Mile High Sports

Broncos offense hits a new low in Christmas night loss to Chiefs

Casey Light

Just when we thought the Denver Broncos offense had hit its low point with a three-point performance against the New England Patriots in Week 15, things got even worse against the Kansas City Chiefs in a Christmas night loss that ended Denver’s hopes at defending their Super Bowl 50 crown.

Denver produced just 246 yards of total offense in Kansas City on Sunday, being out-gained as a team by KC’s Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill alone. Trevor Siemian posted his worst career passer rating while completing just 39.5 percent of his passes.

In the loss, Denver’s duo of 1,000-yard receivers, Emmanuel Sanders and Demaryius Thomas, had just four combined catches for 46 yards on 11 targets. In soggy conditions, against a strong Kansas City secondary, Siemian could do nothing to stretch the field. Here’s an alarming dissection of his stats, per Pro Football Focus:

[Siemian] completed just three of 13 passes that traveled at least 10 yards through the air, for 64 yards and an interception, and on 10 pressured throws he completed just two passes for 20 yards, and had a QB rating of 39.6.

Devontae Booker fumbled and Siemian was intercepted on the last play of the game to swing the turnover differential 3-1 in KC’s favor. (Kalif Raymond had a special teams fumble, as well.)

Yes, the scoreboard looked a little more positive, as Denver limped away with 10 points in a 23-point defeat. But six of those points were gifted to the offense thanks to a Justin Simmons near-INT-TD. Simmons was stopped at the Kansas City 6-yard line and Justin Forsett found the end zone for his first touchdown as a Bronco.

It was the first time Forsett scored in 2016 (he did not find paydirt during stints with Baltimore or Detroit this year), and nearly felt like it had been that long since the Broncos as a team had scored a touchdown. Forsett’s first-quarter rush was one of only two touchdowns Denver has scored over its last three games.

Things are going so poorly for the Denver offense that they have not produced a touchdown drive of greater than 50 yards since a second-quarter drive of 75 yards in Week 13 against Jacksonville. Since scoring three touchdowns in the second half of an overtime loss to Kansas City in Week 12, Denver has just three total offensive touchdowns over its last four games  – two of which were set up by defensive turnovers.

In the loss to Kansas City, the Broncos were held to 63 yards on the ground. It was the sixth time in 15 games Denver was held to 65 or fewer yards. They are 2-4 in those contests, including 0-3 in the last three games. It was the fourth time this season Denver was held below 300 total yards.

The offense is quickly sliding down the ranks, currently sitting in the bottom third of the league in key categories like offensive touchdowns per game, red zone scoring attempts per game and offensive points per game.

Denver will have to focus on fixing that for the 2017 season, as the only thing left to play for is playing spoiler against the Raiders to keep them from grabbing the No. 1 overall seed.

The Denver offense hit a new low on Christmas night, and here’s what the team at MHS (and some of our favorite follows on Twitter) had to say about it…

https://twitter.com/Cianaf/status/813220793891127296

https://twitter.com/AllbrightNFL/status/813243030383816704

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