If you think these Denver Broncos are unusual as far as teams with league-pacing records this deep into the season go, well … you’re right.
They are the 76th team in the Super Bowl era to start a season with an 11-2 mark, so that part isn’t particularly notable from a historic perspective.
But by doing so with a point differential of plus-73 — an average of plus-5.6 points per game — they are unusual. That’s because only three of those other 75 teams had a worse point differential than these Broncos.
Sure, they had a not-as-close-as-the-score-would-indicate win over the Las Vegas Raiders last Sunday. But the Raiders’ late surge, capped by the mystifying walk-off field goal, added just 10 points of differential; the Broncos would rank in a tie for 69th among these 11-2 teams of the Super Bowl era in point differential instead of 73rd, ahead of six teams instead of three.
The average point differential for an 11-2 team is plus-136 — or plus 10.5 points per game; the Broncos reach barely half of that point. Their Pythagorean win total — which is based on point differential — is 8.5 wins and 4.5 losses, serving as an example of how these Broncos are maximizing what they are.
They’re 9-2 in one-score games, including 7-2 in contests decided by four or fewer points. Seven of their games weren’t decided until the last snap; they’re 5-2 in those games, including 3-2 in duels with walk-off field goals.
They walk on the edge, leading to that minimal point differential.
But it’s been done before to reach the ultimate goal.
SUCCESSFUL PARALLELS TO BRONCOS’ START HAVE A KEY CONNECTION
The common thread is Hall-of-Fame coach Bill Parcells, a key mentor of Sean Payton.
Just two 11-2 teams with a point differential of fewer than 8.0 points per game made it to a Super Bowl, but both won it: the 1986 New York Giants and the 2003 New England Patriots. Parcells coached those Giants, and his longtime assistant coach on those 1980s Giants teams, Bill Belichick, guided the Patriots to that crown, the second of their six championships in the 2000s and 2010s.
That said, their performances are the outlier, and the overall percentage of 11-2 teams with a point differential of fewer than 8.0 points per game to make the Super Bowl is 13.3 percent. For all other 11-2 teams, it’s 47.5 percent (28 of 59).
And as far as making it as far as the conference-championship game, the contrast is not as extreme, but notable, with 46.7 percent of those teams with sub-8.0-PPG point differentials making it to the NFL’s final four, compared with 71.2 percent of the clubs with better point differentials.
To make it all the way to the Super Bowl means the Broncos would be one of the outliers. But they also share significant philosophical DNA with the two clubs in their category that did, making them well-equipped to buck the long-term historical trend.
