There's been a lot of discussion about McCoy and the playcalling on 3rd down over the past several weeks, and not being aware that someone has broken down the data, I decided to try to wade through it. If someone has posted something like this already, my apologies. I've broken down the play by play, and what you see here is only that--I'll leave the film breakdown (as to what particular running/passing plays were called) to someone who has access to the film and more knowledge about individual plays. I was interested in run/pass ratios under Orton and Tebow, whether there is a significant change in playcalling since the Detroit game, and what our overall success has been on different down and distances. 

NOTE: If the totals don't quite add up, it's because we benefited from a penalty on the opponent, in which case I threw those plays out.

Above we see a game by game breakdown of 3rd down and distance. A few observations:

Average 3rd down under Orton was 6.9 yds and under Tebow it's a half yard more. Of course one would expect that Orton would have a higher success rate, but not twice as good as Tebow, yet Tebow is only successful 23% of the time. This is not good at all. On a positive note, Tebow has improved over the last 3 games. In the first 10 quarters of his play he was only hitting on 17% of 3rd down and over the last 12 quarters he's 29% (still really bad though). 

Here we see the breakdown by running and passing plays on 3rd down. While it seems like we always run on 3rd and long since Tebow took over, we've only done that 7 times, and been successful on none of them. The area that jumps out to me regarding Tebow is he has a horrible record on 3rd and 4-7 yards. Here is where he needs to focus his improvement on. The surprising thing to me is just how much we were a passing team on 3rd down when Orton was the starter and how much more we run on 3rd now in comparison. 

Here we see another aspect that our receivers need to work on, and that is getting beyond the 1st down stripe on 3rd down catches. Orton had 7 of 27 3rd down completions miss the 3rd down distance and Tebow has had 8 of 14 be short. Since both QB have had trouble with this, it's probably partly on the receivers. 

As has been pointed out numerous times before, the big glaring problem Orton had that Tebow so far hasn't is turning the ball over on 3rd Down. While Tebow hasn't converted very well at all, he does score and doesn't turn the ball over, and when the defense is playing as well as it has, this all ends up in W's for Tebow and the Broncos. However, for those of us who want to see "the gloves come off" in regards to McCoy's playcalling, until Tebow shows he can convert on 3rd and 4-7 yards, I'm not sure we'll see him open the offense up too much. Here's to hoping it happens sooner rather than later.