What. A. Game.
And I’m not even speaking as a Broncos fan — well, maybe a little — but really, what a game! There’s a reason why that was the highest rated AFC Championship game in nearly three decades, and it’s because it had everything: Great players, great plays and, above all else, great storylines.
If that truly was the last Brady-Manning matchup, then it was a darn good way to go out.
But how did the Broncos do it? As Denver is well aware (as are the Broncos, themselves), almost nobody picked Denver to walk away with a win, and most didn’t expect it to be close. Yet, they did, and aside from some late-game heroics from Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski, it was a dominant performance.
There are plenty of reasons why the Broncos won, but let’s look past the surface and towards the advanced analytics to see what we may have missed (or, in some cases, to backup what we already saw):
Tom Brady had a bad day
Just how bad was Tom Brady’s day? Well, I think it’s safe to say that it was one of the worst games of his legendary career.
On Sunday, Brady graded out with a -4.4 grade, according to Pro Football Focus, which is his worst grade since back in Week 7 of 2013. In fact, since PFF started grading back in 2007, Brady has only earned three grades worse than the one he had on Sunday: That Week 7 game (-6.3), the 2009 Wild Card loss to the Baltimore Ravens (-5.0) and the 2007 AFC Championship victory over the Chargers (-4.7).
And what’s most surprising is that Brady actually performed worse when not pressured (-4.7) than when he was pressured (-0.3). My guess is that those numbers stem from the simple fact that Brady was pressured so often (30 out of 61 drop backs) that he was anticipating the pressure before it even came.
Really, if it wasn’t for those final two passes to Rob Gronkowski, this may have been the worst game of Brady’s career. Not only was he having a hard time finding open receivers amongst Denver’s secondary, but he was missing open guys, too.
Wade Phillips deserves every bit of praise he gets for that performance; that was an all-time great gameplan from an all-time great coordinator.
Sometimes you win with less
Coming into the game, I was extremely curious as to how Wade Phillips would attack Tom Brady and his beat-up offensive line. Denver needed to get to Brady, and they needed to get to him fast; give him time to throw, and he will eat you alive.
But just how would Denver go about getting to Brady? Would Phillips unleash the blitz, hitting Brady from all directions and forcing him to make an immediate decision? Or would he rush four, allowing the rest of the defense to stay back in coverage, and hope his superstar pass rushers could get to Brady without help?
Both options made sense, but Phillips made the ballsy decision by going with the latter, and it worked to perfection.
Not only did Phillips limit his blitzes, but he almost cut them out entirely, blitzing a season-low 17.2 percent of the time. In fact, there were multiple occasions where the Broncos only brought three pass rushers, and they still generated pressure.
Wade Phillips took the gamble that his superstar pass rushers, Von Miller (8.5) and DeMarcus Ware (8.0), could wreck havoc all alone, and they absolutely did, combining for three sacks and 15 more quarterback pressures; Derek Wolfe (5.8), who has been playing outstanding of late, also added a sack and seven more pressures.
As a unit, the Denver Broncos were able to get to Brady 23 times on the day, the most by any defensive unit all season, which is, again, made all the more impressive by the fact that they hardly ever brought more than four pass rushers.
On 39 passes with a 4-man rush, Denver had two sacks, 12 QB hits, and five hurries.
Created pressure on 48.7% of those dropbacks.
— PFF (@PFF) January 25, 2016
It’ll take a much different gameplan to take down Cam Newton in two weeks, but in the case of Tom Brady, Wade Phillips aced the test.
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The Denver Broncos faced a juggernaut
Coming into the game, all anybody could talk about was Tom Brady and the New England offense. How would the Broncos stop Brady? Who would cover Gronk? Are the Patriots unbeatable with Julian Edelman?
Coming out of the game, it looks like we should have spent a lot more time talking about the New England defense.
While the Broncos defense took home the crown on Sunday, the Patriots weren’t far behind. In fact, they were outstanding, and we probably shouldn’t have expected otherwise. For the season, the only team that graded out higher than the New England Patriots on defense (194.5) was the Denver Broncos (252.2), and it looked that way in the AFC Championship game.
Of the 18 Patriots defenders that got on the field, only one, Malcom Brown (-0.4), finished the game with a negative grade, and there were 10 that graded out higher than +1.0 (a green grade). That’s unbelievably impressive. Essentially, that means that nobody on the Patriots defense had a bad day.
The Broncos can’t even say that.
While the Broncos finished the day with a higher cumulative grade than the Patriots, they had seven defenders finish with a negative grade, including three (Brandon Marshall, Danny Trevathan and Shane Ray) who finished under -1.0 (a red grade). Now, they also had 10 who finished with green grades, and Miller, Ware and Wolfe all finished with higher grades than New England’s best defender (Dont’a Hightower; 5.8), but that shouldn’t undersell the Patriots’ performance.
All that is to say that it shouldn’t be surprising that the Broncos offense slowed down at times; they were facing what just might be the second best defense in the NFL.
Again, all that matters, and all that will continue to matter, is that the Broncos score one more point than their opponent. Luckily, they’ve become very good at doing just that.