The Golden Game – Super Bowl 50 – wound up with a distinct Orange & Blue tint, and a third Lombardi Trophy is coming home to the Mile High City.
Of course, credit the Broncos’ championship defense that now has truly earned that title after bringing the relentless heat and delivering the goods on one scintillating Super Sunday night in Santa Clara.
How good was it? Even Coldplay sounds a helluva lot better right now.
And after that Tour D Force we just witnessed from the Broncos here in the NFL postseason, here are seven of the more notable numbers and significant stats from a remarkable run filled with them:
The Broncos’ three playoff opponents – the Steelers (26.4 points per game), Patriots (29.1) and Panthers (31.3) – entered the postseason as the league’s fourth, third and first-ranked scoring offenses respectively. But Wade Phillips’ Denver D held them all to 18 points or fewer and at least 10.4 points below their regular-season averages. They saved the best for last, holding the Carolina’s league-leading offense – one that had rolled up 80 points in its two playoff wins – to a season-low 10 points on the Big Stage.
In those three post-season games, the Broncos squared off against three QBs who have combined to win six Super Bowls, three Big Game MVP awards and three league MVP honors. Against the Orange & Blue, Ben Roethlisberger, Tom Brady and Cam Newton combined to complete 51.5 percent of their passes with only one TD toss, three interceptions and a pair of fumbles.
On the subject of post-season turnovers, the Broncos wound up with seven takeaways – four fumble recoveries and three interceptions – over the last month, leading directly to 28 of the Broncos’ 67 post-season points. As a comparison, in their previous eight playoff games – dating back to the 2005 AFC title game loss to the Steelers – Denver only had forced a total of six opponent turnovers.
Finally in these three playoff tilts, Pittsburgh, New England and Carolina faced 42 third-down situations against the Broncos, but only wound up converting seven of them for a 16.6 percent conversion rate.
So the Denver D not only had to slow three of the league’s best offenses in the postseason, but it had to overcome the Broncos’ own struggling offnese which wound up scoring only four offensive TDs in the three games while averaging all of 254 yards and 14 first downs per outing and converting 10-fo-46 third-down attempts (21.7 percent).
Moreover, in the first 49 Super Bowls, seven teams had failed to amass 200 total yards. All seven lost, falling by an average of 23.7 points. With only 194 yards Sunday night, the Broncos joined that club, only becoming the first to win – and by 14 points at that.
Finally, if we’re only going to single out one individual from this all-around team effort, it might as well be the Super Bowl 50 MVP. In his first five career playoff games, including this season’s divisional-round win over the Steelers, Von Miller amassed 20 total tackles, 1.5 sacks and no forced fumbles, interceptions or passes defensed. In the last two games against the Patriots and Panthers, he notched 11 total tackles, five sacks, two forced fumbles, two passes defensed and an interception.
