If you’ve played a Madden video game, you’ve been to that dark place. Nothing you seem to do on defense is effective. You can’t stop the run. You can’t stop the pass. You wonder why you even play this stupid game that hasn’t been good in a decade. The frustration slowly turns into rage.
You could just quit the game. That would be the healthy way to handle the situation. But you’re a football fan. The entire concept of fandom is built around an unhealthy obsession with something you can’t control. Besides, you still have that “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” option. The one defensive play call every Madden player goes to when nothing else seems to work.
I’m talking, of course, about “Engage Eight.”
If you play Madden, you’re very familiar with “Engage Eight.” If not, the concept behind the play is simple: Send the whole damn house and just hope for the best.
Most play designs in Madden are based on a real-life concept. But not “Engage Eight.” It’s a caricature of a play call, exaggerating the most notable features with little regard for reality. And the fact that we were all just like “Yeah, sure,” I think, shows that most football fans see blitzing as this all-or-nothing proposition. There may have been a time, early in the sport’s evolution, when that was true. But it certainly isn’t the case today.
Even the most aggressive defensive coordinators aren’t out here calling eight-man blitzes. It’s simple math: You send eight guys after the passer, and we have five eligible receivers. We’re going to get it to one of those receivers before the rush gets home.
That math does not stop us Madden players from calling “Engage Eight,” though. We don’t stand a chance if the quarterback has all day to throw, so we need that pressure. While the means may not be rooted in reality, the ends we seek are not all that different from our real-life counterparts, who also don’t stand a chance if the quarterback is provided with a clean pocket. NFL play-callers just have to go about it with a bit more caution and a lot more ingenuity.
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I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you’re not an NFL defensive coordinator. Even still, you probably have a good idea of how to stop Tom Brady. You’ve probably heard this cliched analysis a thousand times over the past decade: You have to get pressure — preferably interior pressure — and move him off his spot.
It’s a useless bit of analysis. Not because it’s wrong. It’s not. But you can say the same about every quarterback who has ever stepped foot on an NFL field. No quarterback performs consistently well under pressure. Not even the league’s slipperiest quarterback Russell Wilson, who averaged -0.24 Expected Points Added per play when under pressure in 2019, per Pro Football Focus. That was actually much better than the league average of -0.42 but nearly half-point below the league-average output on clean dropbacks (0.25). Pressure turns any quarterback into a much worse — and more erratic — version of himself. And a clean pocket has the opposite effect. Last season, Mason Rudolph, who lost his job to a dude named Duck, averaged 0.21 EPA per clean dropback, according to PFF. Without pressure, Rudolph essentially turned into Drew Brees. If EPA isn’t your thing, how about yards? According to PFF, NFL teams averaged 7.6 yards on dropbacks without pressure. The number dropped a full four yards to 3.6 on pressured dropbacks.
Those are a lot of numbers telling you something you probably already knew: Pressure is good for the defense and decidedly not good for the offense. I spent a significant portion of my summer trying to figure out what that actually means, and why some teams are better at it than others. This series, which we’re calling “Getting Home,” is the result. We’ve broken it into five parts:
- An overview of the current state of blitzing in the NFL
- Pass protection basics — and how the Ravens manipulate them
- Bill Belichick’s vaunted “Cover 0 blitzes”
- Revisiting “Creepers”
- Blitzing innovations likely to hit the NFL soon
Some pressure is better than others
All pressures are not created equal and it’s not enough to simply bother a quarterback. FiveThitryEight’s Josh Hermsmeyer found that pressure plays were worth 0.41 EPA for defenses in 2019, but they weren’t necessarily drive-killers. Hermsmeyer writes…
“Over the past three seasons NFL teams forced the opposing offense to punt 5.7 percentage points more often when they pressured the QB at least once on a drive.”
That punt rate spiked 18.2 percentage points when a defense actually sacked the quarterback, and those sacks were worth 1.47 EPA per play. PFF analysts Timo Riske and Sam Monson came to a similar conclusion about the importance of converting pressures into a sacks:
“On all passing plays, teams manage a first down on a series 60% of the time. But that number plummets to just 20% on plays with a sack. Again, repeating the findings at 538, sacks moved the needle hugely while other types of pressure were not nearly as devastating to the offense, with one notable exception: hits in the throwing motion.”
