ENFIELD, U.K. — Vance Joseph isn’t afraid to bring the house.
In the two biggest defensive plays of Denver’s 2024 win against the New York Jets, the Broncos defensive coordinator blitzed then-Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
Inside linebacker Justin Strnad sacked Rodgers on the first play of the game, and then safety P.J. Locke stormed off the edge and sacked Rodgers on an all-out, seven-man blitz on fourth-and-10 in the fourth quarter.
The Broncos finished the season with a 35.7% blitz rate overall as Joseph played man coverage extensively and blitzed seemingly at will.
He’s certainly still got plenty of blitz ideas at his disposal this year, but so far through five games, his Denver defense has been heating up quarterbacks without needing to commit extra rushers.
The Broncos have 22 more sacks than any other team since the start of 2024 and have once again stormed out to an early lead with 21 total sacks this fall, five more than anybody else in football.
They’ve done so in 2025, though, with just one game where the team’s blitz rate was above 33.3%, according to Next Gen Stats. Denver’s overall blitz rate is only marginally lower so far this year at 34.2%, but that’s largely because Joseph’s group brought more than four pass-rushers 68.2% of the time against Indianapolis in Week 2.
Otherwise, their weekly blitz and pressure rates look like this:
• Week 1 vs. Tennessee: 29.4% blitz, 50% pressure
• Week 3 at L.A. Chargers: 24.5% blitz, 54.7% pressure
• Week 4 vs. Cincinnati: 13.8% blitz, 37.9% pressure
• Week 5 at Philadelphia: 33.3% blitz, 33.3% pressure
That’s getting the job done without needing extra rushers to do it.
“I want us to be smart bullies,” Joseph said Thursday. “I don’t want to pressure and expose a corner or expose a linebacker. Every pressure we have is calculated and thought through on matchups. Can we pressure the quarterback? If we don’t, what do our matchups look like? I think we do a great job.
“Sometimes it doesn’t work out in our favor, but that’s always our purpose when we’re pressuring is to have our best matchups while we’re pressuring. So it’s a balancing act.”
Having pass-rushers the caliber of Nik Bonitto, Jonathon Cooper, Zach Allen and John Franklin-Myers certainly helps in that pursuit, but so does getting creative in how four-man rushes look.
Joseph put on a clinic of simulating pressure Sunday against Philadelphia on third downs in particular.
In 13 third-down looks, Joseph showed six, seven or even eight defenders at the line of scrimmage, signalling the kind of all-out blitz look that helped win a game at New York last year.
The Eagles false-started twice, and on the other 11 snaps, Denver’s defense racked up three sacks and five pressures and held quarterback Jalen Hurts to 3-of-8 passing and two first downs despite only sending more than four rushers one time.
Once, the four middle players bailed out into coverage while safety Talanoa Hufanga and nickel Ja’Quan McMillian served as half of Denver’s rushers and McMillian tracked Hurts down for a sack.
A week earlier against Cincinnati, the Broncos so thoroughly discombobulated the Bengals’ front that four players tried to block Allen while both Bonitto and Cooper stormed past the tackles looking for a front.
Three-on-six, advantage to the three.
“That’s the way to blitz these days,” Joseph said. “The ball’s coming out really, really fast. There’s a lot of pass game. So it’s fun to find pressures that can get home with four or five and still have good coverage. That’s the game plan each week.”
Joseph credits having certain looks that can “trap” an offense in certain protections if you can decode what the opponent likes to do and when.
“To create a free runner and only bring four or five is key, right?” Joseph said. “Because then you can have more coverage. When you’re bringing heavy, heavy pressure, the coverage is usually really, really weak. But with a simulated pressure, you can bring less guys and still have a strong pressure, but stronger coverage.
“That’s the point. And that’s just film study. Our staff does a great job of finding the soft spots in protections.”
Perhaps the most impressive part about Denver’s rush against Philadelphia: They sacked Hurts five times and yet only let him scramble once for 3 yards.
That takes discipline and unselfishness, according to Allen.
“You watch the film and guys aren’t winning with the prettiest rushes,” Allen said. “We rushed to win the game that week. It wasn’t that we were rushing to have the sexy numbers or any of the win rates or anything like that. Guys really put their egos aside.
“When you do that, especially with a group like ours that, we obviously are competitive and want good numbers, it just shows how close we all are.”
Denver faces another dangerous rusher this week in Justin Fields, whom Joseph said is a better runner than Hurts.
Fields has rushed 31 times for 204 yards (6.6 per carry) and three touchdowns in New York’s first five games.
That likely means more simulated pressure looks and more rushes to cage Fields. Two items on the checklist that are easier said than done, but at which the Denver defensive front has excelled this season.
“We’ve got a lot of smart guys, so we can do a lot of different things,” Allen said. “There’s times where you see across the league where maybe guys can’t pick up that much stuff, and they get pretty predictable. But we’re able to mix it up, and that makes all of our jobs easier.
“Having Vance, he makes it simple for us but also complicated for offenses, and that’s huge.”
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