Denver Broncos has been running for his life in the first three games due to extensive pressure from opponents.
The Denver Broncos offense has been taken to task in all sorts of ways so far this season, and the criticism is more than justified. The Broncos are paying a lot of sleepy halves of football, and you can almost count the number of good quarters they’ve played on one hand so far.
Much of the focus has been on new play-caller Davis Webb and the failures of the running game, but there’s another issue that isn’t getting enough play. Quarterback Bo Nix has been under pressure on 43 percent of his dropbacks so far, per TruMedia, as Nick Kosmider noted in a piece he did about this for The Athletic.
Nix is far better on the move than he is under pressure, and Kosmider supplied some numbers to prove that point. The QB ranks last through three weeks among 32 qualified quarterbacks in EPA (expected points added) per dropback when pressured (-0.99), according to Next Gen Stats. He’s completed 9 of 27 passes for 65 yards when that happens, with no touchdowns and two interceptions.
Extra preparation against the blitz would help. The sample size is small, but defenses have blitzed Denver’s offense on 33 percent of Nix’s dropbacks this season, which is the sixth-highest rate in the league.
Contrast that with last season, when teams blitzed the Broncos on 20.6 percent of Nix’s dropbacks in 2025, which was the fifth-lowest rate in the NFL. Teams are creating pressure on 48.5 percent of those blitz attempts, compared with 42 percent last season.
Coach Sean Payton blamed a lot of this on aggressive defensive play-callers early on, and he’s not ready to draw conclusions about that just yet. The Broncos have been working on trying to speed up Nix’s process, but the quarterback insisted that there have rarely been free rushers and the team has done a great job of blitz pickup.
The blitzes haven’t resulted in sacks, but that’s consistent with the overall results last year as well. A lot of Payton’s designs are built around avoiding sacks at all costs, and that’s been drilled into Nix’s mental clock.
Nix also hasn’t scrambled much, and that was a tactic he used to counter blitzers. It’s fair to ask if that’s related to his ankle, as he’s had just one scramble for three yards. Nix has also posted back-to-back games without a scramble rush for the first time in his career. There are a lot of factors playing into this, but so far the Broncos don’t have the right combination of answers.
