Play-action is such a cheat code, it’s helping Mitchell Trubisky put up franchise QB numbers

None of this is real, Bears fans. Sorry.

Mitchell Trubisky has played good football for three weeks in a row. That, apparently, counts as news, which I guess makes sense given the fact that he’s only two games away from the end of his rookie contract and a strong finish to the 2020 season could maaaaaaybe convince the Bears to give him another shot in 2021.

I think most rational people would need to see more than three solid weeks from Trubisky to even think about reassessing his future with the team, but football fans are hardly rational. So, of course, columns and blog posts have been written about this supposedly new and improved Mitchell Trubisky.

It was a rather uneventful week in the NFL, so I figured I’d bite and jump into the conversation. I watched the Trubisky film so you wouldn’t have to, and I did so with one question in mind: Has anything really changed?

The answer to that question became rather obvious with the first few minutes of watching the film: Yes, something had changed, but it was not necessarily anything in Trubisky’s individual performance. Instead, it was the offense he was operating that looked completely different from what we’ve seen out of Matt Nagy in the past. It actually looked a lot like the offenses we’ve seen turn Jimmy Garoppolo, Jared Goff and, most recently, Baker Mayfield into productive starting quarterbacks.

Now, there are minor (as well as some major) differences between those schemes we’ve seen employed in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Cleveland, but the foundation for all of them is identical: The outside zone running play.

Off that stretch action, you get the foundation of the passing game: The three-level flood concept off of play-action, which will almost always include a vertical route to stretch the defense downfield, an intermediate crossing route that is typically the route the offense is looking to hit and then some sort of check-down route in the flat.

It’s a versatile concept that can be run from various formations and personnel groupings, and coaches can add little wrinkles to the design in order to exploit a defense that is overplaying them. And the best thing about these concepts is … they are really easy to read for the quarterback. With the defense overloaded to one side of the field, the quarterback just has to find the uncovered receiver.

There are no complicated reads. There’s no muddied pocket to bravely navigate. The defense is typically scrambling to get to their landmarks after biting on the play fake. It’s taking the most mentally demanding position in all of sports and completely simplifying it: See the open man and throw him the ball.

After Sean McVay transformed the Rams offense, along with Goff’s career, with this scheme, which came a year after Kyle Shanahan coordinated a record-breaking offense based on a lot of the same principles in Atlanta, we’ve seen the derivatives of this scheme spread across the league and elevate quarterbacks who have had problems with the whole “mental process” part of quarterbacking. This system is the football equivalent of paint-by-numbers. Essentially any quarterback capable of making the most routine throws can look functional running these plays. At one point not too long ago, it had people talking about Nick Mullens as a potential starter in the league.

When news broke that the Shanahan’s 49ers had plucked draft bust Josh Rosen off of the Bucs practice squad, fans and analysts joked that the system would salvage his career and, if he played over the next two weeks, it would serve as a test of the system’s ability to elevate quarterbacks.

Well, we don’t actually have to wait for that to happen. Nagy is already testing the efficacy of the system after adjusting his offense look similar to what we’ve seen the 49ers run under Shanahan since reinserting Trubisky into the lineup. The Bears are running a ton of outside zone from under center — only four teams have attempted more of those runs since Week 13, per Sports Info Solutions  — and to complement that, they’re getting good use out of the play-action looks based on those run designs.

And … it’s working.

Over the last three weeks, Trubisky is completing 73.9% of his passes and averaging 8.9 adjusted yards per attempt. He ranks 11th in EPA per dropback and second in success rate, per RBSDM.com. He’s producing like a top-10 quarterback.

All of that sounds good, but before Bears fans get too excited, I should point out that almost all of Trubisky’s production is coming on those plays that make any quarterback look good. And without those schematic crutches, his efficiency falls off a cliff. Since Week 13, Trubisky has averaged 0.44 EPA per dropback with a success rate of 69% when using play-action. Without play-action, those numbers drop to -0.06 and 51.9%, respectively.

Nagy has gone to extremes in order to simplify the offense for Trubisky. During this hot streak, he’s called play-action at a league-high rate, which is 6.2 percentage points higher than the second team on the list. And it’s not just that the Bears are using so much play-action; they’re calling the same general concept — that flood off of bootleg action — over and over again. I’m not exaggerating when I say that those plays (or variations of them) have accounted for at least 40% of Nagy’s pass calls over the past three weeks. Here are TWENTY examples from the last two games alone…

It’s like a middle schooler who found a money play on Madden and is just going to keep calling it until the defense finds a way to stop it.

I feel like I’ve written this article so many times over the past few seasons: Flawed quarterback is elevated by play-action heavy scheme.

The response from the fan bases cheering for these quarterbacks is always the same: Why are you penalizing a quarterback for playing in a system that plays to his strengths? I’m sure some Bears fans will be in my mentions asking the same question when this is published. I’d say to look at those splits I presented a couple of paragraphs up and ask yourself, Why is this quarterback’s biggest “strength” something that every quarterback seems to be good at? And if every quarterback is good at it, is that strength all that valuable? In other words, is he worth 10 to 15 percent of the salary cap, the going rate for a “franchise” QB?

The answer for Trubisky is the same as the answer for the rest of these Shanahan/McVay/Kubiak quarterbacks: Probably not and you’re better off letting another team pay the money to find out.

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