ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Down multiples scores in each of the last two games, Pat Shurmur had no choice but to run a no-huddle offense in the fourth quarter.
In those 30 minutes of football, the Broncos’ offense scored a remarkable 42 points.
“Particularly the Charger game, that last drive was very, very well run,” Vic Fangio said, reflecting on the Broncos’ hurry-up offense in the fourth quarter in Week 8. “We had a lot of short gains in there, meaning seven, eight, 10 [yards] that we had to get up and get going. I thought we did excellent in that.”
Working in an up-tempo offense, Drew Lock and the Broncos’ offense dropped 21 points and 195 yards of offense, including 155 yards through the air. The final passing yard from Lock to K.J. Hamler as time expired sealed the Broncos’ 21-point comeback victory.
The no-huddle offense worked again a week later against the Atlanta Falcons.
“Last week, we had to hurry up while we were coming back and did well there also,” Fangio stated on Wednesday. “You know we didn’t end it well, that last play, where we really didn’t get the play off. That was poorly done there.”
Against the Falcons, Denver again scored 21 points in the final quarter and had 196 yards of offense, including 151 passing yards. In the three quarters before, however, the Broncos only scored six points and had 209 yards of offense while huddling and running a slower-paced offense.
“Overall, it’s been good,” Fangio said of Denver’s hurry-up offense. “We try to work on it a lot and do it a lot. In training camp — obviously training camp was cut short, and now dealing with the restrictions and the squeezing of our schedule with COVID and stuff, it’s been harder to work on, but we still make time for it during practice.”
In the 20 quarters Lock has played in full this season, the Broncos’ offense has averaged just over 3.5 points per quarter in 18 of them — a pace of just over 14 points per game. However, in the past two fourth quarters, Denver’s offense has taken off while going up-tempo.
And it isn’t a coincidence that the Broncos’ young offense has thrived working at a fast-paced tempo.
“Nowadays with this college stuff, a lot of these young men are coming from these college systems where everything is fast-paced. And they are used to it,” Phillip Lindsay explained. “And then you get to the NFL and it’s ‘get in the huddle.’ You know a lot of these players, this is their first time ever being in huddles. Usually, you get the calls from the line of scrimmage. So it could be that.”
“I think that any offense can thrive with [an up-tempo offense], especially with a younger class of men that you can kind of get on the ball and go,” Lindsay added.
One of those players Lindsay is referring to is the Broncos’ starting “Q” himself, Drew Lock.
“I did that all of college,” the second-year quarterback said on Wednesday about running an up-tempo offense.
Outside of Melvin Gordon, Graham Glasgow, Demar Dotson and Tim Patrick, every other starter on the Broncos’ offense is on their rookie contract. With so much youth that has experience going up-tempo in college, why don’t the Broncos run this type of offense before the fourth quarter?
“I saw when it works really, really good and I saw when it works really, really bad,” Lock said on Wednesday, explaining why Denver doesn’t go no-huddle from the beginning of the game. “If you go up-tempo and push the ball and get things rolling, it’s going to be awesome. You’re going to be like, ‘Ah this is breaking science in the game of football.’ But when you go three-and-out in 30 seconds because you’re trying to go up-tempo, it puts your defense in a really bad spot.”
In Lock’s career at Missouri, he dropped over 60 points in a game going up-tempo. But he also witnessed first-hand how a no-huddle system can “shoot yourself in the foot” when an offense forces their defense back on the field with a quick three-and-out.
“That’s just the game you have to juggle with possibly going up-tempo,” Lock stated. “If you feel like you have a great set of plays you feel like you can go up-temp on, then sure. But I think you see us going up-tempo because we’re coming back from being down and if we go three-and-out, we’re already losing by X amount of points, we have to go fast. You’re not going to win the game by just slowly moving the ball down the field and that’s why you see us going fast in the second half.”
For the most part, the 2020 Broncos have really only experienced the positives of the up-tempo offense thanks in part to their youth’s experience with it. However, there’s a “really, really bad” side to it as well that is holding Denver back from unleashing it for the entirety of a game.
