Denver Post Broncos writer Parker Gabriel posts his Broncos Mailbag weekly during the season and periodically during the offseason. Click here to submit a question.
I’ve been watching football for a long time, and I cannot recall a QB who is so up and down. Bo Nix has so many terrible throws and a lot of great throws. Do you ever recall seeing a QB this inconsistent?
— Jay Lav, Los Angeles
Hey Jay, thanks for writing in and getting us going this week.
There’s certainly been an unevenness to the way Bo Nix has played so far in his second season. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the most inconsistent I’ve ever seen or anything like that.
Nix is still a young quarterback as it pertains to the NFL. He’s played in just 24 regular-season games. He’s still got a lot to see and learn.
Now, clearly, head coach Sean Payton put massive expectations on Nix’s shoulders when he predicted this summer that Nix would be among the top four or five quarterbacks in the NFL within the next two years. He said he didn’t believe in sophomore slumps, but he did believe in sophomore leaps.
So far this season, Nix hasn’t taken a statistical leap. A slight slump can be argued: Nix’s numbers through seven games compared to last year are down in categories like completion percentage, quarterback rating, yards per attempt, yards per completion, air yards per attempt and more.
Among qualified NFL passers, Nix currently ranks like this in the following categories:
Touchdowns: T-10 (11)
Yards: No. 11 (1,556)
Dropbacks: No. 4 (280)
Completion percentage: No. 24 (62.5%)
Completion percentage over expected: No. 27 (-2.9%)
Air yards per attempt: T-25 (7.2)
Deep %: No. 21 (9.8%)
According to Sumer Sports, Nix’s success rate of 41.06% is No. 29 among 34 quarterbacks with at least 100 snaps this year.
All of those numbers suggest it’s been an up-and-down start to the year for Nix and that statistically he’s only in the upper half of the NFL in a handful of metrics.
There are a few reasons the inconsistency part of the equation might feel more pronounced this week. The first is pretty simple: Nix was tracking toward his worst outing of the season and one of the most disappointing of his career to date through three quarters Sunday, then in the final 15 minutes became the first player in NFL history to account for two rushing touchdowns and two passing touchdowns in a quarter.
Along the way, he easily set a career high in pass attempts with 50 — his previous high was 42 — and a season low in completion percentage (54.9%). He had 14 incompletions on throws within 8 yards of the line of scrimmage.
Then there’s another wild stat from Pro Football Focus that adds to this: So far this season, when the Broncos are trailing, Nix has an adjusted completion percentage of 76.3% and has accounted for 1,044 total yards, 11 total touchdowns and no interceptions while playing to a 101.6 passer rating.
Broncos’ Sean Payton not considering play-calling change, but “there’s a lot” to fix offensively
Overall, it’s just been a curious start. The Broncos didn’t trail in the fourth quarter of any of their first four games and still started 2-2 with a pair of walk-off losses. They’ve played long stretches of bad offensive football each of the past three weeks, trailed in the fourth quarter in all three games and won each of them.
Let’s see what the numbers look like in a couple of weeks, but we have certainly not seen the kind of long, steady, productive stretch from Nix in Year 2 that he played in the middle of his rookie year.
Why can’t Bo Nix perform the same way in the rest of the time that he did in the fourth quarter in almost every game we have played this season?
— Jamie, Salida
Hey Jamie, thanks for the question, which is similar to the one above. He accounted for 174 passing yards, 46 rushing yards and four total touchdowns in the fourth quarter on Sunday, so if he did that every quarter, he’d be the greatest player of all time.
Of course, a slightly less literal answer to your question also includes many other parts. Here’s one: After the Giants went up 26-8 with 10:14 to go, they shifted into much more of a soft defensive approach. They gave up underneath throws and tried to keep the Broncos offense in front. That worked to a degree, as it took Denver 13 plays and 5:01 — nearly half the remaining game — to get the first of three needed scores. Of course, in the process, Denver also got in rhythm and then got a huge play from Justin Strnad on the interception that set the offense up again quickly at the New York 19-yard line.
Suddenly, the pressure switched sides, the Broncos offense was in rhythm and the Giants had to go back to playing their normal defensive style — but from their heels for the first time all the game.
Clearly, teams aren’t playing defense in that softer manner early in games or in most cases other than with big leads. So that’s definitely part of the equation.
Interestingly, Nix said he felt like he really got in rhythm on a 16-yard out-breaker to Courtland Sutton right at the end of the third quarter. So it all kind of came together quickly for the Broncos.
