The 2026 Broncos offense has spent the first part of the season buried near the bottom of the league, but Sunday brought a much-needed jolt. Denver’s attack put up a season-high 378 yards on 61 plays against the Cardinals, with two of those plays coming on kneel-downs, and that worked out to 6.20 yards per play.
That kind of outing didn’t erase the bigger picture, though. Through the first six games, the Broncos were sitting second-to-last in yards per play at 4.40, which was 17.1 percent below league average.
After the Sunday games, league average stood at 5.33 YPP, and Denver had climbed to 4.73, trimming the gap to 11.3 percent below average. That still leaves this group in an ugly place historically: even after the improvement, it remains the worst Broncos offense since the merger by yards per play.
The scale of that slump is stark when set against the best Denver has ever had. The 2013 Broncos offense remains the standard, averaging 18.1 percent more yards per play than the league average.
The 2008 team was next at 17.5 percent above average, and only the 1998 and 2000 Broncos also cleared the 15 percent mark. At the other end, the franchise’s worst offenses before this year were the 2011 and 2019 teams, both at 8.6 percent below league average.
Sunday’s bounce-back came against a Cardinals defense that is now the second-worst in the NFL in yards allowed per play at 6.1. Denver also faced a brutal opening stretch of opponents, with four of its first seven defenses currently ranked in the top seven in YPP allowed. Those early tests included Kansas City, Jacksonville, the LA Rams, San Francisco, the LA Chargers, and Seattle.
The numbers show just how uneven the Broncos have been. Against Jacksonville, Denver ran 62 plays for 392 yards, or 6.32 YPP.
Against the Chargers, the offense managed just 3.61 YPP on 62 plays and 224 yards. The other games were even rougher: 3.45 vs.
Kansas City, 3.83 vs. the Rams, 4.48 vs. San Francisco, and 2.80 vs.
Seattle.
The run game has been a major part of the problem. It has been one of the worst in the NFL so far, though the addition of Jonah Coleman gave it a lift on Sunday. Broncos running backs finished with 18 carries for 83 yards, a 4.6 yards-per-carry average, and Bo Nix added enough on the ground to push Denver past 150 rushing yards for the first time this season.
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