A week ago, the Broncos played the Seahawks in what should have been a thrilling alternate-universe-Super-Bowl-LX. What we actually encountered was a hyper-conservative Broncos passing game and a disjointed Seahawks offense.
A big part of the narrative about Denver’s offense was that both the offense and quarterback Bo Nix were playing cowardly football. After all, a team has thrown fewer 10+ yard passes in a game just 15 times in the last decade, so there’s room for some critique, even for a team that’s started 4-2. But I want to make sure we don’t harp on the wrong thing too much and tell a more complete story.
To help with that, I want to do a little blind resume comparison.
These are all players with a similar rate of what we might call quarterback cowardice, whether by design or by mid-play decision making. I took the percentage of dropbacks where the quarterback did one of the following:
- threw a screen
- threw the ball behind the line of scrimmage after the play had developed
- threw the ball away
These players all ranked among the highest in this combination of metrics since the 2020 season. Which might you prefer, though?
| QB A | QB B | QB C | |
| Screen% | 16% | 14% | 13% |
| Checkdown% | 4% | 5% | 4% |
| Throwaway% | 4% | 4% | 8% |
These guys are intentionally similar by these dimensions, so maybe you wouldn’t pick one immediately. You might lean away from the guy who is throwing it away more, but he’s also throwing fewer screens, and maybe you prefer a little more downfield scheme.
If these guys are playing conservatively, surely the offense is doing a lot of work to make things easier on them. Let’s add a few metrics to get a little more texture for how much ‘easy button’ play design is being given to them. These aren’t mutually exclusive categories, obviously—most bootlegs are also play action, for example—but to carve out those things would get too confusing to be worth it.
- Play action rate
- Bootleg rate
- RPO rate
| QB A | QB B | QB C | |
| Play Action % | 35% | 26% | 24% |
| Bootleg% | 11% | 9% | 11% |
| RPO% | 11% | 8% | 4% |
Wow, so Player A is operating within a pretty quarterback-friendly offense with a lot of deception and easier reads. Player C is a little less of a scheme-driven player (especially when we remember that the screen game isn’t as big a big part of his offense.)
Because we probably are a little suspicious of Player A for the scheme dependence and Player C for the throwaways we might prefer Player B, but to a large extent these players have pretty similar profiles that don’t give us a ton of confidence.
So who do we have here?
Player A is Aaron Rodgers in 2020, when he won the first of his two late-career MVP awards.
Player B is Patrick Mahomes in 2024, a year in which he went 15-1 as a starter and he finished 6th in MVP voting.
Player C is Bo Nix in 2026, a year in which I wouldn’t be surprised if some would vote him as the Least Valuable Player in the league.
This is all basically to say two things:
- A bunch of short passes and favorable play design isn’t always a bad thing
- Even the best quarterbacks are sometimes getting a lot of help
People were making a big deal of Nix’s average throw depth so far this year, but it’s just a few tenths of a yard shorter than Mahomes in 2024. And he’s operating in a much less friendly offense than Rodgers was in 2020.
There is a pretty stark phenomenon at play in terms of quarterback talent, though.
Using that same composite measure of timidity from above, here is a stretch of names from the top 20 player seasons on the ‘leaderboard’ over the past six-plus seasons. It’s basically a Hall of Famer sandwich on dubious bread.
Tyson Bagent
Tua Tagovailoa
Dorian Thompson-Robinson
Bo Nix
Patrick Mahomes
Aaron Rodgers
Patrick Mahomes
Aaron Rodgers
Patrick Mahomes
Alex Smith
Bailey Zappe
Derek Carr
Tua Tagovailoa
If you’re going to play that way you have to bring serious counterbalancing talent to the table, whether with your accuracy, athleticism, or receiving corps. And Nix in particular has failed to deliver.
Here are the same three seasons from above, but with some more differentiating metrics:
- On-Target rate on throws under 10 yards
- Rushing EPA per attempt
- YAC per reception by non-backs
| Short On-Target% | |
| Rodgers 2020 | 89% |
| Mahomes 2024 | 83% |
| Nix 2026 | 72% |
| Rushing EPA/A | |
| Rodgers 2020 | +0.09 |
| Mahomes 2024 | +0.45 |
| Nix 2026 | -0.06 |
| Receiver YAC/R | |
| Rodgers 2020 | 5.8 |
| Mahomes 2024 | 5.2 |
| Nix 2026 | 4.1 |
And that’s how a top quarterback can display his talent even with a bunch of dink-and-dunk throws. (Of course, all of these would look better for Nix if the 2025 season repeated itself, even if it wouldn’t put him in MVP-candidate territory.)
Here’s a comparison of Nix’s last two seasons with the same metrics we’ve been talking about. This shows that the offense has trusted him a little more, but he and the receivers have not rewarded that trust.
Bo Nix – Last 2 Seasons
| Season | 2025 | 2026 |
| Screen% | 13% | 13% |
| Checkdown% | 2% | 4% |
| Throwaway% | 4% | 8% |
| Play Action % | 28% | 24% |
| Bootleg% | 13% | 11% |
| RPO% | 6% | 4% |
| Short On-Target % | 79% | 72% |
| Rush EPA/A | +0.17 | -0.06 |
| Receiver YAC/R | 4.7 | 4.1 |
The 2025 production is just a year old, so it’s obviously possible for Nix and the receivers to play a little better and make them legitimate AFC West contenders even with an undefeated Chiefs team in the fold. But that also adds to the emphasis that a bunch of short throws and conservative pass concepts doesn’t necessarily make for a problematic offense.
