Atwater, John Lynch, and Brian Dawkins – the three Hall of Famers who patrolled the Denver secondary before him – all have Super Bowl rings. Simmons doesn’t.
What might actually help his case is the Walter Payton Man of the Year nominations, three of them, which the voting body weighs more seriously than the public assumes. The foundation work, the community record, the decade-long consistency – Hall voters increasingly factor in the full picture of a player’s career rather than just the position ranking in a given season. Whether that’s enough remains genuinely unclear. The interception total is borderline. The award count is strong. The team success argument works against him in a way that’s unfair but real.
The Justin Simmons Foundation
He and Taryn launched the Justin Simmons Foundation in June 2020, during the pandemic. The focus areas: youth development, hunger relief, education, and youth sports. The inaugural program was called “31 for the Holidays” – a nod to his jersey number – and sponsored 31 families from underserved communities, running for 31 days starting November 2, 2020. Goal was 310 minimum donations of $31 each. Partner organizations included the Denver Rescue Mission and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston and Martin County, the two cities where Simmons had lived before Denver.
In October 2022, the NFLPA named him Week 6 Community MVP after he donated more than $30,000 to youth programs in Denver and raised enough money to replace a dangerous playground at a local elementary school. At that same event – the second annual “An Evening with Justin Simmons” fundraiser at the Denver Marriott Tech Center – he and Taryn donated $10,031.31 each to the Denver Public Schools Foundation, Boys Hope Girls Hope of Colorado, and the Boys and Girls Club of Metro Denver. The dollar amount was not a coincidence. Thirty-one, again.
His community work predated the foundation by years. In 2019, before he had a nonprofit infrastructure behind him, the Broncos documented more than 3,500 volunteer minutes across 20 different organizations – food banks, children’s hospitals, blood drives, schools, military bases, NFL Play 60 events. He also met individually with Governor Jared Polis’s office multiple times to discuss clemency reform and was featured in the ACLU Colorado’s Redemption Campaign, a statewide initiative focused on releasing nonviolent offenders. That last one rarely gets mentioned in the football coverage and probably should.
One story from 2021 that circulated briefly and deserves more attention: before the home opener that season, Simmons heard about a family in another state whose son – also named Justin Simmons – had died from a heart attack at age 32. He reached out to the family, invited all eight members to Colorado for the game, and covered all costs himself: airfare, accommodations, tickets, everything. He wanted to raise awareness about organ donation. There was no press release ahead of time.
Faith, Family, and What He Actually Values
He describes himself on Instagram as a “child of the King” and lists White Flag – a faith and recovery app for which he serves as Chief Advocacy Officer – in his bio. He regularly wore Bible verse headbands during interviews, which most reporters treated as a quirky visual detail. It wasn’t quirky. It was consistent. From the moment he arrived in Denver as a 22-year-old rookie through his retirement at 32, his stated priorities never changed: family, faith, football, community. In that order.
The family part became harder during the Atlanta year. He said plainly that watching his wife manage without him in Denver was difficult. “It’s things that I took for granted that you never know until it’s gone.” He missed two daughters growing up in the city that had been home. No team in 2025 made an offer compelling enough to outweigh that, and he said so without making it dramatic. At his retirement, he said he had a “short list” of teams he would have played for in 2025. Those opportunities didn’t materialize. He doesn’t appear to have any regrets about it.
What Comes Next
He said at the retirement ceremony that he planned to work with his foundation, spend time with his family, attend Broncos games as a fan, and – for the first time in his adult life – tailgate. He also said he intended to meet with people and “pick their brains” about what a second career might look like. His communications degree from Boston College, his decade of public-facing community work, his role at the White Flag app, and his track record as a team captain all point toward some kind of leadership or public advocacy role. What exactly that becomes is still unclear, and he seemed content with that uncertainty.
When the Broncos open their 2026 home season, Simmons said, he’ll be in the stands. Not in pads, not in the tunnel, not leading the huddle. Just watching the team he gave eight years of his career to, from the other side of the railing, cheering for guys he used to grind alongside. There’s something worth sitting with in that image – the four-time All-Pro in the crowd, in orange, watching Bo Nix run an offense that didn’t exist when Simmons was still trying to make things work with Paxton Lynch.
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