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The youngest coach in Dove Valley also looks the most out of place, by sheer physicality. This isn’t Isaac Shewmaker’s fault. It’s a compliment, more than anything.
On Thursdays, the 29-year-old Shewmaker bends down to mimic a snap and leads one of the best pass-rush units in football in get-off drills. Luminaries bend before him: 6-foot-2, 246-pound second-year reserve Jonah Elliss tenses; 6-foot-3 All-Pro Nik Bonitto waits; 257-pound Jonathon Cooper, whose muscles have muscles, toes. They all snap forward at Shewmaker’s bark. At his beck.
At a Broncos outside-linebackers coach who stands five-foot-something, and played a little high school ball back in Kentucky. No college.
“Obviously, God gave me the brains to do it,” Shewmaker says, sitting on a bench after the Broncos’ Thursday practice. “But not the body to do it.”
But ah, those brains. They have a knack for making the complex seem easy, in a Vance Joseph defense that presents a lot that’s complex. Elliss calls Shewmaker “just super smart.” Practice-squad reserve Garrett Nelson raves about the coach’s “high-level IQ.” Rookie Que Robinson says the young Shewmaker is “smart as hell.”
“You’d probably walk past him in the grocery store and wouldn’t think he coached, probably, one of the top outside-linebacker groups,” Robinson cracks. “But yeah, shoot, man, he gets it done for us. And he’d probably give us the shirt off his back, at the end of the day.”
You know Joseph, the defensive coordinator primed for a head-coaching gig. You know 30-year-old quarterbacks coach Davis Webb, who’s on the fast-track to a play-calling job soon enough. Meet Shewmaker, the most promising mind in Denver’s building who you probably have never heard of.
Just ask reigning Defensive Player of the Year Pat Surtain II.
“He’s got a brilliant football mind,” Surtain says. “And he’s gon’ get one of those job promotions … like a D-coordinator, or something like that, very soon.”
Quietly, Joseph’s defense experienced a large and partly unexpected turnover in leadership this offseason, after Denver fired inside linebackers coach Greg Manusky in January — and then fired outside linebackers coach Michael Wilhoite a month later after Wilhoite was charged with a now-dropped felony assault of a police officer. The young Shewmaker was waiting in the wings, fresh off just two years in defensive quality control in Denver. And in his first season as an NFL position coach, Shewmaker has presided over the driving group in a pass-rush that just broke its own franchise record for sacks (64).
That room is chock-full on talent, of course. The Broncos are set to pay Bonitto and Cooper over $160 million in the next few seasons for their services, and Elliss is a 2023 third-round pick. The room’s also chock-full on personalities. Bonitto hosts impromptu dance-circles in the middle of group drills, and Cooper bleats loud and often.
“I know it’s kind of a big ask to kinda wrangle our room” Nelson says.
Shewmaker is a young shepherd. Really, though, he has been building for this since he could walk. At 6 years old, he announced at his kindergarten graduation that he intended to become the head football coach at the University of Kentucky.
He loves the game — particularly defense — because it is a chess match. And Shewmaker teaches it as such.
“If they understand why they have to be here because of who it affects, then they buy into it more,” Shewmaker says. “When you just say, ‘Well, you have to set the edge because that’s what the piece of paper says,’ they have a harder time buying into it. So part of my whole thing is, ever since I started was – learning it on a level where I can teach all 11.”
He gave up playing for good after high school, when he suffered a variety of concussions in football and then got drilled by a 92 mph fastball to the noggin his senior year playing baseball. Doctors told him he should stop. (“I was like, ‘That’s probably fair,’ ” Shewmaker acknowledges.) So he went to Kentucky and became an equipment manager, resolving to simply do anything he could to get in the building.
Within a month, the program assigned him to help out with defensive backs. Within a year, ex-Kentucky defensive backs coach Derrick Ansley took a DBs job at Alabama and convinced Shewmaker — a student — to transfer. Shewmaker became a defensive assistant on Alabama head coach Nick Saban’s staff as a college sophomore in 2016. The rest is recent history.
In Denver, now, this Broncos edge-rusher group has answered the call at nearly every bell, down to the depth. Elliss has waded through an injury-muddled season to rack up 1.5 sacks and a couple of tackles for loss in his past three games. Reserve Dondrea Tillman has rounded into a legitimate star in his role, with four sacks and two interceptions in his last 10 games. Robinson, a 2025 fourth-round pick who was thought of as a mostly developmental prospect, contributed two quarterback hits in rotational reps in a Week 16 loss to the Jaguars.
Shewmaker, Robinson says, helps his group focus from not getting “scatterbrained” inside the detail of a formation.
“Plays that I did make — I probably talked to him about it like, 1,000 times,” Robinson says. “He probably told me not to look at this, don’t worry about that, and just do this, and you’ll be fine. And it’s helped me make a couple plays this season.”
Shewmaker has now spent enough time under Joseph that the Broncos’ defensive coordinator — nearly twice his age — often consults Shewmaker mid-game on the sidelines, as Nelson affirms. And the Broncos’ OLB room insists that Shewmaker could coach any position group.
Eventually, they sense, he could be coaching all of them.
“He’s going to be going far,” Nelson said, “in this profession.”
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Luca Evans
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