The Broncos in Week 17 game up 412 yards passing and three touchdowns to Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow. Yet, the Broncos were not only in the game. They had a chance to drive for a winning score — twice — in overtime before ultimately falling short.
One of the major reasons was that Denver’s defense came up big on fourth down. They extinguished two long, otherwise productive Bengals drives with stops on fourth down. Those plays helped by the Broncos time until rookie quarterback Bo Nix heated up in the second half.
Fourth down could be another critical subplot in Sunday’s wild-card game against the Buffalo Bills, the first postseason game for Denver in nine years. The Bills (No. 2; 72.7 percent) and the Broncos (No. 5; 68.2) are among the league’s most efficient fourth-down teams. The Bills are a perfect 6-of-6 in red-zone, a place where Josh Allen turns into a nearly unstoppable battering ram.
The fourth-down equation may be most critical for Denver’s offense. In Week 9, in a game against the Ravens, the Broncos went for it on fourth down twice in the first half. Sean Payton believed Denver would need to score frequently in order to keep pace with the Ravens, but those two failed conversions ultimately set Denver back in a 41-10 loss. The Broncos have converted all four of their fourth-down attempts since then, in part because Nix has been more comfortable running the QB sneak.
“Believe it or not, we’d spend an hour on figuring out the formation for our sneak,” Payton said this week. “(Right guard) Quinn (Meinerz) does a good job, right? Bo’s first (sneak) early on, he went in a certain direction, and I said, ‘Look, there’s this right guard that’s getting paid a lot of money.’
“Defensively, there are certain things that they can do. Each week there will be different ways to look at it, ‘Is it a yard, or is it a yard-and-a-half?’ All of those things, and then the complementary plays also from the gun or under center. You want to be good in short-yardage situations.”
In a game where the Broncos will need to be nearly perfect on the margins, capitalizing on any fourth-down situations that arrive — on either side of the ball — will be paramount.