That’s a wrap. Here’s a recap of how well the Denver Broncos defense has played in third and long situations.

I decided to put the final three games into one article. Keep in mind that the final game we had our JV secondary playing 75% of the game.

Indy was able to go 2 of 4 against us on 3rd & long with both conversions coming on throws to Frank Gore.

We held WAS to 1 of 7 on 3rd and long.

KC went 3 of 8 on 3rd and long against us with two of those conversions coming while we still had Chris Harris, Jr. and Aqib Talib in the game.

For the season the Broncos finished 4th in the league at stopping our opponents when we got them in 3rd & long. Including penalty conversions we allowed conversions on 23 of 97 - 23.7%. JAX led the league at 16.1% - 18 conversions on 112 attempts, while IND was the worst in the league allowing conversion on 35.0% of 3rd and longs. Offensively we finished the year 23rd - converting on 24.8% of our 3rd and long’s - including penalty conversions. CAR was best in the league at 34.1% while NYG was the worst at 16.7%. The Giants only converted 18 all year, but two of those came against us.

Overall the defense finished 2nd in the league at stopping our opponents on 3rd down. Not including penalties we allowed conversion on 66 of 209 - 31.6%. Only MIN was better at 25.2%. Our 3rd down defense was actually the best it has been since 2012, when we only allowed conversion on 30.6%.

Defensively, 2017 was actually our 3rd best team performance in term’s of stopping the opponent on 3rd down this century.

The Denver defense had some odd things happen this year. I’m going to expand this into an entire article, but here is the data to whet your appetite.

2017 saw the 3rd fewest yards allowed by our defense but a lot of points allowed (many directly attributed to the offence and special teams). So the 12.1 yards per point was the lowest value that out defense has allowed this century. Yards per points measures how far your opponents have to go to score by dividing total yards allowed by total points allowed. So the takeaway from that is that our team played uncomplimentary football all season setting our defense up in bad situations.

In terms of stopping the run on first down we finished the year 15th in the league allowing 3.87 ypc on first down runs. IND led the league allowing a meager 3.01 while the Chargers were the league worst surrendering 4.81.