The Denver Broncos won 14 games in the regular season, which tied a franchise record. The team clinched the AFC's top seed with a less-than-inspiring Week 18 victory over the LA Chargers, but it was pretty clear that Denver's game plan on offense was vanilla on purpose.
The Broncos may think the Chargers could return to Denver for the Divisional Round, so emptying the playsheet and trying to blowout a team resting starters was not going to be a wise idea. Heck, Denver seemed to do that in Week 18 last year, and they then proceeded to get blown out in the Wild Card Round.
Anyway, the team's offense has been up-and-down at times this year, but things have really gotten hard at times thanks to the team losing JK Dobbins all the way back in Week 10, so it's not a surprise that the team's fatal flaw for the playoffs is the rushing attack...
The Denver Broncos biggest flaw for the playoffs is quite obvious, unfortunately...
Here is Kevin Patra for NFL.com and some of what he had to say about the Broncos' run game being the team's biggest flaw for the playoffs:
The bigger concern to me is the drop-off in the running game following J.K. Dobbins' injury. The veteran running back went down in Week 10 with a ligament tear in his foot. He still leads the Broncos in rushing by 232 yards (772 to 540 for RJ Harvey). Sans Dobbins, Denver’s run game has screeched to a halt. In the first 10 weeks, Broncos running backs generated a -0.07 EPA per carry, 14th in the NFL, and 0.9 rush yards over expected per carry, tied for fourth-best. Since Week 10, those figures have plummeted to -0.14 EPA/C, tied for 25th, and -0.7 RYOE/C, 31st. Harvey has splashed some big plays and been stellar in the red zone, but Denver needs more down to down to keep Nix out of long-distance situations for the Broncos to thrive against playoff defenses.
Patra's assessment here is spot-on, especially when he mentions that the Denver Broncos need more down-to-down consistency from the run game. This has been the main issue, especially with RJ Harvey. Harvey has the big play gene in him and has been able to create a few of those this year. He had long rushing touchdowns against the Dallas Cowboys and Jacksonville Jaguars. However, you can kind of tell that Harvey isn't super comfortable running between the tackles at times.
Denver should consider taking some of the load off Harvey and giving the veteran Jaleel McLaughlin more carries. McLaughlin is good enough to be a competent RB2. The Broncos need to entrust him more. Ideally, JK Dobbins perhaps returns for the AFC Championship Game if Denver is able to reach it.
If that does happen, the run game concerns might disappear overnight.