The Worksheet: Winning, Losing and Plays

Since it’s a fertile time of the offseason for seasonal projections to start trickling in, I wanted to look backwards on 2015 for a moment while using it as guide to start your preparation for creating your own projections or just as a loose group of notes.

The first place I always start when creating projections is diving into the number of plays a team will run and types of splits that may stem from those plays. Looking back at last season, here are few things that jump out.

Starting off in Big D, the Dallas Cowboys have made it abundantly clear that they’d like to play a brand of controlling the clock while also protecting Tony Romo that is similar to how they played in 2014. Last season, Dallas ran 99 fewer rushing plays than they did in 2014 as they also trailed on the scoreboard for 101 more offensive plays.

As their record dictates, and with Romo missing 12 games, the Cowboys found themselves in a wealth of undesirable game situations. Here are their splits in the second half and fourth quarters of games compared the 2014 season.

While facing so much negative offensive script late in games saw the Cowboys go from having the second most rushing attempts in the NFL to falling to 18th a season ago, they still ran the ball effectively, ranking 9th in rushing yards (1,890) and 5th in yards per carry (4.6) as a team.

Warren Sharp has pegged Dallas with the easiest strength of schedule for this upcoming season and the Cowboys used the fourth overall draft selection on Ezekiel Elliott. While the above rushing success in poor conditions to run dictates that Elliott was far from a necessity, there’s no mistake that he’s going to be a heavy beneficiary heading into an offensive climate that is going to see a major flip in positive game script as long as Dallas keeps Romo on the field.

If the Cowboys’ backfield depth remains the same as it is now in September, Elliott may not command the 75 percent plus share of the backfield carries that Darren McFadden and DeMarco Murray had over the past two seasons, but he’s going to be firmly in play to produce top-5 numbers at the position right out of the packaging.

When looking at teams with immensely positive game script a year ago, it’s no surprise that the Carolina Panthers were at the top. When you only lose one regular season game, you‘re going to be leading a ton and the Panthers had the lead for 58.5 percent of their offensive snaps. More impressively, Carolina led for 75.8 percent of their second half snaps, the second highest mark of the past five seasons (the 2011 Packers led for 84.7 percent) and the Panthers were ahead on the scoreboard for 78.4 percent of their 4th quarter plays. In those spots, Carolina ran the football 65 percent of the time as those 127 rushing attempts accounted for 24.2 percent of their season total.

In short, Carolina had arguably the best script and atmosphere for running the football over the past five seasons. Jonathan Stewart missed three games, and his seven games with 20 or more rushing attempts trailed only Adrian Peterson’s eight. Given the flush opportunity to boost his output, Stewart mustered up just six top-24 fantasy weeks on the season. We can definitely still anticipate Carolina to be a good team again, but they also had a perfect storm of facing their own subpar division combined with the AFC South and NFC East a year ago.

I fully expect them to take a step back in positive game script. Teams that lead for 60 percent or more of their 4th quarter plays since 2011 have seen a -12.5 percent drop the following season with an average loss of 29 total rush attempts.

The Panthers also should come back down in terms of scoring efficiency. Carolina led the league in offensive efficiency per drive nearly across the board. They’ve been a solid offense every year since Cam Newton entered the league, but 2015 was far above the bar they previously set.

Even if the Panthers fall back to their average of 2.00 points per drive (which still would’ve ranked 8th a season ago) while rolling over the same number of possessions, they would still score 74 fewer points this year. Even if Carolina carries over a highly efficient offense through an increased difficulty in opponents, they stand to potentially lose double digit touchdowns as a whole.

A team that faces Carolina this season and is trending up is the Oakland Raiders. The Raiders have nailed their past few drafts, which afforded them the luxury of spending heavily in free agency to support those young cornerstone pieces. The step forward for the franchise began last season as the Raiders won seven games.

Despite the jump in win total, Oakland still experienced poor game script a season ago. The Raiders trailed for 55 percent of their offensive plays (23rd), 61.5 percent of their second half plays (23rd), and 69.6 percent of their 4th quarter plays (25th). They were down by two or more scores in the 4th quarter on 33.7 percent of their plays (21st).

Still, all of those were improvements over 2014 and were enough to see Derek Carr lose nearly two passing attempts per game. That was with Oakland having just 177 rushing attempts in the second half of games, which ranked 28th in the NFL. Given their additions on defense and the offensive line, I’d expect Oakland to continue to take steps forward in terms of controlling the scoreboard while Carr’s volume moves further in an opposite direction.

That should especially be the expectation when combining the offensive mentalities of Jack Del Rio and Bill Musgrave, two coaches that have been tethered to run first offenses throughout their careers. Last season was only the second time that an offense under Musgrave has been in the top half of pass attempts in his seven seasons as a coordinator, and just the second time in Del Rio’s 10 years as a head coach. Even amid whispers of both endorsing playing with faster tempo, that could end up being more coach speak than fact if the Raiders are controlling games.