According to the PFF study, NFL offenses were able to convert a series of downs into a first down 57.5% of the time when a defense hurried the passer on at least one play. The first-down rate dropped to 52.6% when the defense hit the quarterback after a pass was thrown. So at the play level, pressure matters but not necessarily in the big picture view of things. To really derail an offense, the defense has to make contact before a quarterback gets rid of the football.
From Pro Football Focus:
“The first big swing we find is on plays where a quarterback was hit while throwing. This reduced the chance of a first down on the series to 33.5%, moving it closer to plays with a sack. These plays almost always fall incomplete, but they can also put the ball in harm’s way and cause turnovers.”
When defenses were able to get the quarterback down for a sack, the first-down rate plummeted to 20%. So, maybe analysts have had it wrong about Brady this whole time. It’s not quite enough to just move him off his spot. If you want to truly stop Tom Brady, or any NFL quarterback for that matter, you have to hit him. And it’s far easier to hit a quarterback in the pocket when he has no way to escape.
One way to block all escape routes would be to send more pass rushers, but most NFL defensive coordinators are reluctant to send the house because it leaves the secondary vulnerable, and giving up big plays is an easy way for a coach to lose his job. That may be the reason why defenses have grown more cautious as offenses have grown more pass-happy over the last decade. While the rate at which defenses send a standard four-man rush has remained fairly steady over the last decade, the rate for five- and six-man rushes has declined while the rate for three-man rushes has increased since 2010, according to Football Outsiders.
It makes some sense, theoretically. NFL quarterbacks are throwing shorter passes and getting rid of the ball quicker than ever, leaving little time for the pass rush to get home. If the pass rush isn’t going to get home, it’s only logical to drop more defenders into coverage and flood those underneath zones. It’s a passive approach, sure, but modern defense is all about avoiding explosive plays.
As is typically the case for NFL offenses, the data suggests NFL defenses could stand to take a more aggressive approach. Numbers from Sports Info Solutions’ indispensable Data Hub show that defensive performance steadily improves as the number of pass rushers increases.
This makes sense. The more blocking matchups there are on a given play, the more likely the offense will lose one of them, leading to pressure on the quarterback. As we have covered, that’s bad for the offense.
Interestingly, the number of players the offense keeps in to block doesn’t seem to make a difference for the efficacy of a pass rush until you get to a six-man rush. That’s when a numbers advantage for the pass rush really seems to make a difference.
And, counterintuitively, defensive performance against the pass improves as the numbers advantage in coverage decreases, another suggestion that an aggressive pass rush is superior to a passive one.
So maybe the Madden devs were onto something with “Engage Eight.” But it’s foolish to look at those numbers and make any grand declarations about the sport. We are, after all, painting with a broad brush here and football is far too complex a sport to analyze from the 10,000-foot view. All six-man rushes are not the same, and all six-man protections are not the same. And, the efficacy of bigger blitzes could very well be based on their novelty. If offenses start to account for more aggressive pass rushers, the numbers might swing back the other way. There are just too many variables, including personnel, to confidently say that defenses should be blitzing more often.
The goal, as always, should be to create a numbers advantage without creating an exploitable disadvantage elsewhere. Any strategic aspect of the sport is based on that balancing act. Finding that balance is the key to producing effective pressure. The question defensive coaches should be asking, then, is: How can we overwhelm the protection without leaving ourselves vulnerable in coverage? It’s an ongoing chess match between offenses and defense. Between the pass rush and the pass protection.
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The purpose of this series is to examine that chess match and to figure out how the NFL’s best defensive minds put pressure on opposing quarterbacks. But you can’t have a good understanding of how to beat offensive lines without first learning how they protect the pocket. So, in Part 2, we’ll cover the basics of pass protections at the NFL level and take a look at how the Ravens’ Don “Wink” Martindale, the league’s most blitz-happy defensive coordinator, manipulates them to give his pass rushers the best chance to get to the quarterback.
In Part 3, we’ll look at Bill Belichick’s “0 blitzes” and how they’re designed to help the Patriots pass rush win no matter what protection the offense has called.
In Part 4, I’ll revisit a piece I wrote last offseason that covered “Creepers” and “Simulated Pressures.” I look at how teams used them during the 2019 seasons and the numbers that suggest they give defenses the best of both worlds between pressure and coverage.
Finally, in Part 5, we look at some trends percolating at the lower levels that could soon make their way to the NFL.