For most of the post-Peyton Manning era, throwing deep on the Broncos was a cheat code. From 2020 through 2024, opposing quarterbacks feasted on 20-plus air yard attempts against Denver — a hole that outlived head coaches, coordinators, and cornerback rooms. In 2025, the hole closed. Not just closed — inverted. Opponents attacked it more often than ever, and were punished harder for trying than any other quarterback room in the league.

This is the six-year arc, told through one throw type.

The chronic weakness

Here is Denver's defense against passes with 20+ air yards, every season from 2020 through 2025:

The 2023 and 2024 rows are the ones that hurt. Denver allowed +0.600 EPA/play on deep throws in 2023 — sixth-worst in the NFL — with opposing quarterbacks completing 44.6% of them, the third-worst mark in the league that year. 2024 was barely better: +0.559 EPA/play (fifth-worst) and 38.8% comp allowed. Sixteen yards per deep attempt in 2023, twelve in 2024. In both seasons, taking a shot on the Broncos was a positive-expected-value decision.

And it wasn't a new problem. In 2020, Denver allowed +0.805 EPA/play and 45.6% completions on deep balls — third-worst in the league by EPA. 2022 was the only clean year in the sample.

The 2025 inversion

Word gets around. Opposing offenses came into 2025 with a plan, and the plan was more shots.

Denver faced 95 deep attempts in 2025 — the most raw attempts against any defense in the NFL, up 42% from 67 in 2024 and 56 in 2023. As a share of dropbacks faced, deep attempts against Denver climbed from 8.7% in 2023 to 9.1% in 2024 to 12.3% in 2025 — the second-highest rate in the league, trailing only Detroit's 13.3%. Opponents saw the tape and dialed it up.

They completed 24 of them.

• 25.3% completion allowed — the lowest deep-completion rate of any defense in 2025. The league average was 36.5%.
• +0.118 EPA/play allowed — fifth-lowest in the NFL, behind New England's +0.010, Carolina's +0.047, the Chargers' +0.049 and Jacksonville's +0.117.
• 7.9 yards per deep attempt allowed — about half of the 16.1 they gave up in 2023.
• Four interceptions against five touchdowns on those 95 throws.

The bucket split inside 2025 sharpens the point. Short throws against Denver (under 10 air yards) went for a 68.1% completion rate at −0.038 EPA/play — ordinary quarterback stuff. Throws to the middle of the field (10–19 air yards) came in at 47.7% completions and +0.346 EPA/play — actually Denver's worst bucket. It's specifically the deep shot — the throw that had defined this defense's soft spot since 2020 — that collapsed for opponents.

Volume up, payoff down

The standard "unit fixed its weakness" story is: opponents stopped attacking the weakness because the weakness went away. That isn't what happened here. Opponents attacked the deep ball against Denver more in 2025 than in any prior season in this window — 95 attempts, a 42% jump in raw volume and a climb from a 9.1% to a 12.3% per-dropback rate — and were rewarded less for it than against any other defense but four. The 2025 Broncos weren't avoiding deep shots; they were inviting them and cashing them in.

That shows up in Denver's overall pass defense, too. The Broncos allowed +0.051 EPA/play on all pass attempts in 2023 (26th in the league), then flipped to −0.095 in 2024 (2nd) and −0.112 in 2025 (7th). The unit as a whole had already turned the corner in 2024 — but the deep ball hadn't caught up yet. The 2025 numbers are what a fully realized version of this pass defense looked like.

The context caveats

A couple of honest hedges before the takeaway:

• 25.3% deep-completion allowed was the best mark in the NFL in 2025, but it isn't a historic outlier on its own. Looking at team-seasons with a comparable sample (40-plus deep attempts), at least seventeen posted a lower deep-completion rate since 2015 — Houston in 2024 (20.0% on 90 attempts), New Orleans in 2022 (20.0%), Tennessee in 2017 (20.0%), and more. What makes Denver's 2025 version distinctive is volume: 95 attempts is a bigger sample than nearly all of those seasons, and holding a low rate over more attempts is harder than holding one over 50 or 60.
• The touchdown count barely moved — five in 2025 versus six in 2024 and seven in 2023. The gains showed up in completions, yards, and interceptions, not in the end zone. Big plays over the top were the thing that changed, not scores allowed on those plays when they connected.

What to watch in 2026

Opposing coordinators will presumably test whether 2025 was signal or noise — the jump in deep-attempt volume this past year suggests the league already spent 2025 probing, and the answer it got was "don't." If Denver holds a sub-30% deep-completion rate on another 80-plus attempts in 2026, it'll be fair to stop calling this a one-year inflection and start calling it the defense's identity. Until then, 2025 reads as a hole that finally got plugged after several years of leaking — with the added wrinkle that the plugging was thorough enough that opponents' own scouting adjustment (throw deep more) actively worked against them.

The Broncos spent most of the 2020s losing games over the top. In 2025, they started winning them there.