Mastering the two-minute drill is an essential task for any NFL quarterback, but it doesn’t come easy. It takes a unique combination of playmaking and clock management, and the latter is often especially tricky for younger quarterbacks to control.
Courtney Cronin of ESPN wrote a piece examining who’s best at it, and some of the names on her list were surprising. One was quarterback Bo Nix of the Denver Broncos, who definitely belongs if you look at his performance strictly via the eye test.
But Cronin backs his presence up with some stats. According to her, Nix’s four touchdown passes in the two-minute drill are tied for second in the league, and his QB rating of 86 is third.
Nix himself has pinpointed why this works so well. He likes the end-of-half and end-of-game situations because the Broncos usually pick up the pace with these, and that also scales down the number of plays. A lot of the reads are simpler, too, given that the goal is to get the ball out quickly, get as many available yards as possible, then move on to the next play.
This format also helps Nix stay on the good side of head coach Sean Payton, who’s referred to sacks as “drive killers.” Nix takes fewer in the two-minute drill, and he’s also slowly mastering the art of the throwaway. Payton compares sacks to turnovers, and that’s especially true when it comes to playing fast.
Once again, Cronin backs up this claim with facts. Nix has taken 12 sacks in 11 games while running the two-minute drill, and only Sam Darnold of the Seattle Seahawks has a lower sack rate. Darnold also has 105 fewer pass attempts than Nix, which makes this stat especially impressive.
"It's a belief, or a mentality, or a grit or a toughness,” Nix has said about running this drill. “We just have this belief if we get to the end of the game -- it starts with a defense where you know they're going to stop them, at some critical moment they're going to stop them and we're going to have opportunity after opportunity [on offense].''
The downside is that the Broncos have been forced to run this drill far too many times this season due to the inconsistency issue. Payton would far prefer to be playing conservative football at the end of games, but this is where Nix is right now, and the Broncos have turned it into a winning formula.