Football is a never-ending game of adjustments and cycles. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Last week the people at Hudl put together their “Hudl Blitz,” a virtual clinic that assembled some of the smartest minds in the game to talk about the things that they do well. You could hear Charles Davis and Kirk Cousins talk about breaking down game film, or Steve Sarkisian outline how he installs and runs run/pass options (RPOs) from Saturdays to Sundays, along with countless other clinics and programs designed to inform the viewer.
One of the smartest parts of the week was a roundtable on defense at the high school level, moderated by Chris Vasseur. Vasseur, known to many as Coach Vass, is the mind behind the Make Defense Great Again podcast, along with the Run Vass Option podcast, which focuses on the defensive side of the football.
During this roundtable, Vasseur and other defensive coordinators at the high-school level started with this premise: How do they handle the RPO (run-pass option) game in what they do? They had a number of answers — some of which we will get to in a moment — but the undercurrent of each of them was this:
Force opposing offenses to run the ball.
Remember, this is the high-school level we are talking about, where the running game is often thought of as king. But these defensive coordinators want to make the choice for the offense on each and every play: Make the QB turn around and hand the football off, becoming a spectator. Or better yet, make him keep the football himself. Both of those are preferable to the quarterback pulling the football away from the running back at the mesh point and hurling it in the air.
Why? Because the passing game, even at the high school level, is more efficient. Numbers back that up, especially in the NFL. Offenses are more efficient — and as such more productive — when they put the football in the air.
Thanks to the smart people who run the website rbsdm.com (yes, that is short for “Running Backs Don’t Matter”), we can chart this out a bit. This graphic below looks at expected points added (EPA) per play both in the running game, and the passing game:
Up and to the right is where you want to be. Down and to the left? That is not where you want to be.
*Glares at Adam Gase.*
Diving into these numbers a bit, the top five offenses during this time in terms of EPA/play are as follows: The Kansas City Chiefs, the Green Bay Packers, the Baltimore Ravens, the Tennessee Titans, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Kansas City checks in with an EPA/play of 0.171, followed by the Packers at 0.145, the Ravens at 0.134, the Titans at 0.124 and the Buccaneers at 0.079. You also see that the two most-recent Super Bowl champions are among the top five.
Now, we can break these out in terms of passing plays versus running plays. For example, the Chiefs had an EPA/dropback of 0.273 over these past two seasons. When they run the ball? An EPA/run of -0.046. Green Bay? The Packers posted an EPA/dropback of 0.145, and an EPA/run of -0.014. As a matter of fact, during this period only two teams in the entire NFL posted a positive EPA/run: The Ravens (0.082) and the Titans (0.020). That’s right, the two teams many believe are the best at running the football are the only teams to post a positive EPA/play when they did so. Every other team was negative, starting with the Arizona Cardinals at -0.001 on down to the worst in the NFL, the Pittsburgh Steelers at -0.202.
In fact, the worst passing team by this metric was the New York Jets, checking in at -0.136 per dropback. That was still better than their EPA/run of -0.181. Every single team posted a better EPA when they threw the football, opposed to when they ran it.
Passing is more efficient, which is why defenses are trying do do everything they can to force offenses to run the football.