THE CLAIM
The Denver Broncos came back to beat the Kansas City Chiefs 28-24 in Week 8, another late win for Bo Nix. ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky didn’t hedge afterward.
There’s support for it in the box score. Nix has a 118.9 passer rating trailing by “one score” (one to eight points) in the fourth quarter, and he leads the NFL in game-winning drives since entering the league in 2024. That’s despite ranking around 30th in passing yards and
Is Nix actually better in the clutch than every other quarterback, or is the Broncos’ late-game record really a different story?
THE VERDICT: DEBUNK
By efficiency, Nix is a middle-of-the-pack quarterback by EPA efficiency the clutch, about the same as he is the rest of the game. Clutch efficiency also barely carries over from season-to-season for historical quarterbacks, so there’s little reason to expect Nix’s late-game magic to continue as it had.
But, Nix’s game-winning drives and late win probability are real, and they shouldn’t be entirely dismissed. But a good chunk of those chances were created by the Broncos’ defense giving back late leads, and the sample is too small to call him the league’s most clutch passer with any confidence.
THE EVIDENCE
I defined the clutch as the fourth quarter or overtime with the score within eight points, i.e. a one-score game. Looking from 2024 through Week 8 of 2026, excluding garbage time, Nix sits right in the middle of the 31 quarterbacks with at least 120 clutch dropbacks in opponent-adjusted EPA per dropback (including sacks and scrambles).
The largest outperformers in clutch play include Josh Allen, Jayden Daniels and Matthew Stafford. In fact, there are 17 other quarterbacks in this sample group who raised their performance more than Nix during clutch situations.
Nix’s +0.102 adjusted EPA per clutch dropback ranks 15th of 31 qualifiers, and his 41.3% clutch success rate ranks 27th. He’s been slightly better in the clutch than in non-clutch situations, by +0.048 EPA per dropback, but that gap shrinks to only +0.007 once we regress it toward the mean based on how little clutch splits tend to persist.
That regression is necessary because the clutch gap is mostly noise.
Across 306 quarterback-season pairs from 2006 to 2026, a quarterback’s clutch-minus-baseline gap in one season predicts the next at an r of only 0.10. For comparison, overall adjusted EPA per dropback carries over at r = 0.34. Quarterbacks who are good in the clutch are mostly just good quarterbacks.
So where does the clutch reputation come from? Nix leads the NFL with 15 game-winning drives, converting 15 of his 20 chances (75%), when the league rate is 38%. And his win probability added (WPA) in the clutch is much better than his efficiency suggests.
