Understanding The Mountain High Diskin Across The Broncos Super Bowl Appearances
I've spent years tracking Broncos history and game film, and this is a topic that comes up more often than you'd expect, usually in the comments section of old game threads. Let me walk through what this actually means, how it works in practice, and where people tend to get it wrong.The Mountain High Diskin Across The Broncos Super Bowl Appearances
"Mountain High Diskin" isn't a formal statistical category or anything you'll find in the NFL's official database. What it refers to is a particular viewing framework some long-time Broncos fans use when going back through game tape from the team's Super Bowl runs. The idea is tracking high-point passes (throws toward the end zone or red zone) and connecting them to key players across each appearance, then looking for patterns in how the offense operated at critical moments. It's essentially a fan-made analytical lens, not an official metric. The Broncos have six Super Bowl appearances: Super Bowl XII (1977 season, loss to Dallas), Super Bowl XXI (1986 season, loss to New York Giants), Super Bowl XXII (1987 season, loss to Washington), Super Bowl XXIV (1989 season, loss to San Francisco), Super Bowl XXXIII (1998 season, win over Atlanta), Super Bowl XLVIII (2013 season, loss to Seattle), and Super Bowl 50 (2015 season, win over Carolina). That's seven total appearances. When people talk about the Mountain High Diskin framework across these games, they're usually focusing on how Denver's passing game evolved — from the Steve Atwater-era defenses shielding mediocre offensive performances to the John Elway-led championships where the vertical passing game was genuinely dominant. Here's the thing most people miss when they try to apply this framework: it only works if you're watching actual game film, not highlight reels. Highlights show the big plays. They don't show the three incomplete deep shots before the one that went for forty yards. I spent probably twenty hours going back through Super Bowl XXII tape a few years ago trying to map out every downfield attempt by Elway, and the takeaway was mostly that the Broncos tried to stretch the field against Washington and it didn't work because the offensive line couldn't protect him. Five of his eight attempted throws of twenty-plus yards fell incomplete. The one that did connect went for twelve yards. Not the story that highlights would lead you to believe.
How to Apply This Framework to Broncos Film
If you want to actually do this yourself, start by getting the full game footage. NFL Game Pass (now part of NFL+ Premium) has archive games, though the quality varies depending on the year. Super Bowls XXII through 50 are generally watchable. The older ones from the late seventies are broadcast-quality at best — grainy, sometimes with audio dropout. What you'll want to track is straightforward in theory but tedious in practice. For each Super Bowl appearance, log every pass that was thrown twenty or more yards downfield. Note the target, whether it was complete, and the resulting yardage. Then cross-reference with red zone attempts — throws inside the twenty-yard line that went for a touchdown or were intended for the end zone. That's the "mountain high" part: deep and high-target passes. "Diskin" is the connecting thread — which receivers and tight ends were actually on the other end of those throws and whether the production matched the attempt. The pattern that emerges across the seven appearances is pretty clear. The Broncos' Super Bowl wins (XXXIII and 50) featured significantly higher efficiency on deep throws compared to their losses. In Super Bowl XXXIII, John Elway completed 23 of 30 passes for 278 yards and two touchdowns. Several of those were intermediate-to-deep completions that moved the chains. Terrell Davis dominated in the rush, but the deep passing game kept Atlanta's defense honest enough to make the ground game work. In Super Bowl 50, Peyton Manning's deep ball was less the story — his middle-of-the-field precision was. But the Broncos still generated explosive plays through cumulative accuracy rather than one or two hero throws.
In the losses, the deep game consistently broke down for different reasons. Super Bowl XII: the Broncos' offense was outclassed by a Dallas defense that had nothing to prove. Super Bowl XXI: the Giants' pass rush destroyed the Broncos' protection scheme, and Elway couldn't get anything beyond fifteen yards consistently. Super Bowl XXIV: the 49ers' front four made life miserable for Tony Casillas and the rest of the offensive line. Elway threw for only 112 yards in that one. Super Bowl XLVIII: the Seahawks' secondary was simply too much. Russell Wilson and the Broncos' passing game had no answer for the coverage packages Seattle threw at them.
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Where People Get Stuck
The biggest mistake I see is assuming this framework tells you something you don't already know from the box score. It doesn't. The box score already tells you whether the Broncos won or lost. What the film analysis adds is the context of why certain deep passes succeeded or failed, which gives you a better sense of how the coaching and game planning differed between the championship runs and the losing ones. Another issue is the sample size problem. Seven Super Bowl games across roughly forty years of franchise history is a small dataset. Trends you identify might be real, or they might just be noise. When I first tried mapping this out a while back, I convinced myself that the Broncos' tight ends were consistently underutilized in the deep game across all seven appearances. Going back and double-checking the tape, I found that at least in Super Bowl 50, Denver ran several seam routes and post combinations to Julius Thomas and Owen Daniels that fit squarely into this framework. My initial assessment was wrong because I was watching the games without a structured logging system. I switched to using a simple spreadsheet with columns for play type, depth of target, and outcome, and the picture became much clearer.
What This Actually Tells You
Applying the Mountain High Diskin framework across the Broncos' Super Bowl appearances reveals that the common thread in Denver's two wins was competent quarterback play combined with a complementary rushing attack. The losses almost uniformly involved either protective scheme failures (XXI, XXIV) or the opponent having a superior game plan (XLVIII). Super Bowl XII is the outlier — a straightforward mismatch where Dallas was the better team by a wide margin. One counter-intuitive finding from digging into the film: the 1998 Broncos (Super Bowl XXXIII) actually attempted fewer deep passes than you'd expect given how much everyone remembers that team. The emphasis was on short-to-intermediate timing routes that exploited mismatches against Atlanta's secondary. Terrell Owens was the primary deep threat, but most of Denver's production came from over the middle. The "mountain high" passes were there, but they were situational rather than a primary offensive strategy. That's probably why the Falcons couldn't adjust — they prepared for a deep-ball attack that Denver largely didn't run. Similarly, the 2015 Broncos (Super Bowl 50) are remembered for their defense, and rightly so. But going back through the film, the passing game was more methodical than explosive. Manning rarely forced deep throws. He took what the defense gave him, which meant the Broncos often settled for field position and punt points rather than breaking big plays. That approach worked because the defense scored two touchdowns and the special teams contributed as well. It's a different model than the Elway-era championships, where the quarterback was the central creative force.
A Practical Warning
Don't treat this framework as a predictive tool. It's retrospective by nature. You can look back at the Broncos' Super Bowl games and identify patterns, but those patterns don't tell you what will happen in a future game. Football changes too quickly — scheme evolution, personnel turnover, and rule changes make historical analysis useful for understanding, not predicting. The best you can say is that the Broncos' two Super Bowl victories shared certain structural similarities in their passing games, and their five losses shared different ones. If you're interested in diving into this yourself, NFL Game Pass is the most reliable source for full-game archives. The quality isn't great for the pre-1990 games, but it's passable. For Super Bowls XXII onward, the footage is detailed enough that you can actually track individual route combinations and defensive coverages. I'd recommend starting with Super Bowl XXXIII and Super Bowl 50 since those are the cleanest films and the most relevant to understanding what separateates the wins from the losses. There's also value in watching the losses just as carefully. Super Bowl XXI and XLVIII in particular show how quickly a Super Bowl can fall apart when the defensive game plan neutralizes your primary offensive weapons. The Broncos in those games had talent but couldn't overcome schematic disadvantages. That's the part of the framework that matters most — understanding what breaks rather than just what works.
