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Indianapolis Colts by the Numbers: Week 7 Defensive Stats

By T. Troy Russell@TTroyRussell Oct 25, 2018, 2:00pm EDT

NFL: Buffalo Bills at Indianapolis Colts

Make no mistake, going into week 7, the Buffalo Bills had one of the worst offenses in the league.

According to Football Outsider’s DVOA, they ranked 32nd in passing, 27th in rushing and combined for the 32nd overall worst defense. In terms of total yards and yards per play they were 31st and 32nd respectively. In points per drive and drive success rate they were also 31st and 32nd respectively.

By just about any measure, the Bills offense was bad. On Sunday, The Colts defense continued the trend. Across the board, Indy made a bad offense look worse.

While a DSR of 57.7% is really bad, it is actually about Buffalo’s season average. So yeah, the Colts defense shut them down, but so has every other defense that faced them.

That’s not to take anything away from the defense: they could have played poorly, but they didn’t.

TEAM TOTALS

Holding the Bills to 5 points, earns the Colts defense a #1 spot in points per drive for the week and 4th place in DSR against.

Five turnovers led the league. Third down conversions was the 4th best defensive mark driven by a 7.6 avg yards to gain. No first downs on penalties were given up.

There isn’t much to analyze here as everything looks great.

PASSING

I actually can’t believe that a team put up a worse ANY/A than the Bills 1.0, but Arizona did and so the Colt’s passing defense only ranks 2nd for the week.

Buffalo’s 6.7 average depth of target was actually significantly farther than Andrew Luck’s 4.9, but the Colts D shut down yards after the catch to a league best 2.6 yards. That kept Buffalo’s passing game to only 5.6 yards per attempt and it is very difficult to move the ball with that kind of a passing game.

RUSHING

The defensive effort against the run game was a little more iffy. It wasn’t terrible, but the Bills managed to beat their season averages in most run metrics.

Giving up 4 explosive rushes for 89 yards isn’t good, but outside of those runs the Bills put up about 2.5 YPC without much success.

CONCLUSIONS

At a game level, this is one of the most dominant defensive performances of the season by any team. But it’s hard to get excited about it because it came against arguably the worst offense in the league.

Still, good defenses are supposed to beat up bad offenses and that happened here.