By most accounts the Denver Broncos should have won this game in a blowout, and yet, this team managed to need another fourth quarter comeback from Bo Nix to get a win after being down 17-10 in the fourth quarter.
The Los Angeles Chargers were starting an offensive line with almost no experience and they were missing their best WR on offense in Ladd McConkey. The Charger starting offensive line was Jake Slaughter, Travis Burke, Alex Harkey, Logan Taylor, and Cole Strange. Harkey had never taken an NFL
snap on offense. Slaughter is a rookie who has started all five games so far. Burke and Taylor are both rookies who were making their first career starts. Strange is a journeyman veteran on his fourth team in five NFL seasons, but he did enter the game with 48 starts. This OL was facing the defense that led the NFL in sacks in both 2024 and 2025. The Bronco defense should have been making life miserable for Justin Herbert, but that didn’t really happen in the fourth quarter.
The Bronco defense did have five sacks and six QBhits (remember a hit is not sack, and a sack is not a QBhit), but all but one of those happened in the fourth quarter. The one that didn’t was Nik Bonitto’s sack on the last play of the first quarter. Nik had a great game on paper with 3 TFL, 2 QBhits, 2 sacks, and 4 tackles (3 solo), but he didn’t seem to have that big of an influence on the game and he really should have dominated against a team starting two backup OTs. Three TFL is a career high for him. His season high was 16 in 2024. While he got 3 in this game, he only has four on the season.
The Bronco defense gave up another long run. This time was similar to the others in that the opposing RB broke a bunch of tackles on route to the endzone. The Bronco defense joins the Colts and the Raiders as the only defenses who have allowed three runs of 30+ this season. Those would be the 30 yard run by Kyren Williams, the 42 yard TD run by Kimani Vidal Sassoon, and the 60 yard TD run by Kenneth Walker.
At the time of writing, prior to the Monday night game, the Bronco run defense is 25th in YPC allowed at 4.7. The Jaguars are the best allowing 2.9 and the Panthers are the worst at 5.4. What’s more troubling is the third down conversion percentage allowed. The Broncos were one of the best teams in the league over the last two seasons at stopping conversion on 3rd down. They currently stand at 26th – allowing conversion on 45.2 percent. The Cowboys are the worst at 52.6 percent and the Vikings are the best at 22.2 percent (this helps explain their 5-0 start). The Denver defense has allowed 33 third down conversions so far this season. Only the Lions have allowed more at 36. The Bears have allowed 13.
Will Lutz was extremely reliable last season even hitting 4 of 6 from 50 or longer. He is currently 3 of 6 from 40 or longer with two of those misses coming from 40-49 yards. Currently NFL kickers are 75 for 91 from that distance (81.5 percent). Lutz only missed two from that distance all last year and he now has two misses from that range. While Lutz has been having a bad season so far, Jeremy Crawshaw has been having a great season. He has gotten 50 percent of his punts downed inside the 20 (12 of 24), and 8 of 24 have been downed inside the 10. Using my system that rewards punts downed inside the 10 with increasingly more value as you get to the one, Crawshaw is currently 5th with 34 points. A punt downed at the 10 gets one point, while a punt downed at the 1 gets 10 points. Notice how the Bengal’s punter has five downed inside the ten, but four of them were downed at the 8. He only gets 14 points, while the Steeler’s punter, who also has five, has 35 points, because he has one downed at the four, one at the two, and one at the one. Every team has at least one, but the Viking punter only has one and it was downed at the 10.
This stat is a punter stat, but it is also a punt coverage team stat. The Bronco punt coverage team has been really good so far this year. I don’t know how many of Crawshaw’s inside the 10 punts were “coffin corner” punts where he angled them out of bounds. I know he is good at that and has done it as least four times this season that I can remember.
Only six on Crawshaw’s 24 punts have been returned and those are only averaging 7.7 yards per return. That’s currently tied for the second least YPR in the NFL. Only the Packers punt coverage team has been better (7.4 yards per PR). 25 percent return rate is one of the lowest in the NFL. Michael Dickson of the Seahawks has the lowest at 15 percent, while Rigoberto Sanchez of the Colts has had 69 percent of his returned.
