Working from home and being relatively bored on a Friday, I dug through stats of the last five matchups against the Broncos. I picked out numbers that appeared to be germaine to the outcome of the game and some fairly obvious things came to light. You can open my spreadsheet as a PDF and keep it in a separate window while we trudge headlong into an analysis:
- The winner had the highest NET yards
- Highest completions did not guarantee a win
- The winner had the highest AVG yards per pass play
- In 3 out of 5 games, the highest net yards passing wins
- In 3 out of 5 games, the highest 3rd down eff. won
- In 3 out of 5 games, the highest red zone eff. won
The 2 critical stats for winning a game were highest net yards and highest average yards per completion. Translation? Hit your receivers often for big gains.