Broncos snap review and analysis vs. Bills

Who played and who didn’t in the Denver Broncos win over the Buffalo Bills? Let’s review.

The offensive penalties against the Buffalo Bills were maddening, but I’ll take an ugly win over a pretty loss any day. Ten penalties were called on the Denver Broncos – eight on offense, two on special teams. Thankfully their defense avoided penalties completely (knocks on wood).

Offense

The OL had a bunch of penalties but only one lost snap injury and that took Lloyd Cushenberry off the field for three snaps when he was replaced by Luke Wattenberg who saw his first offensive snaps of the season. He didn’t play poorly enough for me to notice his presence so that is a good thing. Last season he played so poorly that you couldn’t miss it. Quinn (the lesser) Bailey played six snaps as the sixth offensive lineman. Despite that our run game was largely stymied by the stacked boxes that the Bills defense played against us.

Michael Burton played 12 snaps and got a false start penalty. Javonte Williams played 52 percent of the offensive snaps, Samaje Perine 33 percent and Jaleel McLaughlin 15 percent. This was the first game where McLaughlin was not effective running the ball, but all of our backs were getting hit before the LOS on most running plays as Buffalo was consistently winning the LOS.

We used two tight ends on a fair number of snaps with Adam Trautman getting 64 percent of the snaps, Chris Manhertz 40 percent and newly activated Lucan Krull 27 percent. Considering that we might have run plays with four WRs and no TEs, I’d guess we ran two TEs about one third of the time. More than that if you count Bailey as a “TE” when we ran six OL.

The WR group had Courtland Sutton, Marvin Mims (yay! now throw him the ball), Jerry Jeudy, LJ Humphrey and newly activated David Sills play 87, 69, 65, 19 and 5 percent of the snaps. This marks the first time that Mims was WR2 by snap counts. Despite that he was only targeted once. He was the target of one of Russell Wilson’s five incompletions.

Jarett Stidham and Cameron Fleming were active but did not play on offense or special teams.

Dwayne Washington was active but played only on special teams.

Defense

Like normal the defense had four players take every defensive snap. This game it was Patrick Surtain, Justin Simmons, Alex Singleton and Fabian Moreau. CB3 Ja’Quan McMillian was on the field for all but one defensive snap. He is quickly becoming the next Chris Harris Jr. While he has a long way to go to get Pro-Bowl level, I like his current trajectory.

The only other CB who played defensive snaps was Damarri Mathis. While he only played four defensive snaps he still somehow managed to screw up.

PJ Locke played 20 defensive snaps before he had to leave with injury to be replaced by Delarrin Turner-Yell who played 34 (63 percent).

Josey Jewell played 33 snaps at ILB while Drew Sanders played two.

Baron Browning, Jonathan Cooper, Nik Bonitto, and Ronnie Perkins played 35, 35, 25 and 19 snaps at OLB.

DJ Jones and Mike Purcell played 33 and 23 snaps at DT/NT.

Zach Allen was the only DE who played more than half the snaps 44 (81 percent). Jonathan Harris and Matt Henningsen played 19 and 10 snaps respectively. So it appears that we were using mostly a light front against the Bills which might have explained why we got gashed by their running game. Elijah Garcia as not active for this game.

Three defensive guys played only on special teams: Riley Moss, Tremon Smith and Justin Strnad. Sanders also played quite a bit on special teams.