Oakland isn’t likely to make a major jump to being elite just yet, but if Carr loses another game’s worth of pass attempts for the season, that puts him in the middle pack of quarterback volume and left to roll over his lofty touchdown rate from a year ago. The 2015 Raiders had a 34:7 passing-to-rushing TD ratio, a mark that should even out regardless of whether or not they fail to increase rushing production. Carr’s yards per attempt have remained so minuscule, even in his breakout last year. Per historical yards per attempt, Carr threw nine more touchdown passes than his relationship between touchdown rate and yards per attempt suggests he should’ve had.

Another up and coming franchise that should start to see more balance is the Jacksonville Jaguars. The Jaguars were 31st in rushing attempts (22.1 per game), 32nd in second half rushing attempts (10.2) and dead last in 4th quarter rushing attempts (4.0). Because Jacksonville was so pass heavy and giving defensively, they ranked 5th in the league in offensive possessions at 11.9 per game.

The Jaguars trailed for 68.6 percent of their second half snaps (28th), in which they carried a 76 percent passing play percentage. Those game situations provided 40.3 percent of their pass attempts on the season. They trailed for 70.9 percent of their 4th quarter plays (26th), which accounted for 25.3 percent of their passing plays for the season.

While trailing in the 4th quarter, Blake Bortles threw 13 touchdown passes, tied for the most ever in a season for a quarterback with Eli Manning in 2011. What’s worse is just four of those passing touchdowns gave the Jaguars the lead as they trailed by two or more scores on 43.3 percent of their 4th quarter snaps (26th).

I’m expecting the Jaguars to remain pass heavy as they should only make a Raiders 2015-esque type of step forward given their youth on defense, but those additions plus the signing of Chris Ivory suggest they want to slow games down where and when possible. Even if the Jaguars reduce their second half trail rate to 55 percent of their snaps (still below league average of 51.9 percent) while staying just as pass heavy, their pass play total would decrease by 54, nearly two entire games worth of passing volume over the course of a season.

The only team that played from behind more often than the Chicago Bears last year was the Cleveland Browns. The Bears trailed for 65.8 percent of their plays, but the interesting development there is that they only threw on 58.7 percent of those plays, while the average NFL rate while trailing was 67 percent pass. Looking under the hood, this isn’t just a John Fox thing. During his entire tenure with the Panthers from 2002-2010, Fox’s teams threw 64 percent of the time while trailing.

Rather, I’m placing my chips that Chicago’s lackluster approach was due to being massacred by offensive injuries. Alshon Jeffery, Matt Forte, Martellus Bennett, Eddie Royal all missed multiple games while first rounder Kevin White missed the entirety of the season. Forte and Bennett are now gone, and the Bears absolutely project to be a run first team again under Fox and Dowell Loggains. But if the game script teeters toward being one of the bottom teams in the league again, I expect them to revert to the norm of passing the football in those situations with their receiving corps back in line.

Speaking of teams constantly chasing the scoreboard, the Tennessee Titans have made it clear through their moves that they’d like to put the shackles on their offensive output with something referred to as “exotic smashmouth”.

They brought in DeMarco Murray and Derrick Henry to bolster that attack, but the Titans may not be good enough to pull this off unless they significantly outperform their 5.5 win over/under. Last year, Tennessee trailed for 64.9 percent of their plays (29th), yet ranked 27th in plays per game (61.0). So not only did they maintain a game script environment that wasn’t conducive to running the football at all, they also never provided pass volume in those conditions. They’re either going to have to lead a lot more this season to make their blueprints work or eventually swerve into opening up the passing game before we should really invest into this offense.

No team called more passes last season than the Baltimore Ravens‘ 700 pass plays. Their 676 pass attempts were 8th most in NFL history as they were a sound example of what can happen to offensive script when a team is completely decimated by injuries. Baltimore saw its 56.1 percent passing rate (24th) from 2014 shoot all the way to 64.6 percent (third highest) last season as they trailed for 62.9 percent of their offensive snaps, up from 45.4 percent in 2014. The Ravens trailed for 72.6 percent of their second half plays, calling a passing play on 70.5 percent of those snaps (43 percent of their season total) and were behind on 79.2 percent of their 4th quarter plays (only Cleveland trailed for more 4th quarter snaps).

Before tearing his ACL, Joe Flacco was on pace for a career high 661 pass attempts due to the conditions in which the Ravens were forced to play, but with a healthy and deep roster at every offensive skill position, the Ravens should reel in their pass attempts close to the 572 attempt average for a Marc Trestman led offense prior to 2015.

These are just a few notes to scratch the surface on what we can expect to recoil and shift for the 2016 season. I don’t want to bog down things by densely covering everything at once, so there will be several follow-up posts here early in the summer to get the train moving toward gauging what stats to follow and which ones to drop as you prepare your draft boards.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)