ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — With an already snug salary cap, the Denver Broncos made their choice this week about which pending free agent at outside linebacker they had room to keep.
The Broncos signed Jonathon Cooper to a four-year extension worth $60 million with $33 million guaranteed, a source told ESPN’s Adam Schefter on Monday.
Cooper has been called one of the team’s high-effort players by coach Sean Payton and is second on the team in sacks with 5.5, just behind Nik Bonitto‘s team-leading six. The Broncos, tied for second in the league in sacks with 31, have 12 different players with at least half a sack over the first nine games.
Cooper, a seventh-round pick by the Broncos in the 2021 draft, was poised to be an unrestricted free agent in March, as was fellow outside linebacker Baron Browning, a third-round pick the same year. The Broncos elected to sign Cooper this past weekend and trade Browning to the Arizona Cardinals Monday in exchange for a 2025 sixth-round pick.
Cooper led the team in sacks last season with 8.5. He has played in 56 games over the last four seasons, including 40 starts, though his time with the Broncos began with some medical uncertainty.
The Broncos knew Cooper had been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in high school. Doctors later said it was Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome — a congenital heart defect a person is born with that results in irregular or rapid heartbeat.
Cooper had two ablations in high school, procedures in which catheters are threaded through blood vessels to the heart as tissue in the heart is then scarred to block abnormal electric signals, restoring a normal heartbeat. Cooper then played through the remainder of his prep career and through five seasons at Ohio State without issues.
However, in the medical checks leading up to the 2021 draft, it was discovered Cooper needed another ablation. He received the news, he said, roughly 48 hours before the first round of the NFL draft.
He had three separate eight-hour procedures shortly after he joined the Broncos, missing some of the team’s offseason program that year before he was medically cleared and went on to play in 16 games as a rookie.