Sir, since I can’t get one question answered, may I try two? Why don’t the Broncos run a hurry-up offense at least some of the time? Secondly, the officiating seems so arbitrary and intrusive this season, and the roughing call on John Franklin-Myers and the interference on Riley Moss near the end of the game are good examples. These calls are dubious and game-determining. Can’t the NFL hire, train and employ full-time professional referees?
— Rick Ruggles, Denver (now Omaha, Neb.)
Sir, here are answers to both of your questions. The Broncos do, actually, run hurry-up, tempo, no-huddle, whatever you want to call it, some of the time. Whether they run it enough is an open question.
Often, Nix sounds like a quarterback who likes playing fast and would enjoy playing fast more often.
Payton said it himself last month.
“(Nix) likes tempo, tempo to the line,” Payton said. “… You adapt because that’s something that a lot of these college quarterbacks are — reducing the verbiage and getting to where we can call plays with just one name, one syllable. Those are some of the things that have changed.”
In the next question he answered, though, Payton in a way established his philosophy.
“I may not want tempo (in some situations),” Payton said. “My defense might be tired. So if I’m going tempo, I want to be able to control that.”
Payton also sees importance in getting the initial first down of a drive. Three-and-outs are bad enough — and Denver’s had a bunch the past few weeks. They’re worse if you’re playing fast and give your defense even less time.
Even without tempo, four of Denver’s first-half drives Sunday lasted 2:43 or less. That included an opening series that took just 22 seconds off the clock and also a 1:15 three-and-out.
It’s become something of a prickly topic with Payton, though. After Sunday’s comeback win, the first question he got asked was just about the wild fourth quarter, and this is how he started his answer:
“We got the first score we needed. Then obviously, we get into two-minute offense,” he said. “I don’t want to hear about tempo, alright? But I think we made enough plays in a short period of time.”
Make of that what you will.
As for the officiating, yeah, it’s an issue and not just for the Broncos but league-wide.
Penalties are definitely up this year, and that’s due in part to the major uptick in the number of kick return plays.
Anecdotally, though, it feels like more players and coaches are saying more regularly that they’re annoyed with the inconsistency in officiating.
The league should absolutely have full-time referees. It’s too big a business, the games are too important and there’s too much gambling money involved to carry on long-term with a different arrangement.
And just one thing for clarity here: The league can have an officiating problem and the Broncos can have a penalty problem at the same time. Both appear to be true in 2025.
Oh, and have some Block 16 for me in Omaha.
Former Broncos QB Russell Wilson blasts Sean Payton as ‘classless’
Why is Sean Payton such a grump? Would it kill him to be happy after such a historic and euphoric victory?!
— RJ Koch, Tonawanda, N.Y.
Ha! Great question, and thanks for writing in, RJ.
One of many reasons Payton is a fascinating figure to cover is that his thoughts, moods, etc. are usually very different from where fans or even players sometimes land.
There was a point in 2023 when the Broncos beat the Packers — it kicked off a five-game winning streak — and it was his first win in Denver to get the Broncos to 2-5 at the time. People were happy after a close win and all that, and the next day, he talked about driving around after the game and asking himself why he couldn’t be happy.
The rationale Sunday was more straightforward: The Broncos played really badly for long swaths of the game. They won, yes, and did so in exciting, emotional fashion. He called it “euphoric” for Denver’s players. But that didn’t mask, even in the moment, how much bad there was, too.
A win is much better than a loss. 5-2 is better than 4-3. There’s good to take away from the game. But this is a team that also has a lot of work to do if it’s really going to get where it wants to go.
Parker, what in the world happened with the fourth quarter? I’ve been sitting here since the game ended and can’t for the life of me figure out how we pulled that off. Everything we did worked.
And did Sean Payton get the penalty on purpose to give the Giants an easier touchdown to get more time on the clock for the offense? I jest, but it worked.
— Marshall, Parker
Hey Marshall, thanks for the question.
On the fourth quarter, yeah, it was insane. We’ve written and talked about it so many different ways, and I still kind of just shrug.
That’s an interesting thought on the penalty. Payton clearly didn’t do it intentionally, but you could make an easy argument that incurring the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty was only the second-worst move by a coach in that sequence. When Jaxson Dart was originally ruled short of the end zone on the quarterback sneak, Giants coach Brian Daboll initially called timeout. He got it back when the review ruled Dart scored, but brother, what are you doing?
With 30-plus seconds left, on the goal line trailing by four with a timeout in your pocket, the clock is your friend. Not your enemy. Clearly, they ended up leaving too much time anyway. But he was going to stop the clock and theoretically help Denver anyway.
Neither ultimately really mattered — the penalty didn’t cost much yardage and the timeout wasn’t actually needed — but man. Not exactly a glorious sequence for either sideline.
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