Here's why the Broncos' first-possession problems are worse than you might think

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — The two worst current teams in first-possession outcomes will meet Sunday at Empower Field at Mile High. But the futility of the Las Vegas Raiders on their first possessions isn’t in the same galaxy as that of the Broncos.

The Raiders haven’t scored a first-possession touchdown in their last 11 games. That’s bad. Nearly half of the teams in the NFL can say that they haven’t gone more than two games without a first-possession touchdown. Nearly three-quarters of the league — 23 teams, to be precise — have scored at least one first-possession touchdown this season.

The median ongoing streak of games without a first-possession score is 3, according to data compiled by Sports Info Solutions and pro-football-refrence.com. Both of the participants in Thursday night’s Buccaneers-Eagles duel scored on their first possessions.

It seems so easy, right?

Not to the Raiders.

But their fortunes seem dandy compared with the Broncos.

Their streak is at 24 games. It’s the Raiders’ first-possession skein, multiplied by two, and then with two more games thrown in for good measure. It covers the entire Pat Shurmur era as Broncos offensive coordinator and the last three games in which Rich Scangarello called the plays.

Last season was the first year since at least 2001 that the Broncos didn’t score a touchdown on the first possession of any game. But this problem predates the 2020 campaign and Shurmur’s arrival; since Super Bowl 50, the Broncos have the fewest first-possession touchdowns in the NFL: a meager 10. The league average is 20.

Last Sunday, the Broncos started their first possession with a false-start penalty. They quickly went three-and-out. A week earlier, the Broncos got a pair of first downs, but a potential touchdown pass down the right side of the field sailed through the hands of tight end Albert Okwuegbunam. Seven days earlier, against the Jets, two incompletions that bracketed a 7-yard Melvin Gordon run forced the Broncos to punt from their 48-yard line.

But on the positive side, the Broncos haven’t had first-series turnover. They had three of them in the final seven games of the 2020 season, punctuating a 10-game stretch in which six of their opening series ended in either a turnover or a three-and-out.

Every failure tells a story.

“Sometimes what looks to be a slow start, sometimes is somebody getting beat deep or somebody missing a block, somebody dropping a pass or maybe a poor throw,” Broncos coach Vic Fangio said. “All of a sudden it’s a slow start and everybody thinks it’s a slow start because you’re not ready, you’re not into the game, your mind’s not right. Sometimes it’s that; sometimes your mind isn’t right.”

But sometimes, it’s another thing entirely.

“It’s kind of like in baseball. A team loses three to nothing and they say, ‘Man, our team looked listless and lazy.’ [But] they had no base runners,” Fangio said. “When you have no base runners, you’re not going to look very good. There’s all kinds of things that go into that, and hopefully we can get that rectified.”

But 24 first-possession drives in a row without a touchdown? That’s harder to explain away. Consider this: Since 2019, the chances of driving to a first-possession touchdown are 23.7 percent. When a team starts at its 25-yard line or closer to its own end zone, that percentage drops slightly, to 21.1 percent.

The chances of not scoring a touchdown on 24 consecutive opening drives? By the current rate, the Broncos’ odds of doing this are 1-in-305. The Raiders’ odds of going 11 games without a first-series score are a comparatively reasonable 1-in-14.

Their Broncos’ early-game and third-down offensive woes could be symptoms of larger problems on the unit, although Fangio said he believed this was not the case.

“It’s just everything,” Shurmur said a moment after he was asked about the team’s slow starts during his press conference Thursday. “We have a young offense. I was told today that it’s the third-youngest offense. We have some growing pains that we’ve gone through, but we’re playing better in a lot of areas. There are just some areas we have to continue to get better at.”

Starting with, well, the start.

The two worst current teams in first-possession outcomes meet Sunday.

And if one of them finally ends their woes, it could decide the game — and alter the trajectory of the rest of the season with it.