Mile High Report
For the first time this year, all five OL starters did not play all the offensive snaps, but this is a good thing. Garett Bolles came off the field for one snap because of a ding, and then he and Quinn Meinerz and Mike McGlinchey got a three snap break for the final kneel-down drive. Ben Powers, Luke Wattenberg and Bo Nix all played every offensive snap. Alex Palczewski played 13 snaps as the 6th OL and then he got three snaps at RT. Matt Peart played four snaps at LT and Alex Forsyth played three snaps at G in place of the Belly.
Two former Broncos were the only active players who didn’t play for the Bengals – Dalton Risner and Brett Rypien. The only active Bronco who did not play was Jarett Stidham.
The Bronco game-day inactives were Sam Ehlinger, Jaleel McLaughlin, Que Robinson, Frank Crum, Lucas Krull, and Jordan Jackson. Jackson was inactivated in favor of Sai’vion Jones who played his first real NFL action.
Courtland Sutton, Troy Franklin, Marvin Mims, Pat Bryant, and Trent Sherfield played 69, 47, 37, 32 and 22 snaps. This as a season high for Pat Bryant. His previous high was 14. He has apparently surpassed Sherfield for the WR4 spot. He had one target. Sherfield had zero.
Adam Trautman, Evan Engram, and Nate Adkins played 42, 35, and 34 snaps. Our TEs got 8 catches on 13 targets, which is huge jump in TE utilization. That is almost on third of the targets. Running backs got 8 targets, and wide receivers got 21.
Our running snap split was 36, 33, and 8 between Dobbins, Harvey and Badie. Removing kneel-owns the Broncos ran 35 times for 189 yards. This was the most since the 225 against the Saints last season.
The offense also put up 512 yards which was the since the 2014 Broncos got 568 against the Cardinals.
The defense was amazing after the first drive. They gave up 62 net yards on the first drive and 97 yards on the remaining nine drives (8 if you take out the kneel-down drive).
The defense forced four 3-and-out drives, and only allowed more than four plays on a drive twice and those drives had 6 and 5 plays. The Bengals are now the worst team in the league for going 3-and-out. The Broncos are 6th worst. The Colts still are the best.
We had 5 defensive players play every snap – Riley Moss, Patrick Surtain II, Talanoa Hufanga, Alex Singleton, and Brandon Jones.
Ja’Quan McMillian played 39 snaps as the slot corner. Jahdae Barron played 21 at his hybrid CB/S role. No other CBs played on defense.
No other safeties played on defense besides Jones and Hufanga.
At the other ILB Justin Strnad played 27 snaps.
On the DL Zach Allen, John Franklin-Myers, D.J. Jones, Eyioma Uwazurike and Sai’vion Jones played 38, 24, 20, 17 and 6 snaps. Jones showed up on a number of plays, but did record a stat.
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