Was Bo Nix to blame for the Denver Broncos' struggles against the Seattle Seahawks?

Bo Nix‘s debut didn’t go according to plan.

Nix only completed two passes eight yards downfield or farther. He turned the ball over twice. His 47.5 passer rating was one of the worst by a Bronco in the post-Manning era. The Denver Broncos lost.

Head coach Sean Payton said after the game that it wasn’t the rookie’s fault. He placed blame on the running game, the pass protection and the receivers.

“We just got to be better around him,” Payton said.

Was he right?

Let’s dig into the game and see for ourselves.

The Protection

The Broncos’ protection was not good on Sunday… but there’s a catch.

In one-on-one matchups, the Broncos’ linemen were solid. For the most part, they handled the man in front of them, although there were a couple of hiccups like in the play below.

Quinn Meinerz gets beaten. Ben Powers gets beaten. Nix doesn’t have time to deliver an on-target pass to Courtland Sutton on a deep dig.

Here’s another example, this time with Garett Bolles losing his battle.

Maybe Nix would have thrown short of the sticks on 3rd & 9 even if he had good protection. Maybe he would have hit Josh Reynolds for a first down. Regardless, the play was doomed by the offensive line.

Generally, the one-on-one matchups weren’t the problem for the Broncos. The bigger issue was that the Broncos weren’t setting up the right protections before the snap.

Here’s an example…

The Seahawks pack the line of scrimmage with potential rushers. The Broncos try to decipher who is rushing and who is dropping in coverage… and they get it wrong.

The center has nobody to block because the defensive tackles drop. Bolles is stuck with two rushers coming off his edge. Nix is forced to bail immediately. (He also runs out of bounds for a six-yard loss instead of throwing the ball away, which compounds the mistake.)

New Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald is known for his rush packages. Nix isn’t the first quarterback to struggle with decoding them. But the missed protection calls cost the Broncos a number of opportunities.

This time, the Seahawks send four rushers, and the Broncos have five blockers.

Easy, right?

Wrong. Macdonald outsmarts the rookie. The Broncos triple-team one rusher and leave a 3-on-2 on the other side.

Powers blocked two rushers about as well as possible, which helped Nix find the completion. The rookie did a good job throwing into the pockets behind blitzes on Sunday.

Here’s another example of a missed protection…

A run that converts a 3rd & 3 is a good play, but was Greg Dulcich about to run free through secondary for a big gain? We’ll never know, because the pressure was immediate.

Football stats are always hard to trust. Too many factors impact each play. But there are two that I think tell the story of the Broncos’ pass protection on Sunday.

The 33rd Team tracks pressure rates. They found that Nix was pressured on 44.9% of his dropbacks. That was the highest rate in the NFL.

ESPN tracks “pass-block win rate,” which gives a win to either the pass rusher or the blocker on every rep. If the blocker locks the rusher up for 2.5 seconds or more, he wins. If the rusher gets off the block in less than 2.5 seconds, that’s a win.

ESPN ranked the Broncos 20th in pass-block win rate.

So what story do those two stats tell? Individually, the Broncos’ blockers were below average, but the quarterback was doomed by the number of unblocked rushers that were allowed.

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