On their way to a 34 to 20 victory against the Colts on Sunday, the Broncos sacked Andrew Luck five times and had 11 quarterback hits. In Week 1 against the Lions, the Colts’ pass protection was less than stellar as they allowed five quarterback hits, two sacks, and seven passes defended.

The Colts clearly have problems when it comes to their pass protection, but unfortunately for Colts fans, this isn’t a problem that you want to have when you play against the Broncos’ defense.

From the chart below, we can see that Andrew Luck barely had any time to throw on multiple occasions. Specifically, the sack that took place with 1:51 left in the 4th quarter only gave Luck 2.38 seconds to make a decision. That play resulted in a forced fumble by Von Miller and a touchdown by Shane Ray, and the 2.38 seconds that Luck had to make a decision was far below the median sack time of 2.8 seconds that I found on record (this time was the median sack time from 2009 to potentially some point in the 2011 season; the article wasn’t clear).

Each sack was timed from the moment the ball was snapped to the time of initial contact by the player who sacked the quarterback. Each sack was timed three times to accommodate for human error. The final sack lists 5.5 blockers for the Colts, because Dwayne Allen momentarily stayed in to block but then ran a route.

For all intents and purposes, the sack by Miller and touchdown by Ray significantly decreased the probability that the Colts would be able to mount a comeback, and for those reasons, it seemed like this play would make for a good topic for analysis in our Week 2 breakdown. As opposed to the typical text based post that breaks down plays that the author has written in the past, said author has decided to present the same topics of schematics and strategy in a more illustrative way with the video above.

It’s entirely possible that this format will be a flop and we’ll go back to the previous format for the weekly posts as we move forward, but it seems like this arrangement might work better for people that are visual learners; it seemed worth taking a shot at.

Broncos v Colts: Von Miller Sack, Shane Ray Touchdown. from Devin Jordan on Vimeo.