Numbers to watch for the Broncos: Here’s why 13 could be the lucky number for Von Miller

As Von Miller goes into a contract year, he — like the team around him — is at a crossroads.

During the MLB All-Star Weekend festivities at Coors Field on Sunday, he told 9News that he wants to play another “five to seven years” — a significant goal given that Miller is 32 years old.

That would take Miller into a career length of 15 to 17 years. It sounds audacious, but it is a reasonable goal in light of the career span of other elite edge rushers of recent vintage, particularly Terrell Suggs and Julius Peppers, both of whom played 17 seasons apiece. Peppers retired after the 2018 season, Suggs is technically still a free agent, although he has not played since working in rotational duty for the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV 17 months ago.

But to have that career length, two things must happen:

1. Today, Miller must get back to near the production at which he played from 2011-18, when he posted double-digit sack totals in every season in which he played at least 10 games.
2. In the years beyond, Miller will likely have to adjust to a different role: that of a pass-rush specialist who works situationally.

That’s eventually what Peppers did, which is why his career arc is worth examining in regard to Miller’s future. After playing between 74 and 82 percent of his team’s snaps in the 2012, 2013 and 2014 seasons, Peppers’ snap count dropped to 66 percent in 2015, 57 percent in 2016 and to 50 and 51 percent in his final two seasons, which saw him return to Carolina.

Yet Peppers remained effective in a strictly-defined role that allowed him to play to his strengths as a pass rusher. In 2015 at age 35, he had 10.5 sacks for the Green Bay Packers and made his ninth Pro Bowl. Two years later at age 37, he had 11 sacks for the Panthers, even though his situational role meant that he started just five of the 16 games in which he played.

Peppers never failed to have at least 7.0 sacks in any season he played after turning 32. In those seven campaigns, he took down quarterbacks 59.5 times — an average of 8.6 per season. More importantly for his legacy, he moved from a borderline Hall-of-Fame candidate to a likely lock, given that he retired with the NFL’s fourth-highest career-sack total since the sack stat became official in 1982.

Miller doesn’t have to post 60 more sacks in his career to be destined for a gold jacket; the Super Bowl 50 MVP trophy adds a line to his resume that Peppers’ CV lacked. But every eligible player with at least 140 sacks is in the Hall of Fame.

So how does Miller get a good start on that — and set himself up for a big score at contract time? He needs one more season in which he has a sack tally in line with his career pace.

Miller has 106 sacks in 135 games. Pro-rate that to a 17-game rate and you have an average of 13.3 sacks per 17 outings.

Which is why “13” is his magic number.

He hit or surpassed 13 sacks four times. For the current situation, the most significant of these was in 2018, the only full season Miller played with Bradley Chubb on the opposite flank.

But hitting 13 — even with the extra game to do it — would be one of Miller’s most significant accomplishments. Consider this: Since 2005, you can count the number of 13-sack seasons for pass rushers on one hand — and for the last 10 seasons, it takes just one digit. Indianapolis’ Robert Mathis had a 19.5-sack explosion in 2013 at age 32; he’s the only player 32 or older at the end of a regular season to hit 13 sacks in the past 10 seasons.

If Miller does this, he’ll earn a final big deal — and he’ll push his career sack total to 119, and that would bring a bigger career-sack total into play. A tally of 160 sacks — which would be third since the sack became an official stat and fourth if pre-1982 sacks are included — would push him onto the NFL’s Mount Rushmore of edge rushers.

Miller will attempt to improve his sack tally after a season that saw the greatest single-season decline in sack rate since 1994. Last year, the league-wide sack rate plummeted from one every 14.99 pass plays in 2019 to one every 16.87 pass plays. That sack rate was the fourth-lowest since the AFL-NFL merger per the data compiled by pro-football-reference (which includes sacks going back to 1970); only 1994, 2008 and 2016 had worse sack rates.

Furthermore, in the bigger picture, sacks have never been harder to amass than they are today. For the post-merger decades of the 1970s through the 2000s, the sack rate was never lower than one ever 14.29 pass plays, the league-wide rate of the 1980s.

But since 2010, the sack rate has been one every 16.28 pass plays, with five of the 10 worst post-merger sack rates coming in that span.

That is the environment in which Miller will attempt to turn back the clock. But if he’s healthy and the offense does enough to allow the Broncos to play from ahead, he could have the type of season that few pass rushers age 32 and older achieve — which would set him up for the contract he hopes to sign in the next eight months, whether that deal is with the Broncos or someone else.