How did the entire Bronco offensive line compare to offensive lines around the league?
SISdatahub.com has data on the performance of every single offensive lineman in the NFL, but what they don’t have is full team data and/or full positional data. So I have scrubbed their data and tabulated it. This will be a series with the first part focusing on the entire OL for each team, then I will go from left to right across the OL (starting with LT) in coming articles.
Every OL player at SIS is listed with a position, and that is the position where they played the majority of their snaps in 2024. Some OL guys who only played or predominantly played as the 6th offensive lineman, were listed as TEs, but I changed them all to LTs for clarity. In the table below, green is good, red is bad.
The Bronco OL had one of the best rates of blown blocks in the league at 2.3%. Only the Packers had a lower blown block rate for their entire OL. For those who don’t know, SIS defines a blown block thusly:
BB or Total Blown Blocks: A blown block, any time a blocker does not successfully block the defender they attempted to engage with and, as a result, gives the defender an opportunity to negatively affect the play.
Overall the Broncos had only 120 blown blocks over 17 regular season games.
The Bronco OL also allowed the third fewest sacks in the league with only the Bills and Packers allowing fewer (both allowed 10). On a percentage basis the Bronco OL only allowed a sack on 0.23% of their total snaps (each dropback involves five OL snaps – 6th on rare occasions). If you run the numbers based on total dropbacks, they come out 3rd as well.
Counting scrambles and not plays negated by penalty, Drew Nix dropped back to pass 620 times in 2024. He scrambled fifty times and had 78 designed runs. He also had 14 kneeldowns, which the league still stupidly counts as a rushing attempt.
The Bronco OL was also only called for 14 holding penalties which was slightly above average. There were four OLs were called for 23. Even in his worst years, Garett Bolles was only called for 9 holding penalties. The most any single player was called for holding this season was seven times.
While holding was up overall in the NFL this season relative to the last two years, it was still down from historic highs in 2019 and 2018. There were 2.51 holding penalties called per game this year in the NFL. In 2020, the NFL refs decided not to call holding at all. See the chart below.
The only other ranking for full offensive lines can be found at ESPN’s NextGenStats. They use win rate which I discussed here. According to ESPN, the Broncos had the best pass blocking and run blocking OL in the NFL in 2024.
Next time I will look at how our left tackles (almost exclusively Bolles) played relative to other left tackles in the league.
I will also discuss whether the Broncos need to (or can) do anything to improve any spot on the OL since all five starters are under contract for 2025 (at least).