History says Broncos won't sustain close-game success in 2016

It’s a full month before the start of training camp, and there are several harbingers suggesting the 2016 Denver Broncos’ season won’t have nearly the Super ending of its predecessor.

Even casual NFL fans likely are aware that only one of the past 17 Super Bowl champions has repeated the feat the following season. And of the eight Big Game winners who have managed to defend their crowns, all eight were led by future Hall-of-Fame quarterbacks – something that the current Orange & Blue roster doesn’t appear to contain at this point.

Meanwhile, the wise folks in Vegas aren’t exactly on the Broncos’ repeat bandwagon this offseason, and there’s the elite-defense-hasn’t-won-multiple-championship angle I covered a few weeks ago.

With the odds already stacked against the boys in Blue, I don’t mean to pile on, Broncos Country, but there’s yet another angle that doesn’t portend good tidings for your heroes this coming season.

Remember all the close wins (touchdown or fewer) Denver piled up last season–a post-merger-record 11 of them, in fact? Well, winning more than your reasonable share of those games one season doesn’t exactly tend to carry over and/or translate into success the following year.

I went into this quick research exercise believing this to be the general rule, and sure enough, the results more or less bore that out.

Gary Kubiak’s 2015 Broncos were the 14^th team since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger to win nine or more regular-season/playoff games by seven points or fewer.

Here’s the breakdown on what transpired the following season for the previous 13—all of which were coming off playoff seasons, including five Super Bowl winners:

• Barely half (seven teams) posted winning records the following season
• Fewer than half (six) made the postseason
• Only one (the 2004 Patriots) made it to the Super Bowl
• And after all won at least nine “close” games the previous season, only three of those 13 teams won six or more such games the ensuing year with the contingent as whole winning an average of 4.3 close games while losing an average of 3.5

Of the five aforementioned previous post-merger Super Bowl winners who won nine or more close games en route to the top, only two (the ’04 Patriots and ’07 Colts) had a winning record and qualified for the playoffs the next season. None of the five, however, notched as many as six close wins in those follow-up seasons.

In short, this is the simple math of the NFL’s law of averages: Win a bunch of tightly-contested, one-score games one season but just don’t expect the same favorable treatment from Lady Luck the next.