Bucs offense begins drives with run-run-pass sequence at league-high rate

Bucs OC Dave Canales has been impressive in his first year as a coordinator, but this one stat could indicate that his offense is a tad predictable.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have shown flashes of an impressive offense in 2023, particularly in the four-game winning streak in which they scored 28 points or more in three of those games. But with a first-year offensive coordinator, there are bound to be a few bumps here and there, and there’s one are where the Bucs may be a bit predictable.

NFL statistician Arjun Menon released a project in which he measured how often a team starts a drive by running twice and then passing on third down during any given series of downs. And not only did the Bucs do this more often than any other team in the league at 53%, but they also do it at a higher percentage of their series of downs than any team in the NFL by a large margin over the Houston Texans.

This, in theory, could create a bit of a predictable offense, pointing toward the philosophy that it isn’t how much you run, but how you run that could cause this problem. Bucs offensive coordinator Dave Canales recently spoke on this matter after some criticized the team against the New Orleans Saints for running the ball too much, saying that the balance between the run and the pass is important to him as a play-caller.

“That’s when all of the stuff opens up. [It is] really critical for me to be disciplined about the balance of it, and at the same time, to take what they’re giving us,” Canales said of his run game. “I just felt like we were not able to do that last week, where, regardless of what they were doing, we weren’t functioning in the rhythm of the pass game [and] we weren’t functioning in our runs.”

The chart also notes that the Bucs convert on that third-down pass 53% of the time. That would be the 12th-highest conversion rate on such plays in the NFL. While it’s hard to argue with some of the results from Canales and how much of a step up this offense is from last year’s, the first-year coordinator still has some improvements to make heading into the offseason.

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