‘He’s a stud’: How Marvin Mims Jr. has found his niche on offense

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Marvin Mims Jr. was an obvious choice to the AFC Pro Bowl Games squad as a punt returner. No one in the league has as many punt returns of at least 20 yards as Mims, and of the 33 players with at least 10 punt returns this season, none has a better per-return average than Mims’s 15.7-yard pace.

Electric things can happen when the football is in the hands of Mims. If he maintains his average on Sunday, he’ll become the first player in club history to have two seasons averaging at least 15 yards a punt return with a minimum of 10 opportunities. All that Mims is messing from his resume is a punt-return touchdown.

That electricity is what spurred Sean Payton and Broncos coaches to devise a different plan for Mims than the one that had him stagnant on offense. They moved him into the backfield in November, and by December, he’d found his niche as a hybrid player who can line up in multiple spots.

“Getting him in the backfield, throwing him swing screens, handing him the ball, those are times where you can guarantee that he gets the ball, and he’s made the most of his opportunities,” offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi said. “I think we’ve done a better job of designing those in the offense for him.”

Not quite a “joker,” in the parlance of Sean Payton — but close enough.

“I don’t know if he’s got the ‘joker’ tattoo,” Payton said in November, “but he might be invited to the club.”

A Pro Bowl nod and 290 receiving yards on 18 catches in the last four games would seem to ensure Mims admission to any club he wants to enter. That receiving-yardage tally would put him on pace for 1,233 receiving yards over 17 games. That’s WR1 production from a player who has started just two games this year and still hasn’t played half of the offensive snaps in any game this season.

But it’s not necessarily how many snaps you accumulate — it’s what you do with them. And Mims has a knack for setting himself up to make big plays.

“His emergence within our offense has been one of the keys to why we’re successful this year,” right tackle Mike McGlinchey said. “Getting him the ball in the backfield, getting the ball in the slot out wide.

“… He’s a stud, and his emergence through the second half of this year is why our offense is starting to click a little bit, and we certainly need more of that.”

None of that would have happened without Mims deftly balancing the process of learning the work each week for wide receivers, running backs and returners. His football life is a dizzying array of meetings and study before he even takes the field.

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“He’s been used [in] multiple roles and the best thing is, mentally he can handle it all, because if he couldn’t, then obviously we wouldn’t be able to do all the stuff that we do with him,” tight end Adam Trautman said. “But because he’s a highly intelligent player, we can put him wherever we want.”

There’s a simple key to learning it all — although it doesn’t come with a shortcut.

“It’s just kind of memorization for the most part,” Mims said. “And we go out here on the practice field, [the coaches] see things they like, they see things they don’t like. Things change over time, but at the end of the day, it’s just kind of just memorization, the receiver, running back, return stuff.”

That work manifests in being the downfield target towards whom Bo Nix looks more often.

“We talk about in the receiver room all the time just trying to make his job as easy as possible, especially with play calls and stuff like that,” Mims said. “I mean, every team kind of essentially gets to the same play, but we have different motions, different sets, all that stuff, all that different stuff, and just make the job as easy as possible for him.

“I think that’s been the main goal of the receiver room this year, and I think we’ve been doing a pretty good job at it. You know, there’s some low times, there’s some high times, just like every other team in the NFL. But just as much as we can help, Bo, the better we’ll be as a team as possible.”

Furthermore, the more Mims emerges as a downfield threat, the more opportunities he’ll create for other phases of the game beyond Nix and the aerial attack.

“I think it opens up a lot. I think having just a deep, vertical threat is a huge deal,” Trautman said. “Obviously, defenses have to respect that. They might have to play more two-high, maybe makes it easier to run the ball, but, yeah, it does a lot.”

And considering that the Broncos offense has accounted for 26.1 points per game since unveiling Mims in the backfield in Week 10 after averaging just 18.8 points an outing prior to that, there’s ample reason to keep turning the pages on the unique book Mims is writing as the offense’s most versatile skill-position threat.

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