How RPOs are changing the projection math

Various option plays in modern offenses have me rethinking team-level statistics

I always have to be careful when I write a post like this, because gatekeepers love to come out of the woodwork to criticize any slip-up in terminology or the basics they learned as a backup lineman on their high school team. It’s such a silly element to football culture, this idea that if you don’t have a textbook-level understanding of football nomenclature that you obviously can’t speak on the nuances of the sport, as if the key to writing a great novel were a really strong vocabulary rather than an ability to paint a robust world and build compelling characters. In fact, I’d argue the best football analysts are the ones who can make interesting points while avoiding the buzzwords — or better yet, explaining them or mixing them in where context clues make the meanings obvious — which is something my favorites like Bill Barnwell, Benjamin Solak, and Mina Kimes do so well.

So forgive me if there are some minor issues with how I explain or describe various elements of modern NFL offenses. One of the things that I think is probably true is the NFL media, despite having gotten way better at explaining this stuff over the past few years, is probably still a bit behind on some trends, and there’s still a bit of a copycat thing where many seem to be waiting for someone who knows a little more than them to confirm a theory before they start espousing it themselves. We’re all kind of floating in the dark a little bit, and that’s something the gatekeepers rely on, because just having something where you can definitively say, “Hey, this is wrong” — even when it’s purely semantics — commands a certain authority.

I’m always wondering if it’s helpful when I hypothesize about things I only know maybe half of the details of, but I do think there’s something to be said for at least trying to advance conversations while seeing the whole football culture façade for what it is. The sport itself is all about whispers of information; it’s moves and countermoves between offenses and defenses, and the edges that are devised don’t last long before they are copycatted as fast as rivals can implement the concepts. And we hear about coaches calling each other and sharing information, asking about coaching points — ways they can get their players to execute the scheme they saw on film.

All of this is brought on today by my recently completing a projection of the Eagles, and then how it immediately called to mind a couple other teams like the Dolphins and Falcons. When I project a team, I spend a considerable amount of time on their prior year team page at Pro Football Reference. The 2022 Eagles were a successful team, which often means they stayed healthier than expected, but even accounting for that, their offense used a really small number of players.

This is a list of every player who recorded a touch, sorted by targets. There are only 11 total players who recorded a target, including only four wide receivers. All season!

This may not seem that wild if you haven’t spent the ungodly number of hours I have looking at PFR team pages, but it’s pretty wild. The Eagles’ Super Bowl opponent Chiefs targeted five wide receivers (as well as three TEs) in that game alone.

Three of the 11 players the Eagles targeted last year were targeted fewer than 10 times, and only four guys had more than 30 targets, with Kenneth Gainwell and Miles Sanders splitting the bulk of the RB targets and making it an extremely concentrated five main roles, with a clear top two. Again by comparison, the Chiefs had eight players with 30 or more targets, and then another four in double digits (and four more beyond that who got at least one target).

One of the really interesting elements to the Eagles’ target tree last year is Dallas Goedert only played 12 games, but the remaining TEs totaled just 24 targets all season. Goedert’s 69 targets were good for 5.75 per game, and yet the other TEs combined for just 15 total targets (3 per game) in the five games he missed (they had another 9 targets in the 12 games Goedert played).

That’s not crazy uncommon — a major mistake novice fantasy projectors make is relying too much on team positional trends, and not understanding individual talents often drive those numbers. We can all think of situations where a backup plugged into a starter’s role and performed well, but the Eagles’ TE target trend being a Dallas Goedert target trend that dried up when Goedert was inactive is the less memorable but roughly equally likely outcome in these situations.

But the degree to which the TE targets dried up — as well as the extreme concentration of targets to A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith — got me thinking about this concept I’ve referred to before where NFL coaches sometimes talk about “thinking players not plays.” The idea is focusing conceptually on how best to get the ball into the hands of their best players, rather than trying to devise a play that can work against a given defensive scheme. Theoretically, that might lead to simpler playcalls with fewer reads, something modern offenses have trended toward.

One of those playcalls is RPOs (run-pass options), which is designed to be a simple read of a single defender where the QB can either give the ball on a handoff, or pull it and throw a quick pass, often a slant or something of the nature. The quick part of the pass side of this is important, because on RPOs the offensive lineman block as if it is a run play, and if the QB pulls the ball but is indecisive or otherwise doesn’t release the throw right away, you’re looking at a likely ineligible lineman downfield penalty (run blocking means the lineman will be pushing forward, whereas on normal pass plays they are falling back into pass protection, and they can’t be more than a yard downfield when a pass is released or else that ineligible downfield penalty comes into play).

Seth Galina wrote about RPOs for PFF last offseason, and talked about how they have been on the rise. I don’t have good data on whether they continued to rise in 2022, but PFR does have some of their own numbers for RPO usage dating to 2019 on the “Play Type” tab on this page. That page shows that RPOs were down a bit last year, but interestingly the percent of RPOs that became passes was much higher, particularly among the league leaders, which I take to mean a potential tweak in how offenses are employing these (making it more difficult to recognize), or something as simple as a change in how PFR is classifying these.

The year-to-year classification isn’t super important, really, since they have a column for pass attempts on RPOs. That’s the area that’s been on the rise, with the Eagles leading the NFL last year at 136, which was 25.4% of their pass attempts. The Falcons, interestingly, were second, at 120 pass attempts (first in terms of percentage at 28.9%), while the Dolphins were third at 97 (16.6%). I mentioned the Falcons and Dolphins earlier because when I wrote my big targets per route run (TPRR) pieces earlier this offseason — and frankly dating back to the commentary I offered weekly on those teams during last season in Stealing Signals — a big part of the discussion of those passing games was how concentrated they were. For the Dolphins, everything seemed to flow through Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle, with each having extreme volume numbers and ancillary pieces being more ancillary than usual. Then the big discussion point around the Falcons this offseason has combined their extremely low pass rate last year with the extremely impressive per-route metrics for both key youngsters, Kyle Pitts and Drake London, who each crushed in stats like TPRR.

The point I’m trying to make goes like this: RPOs more or less take away the reading of a set of routes in favor of a designed receiver who will get the target only if the play is a pass, because it will otherwise just be a handoff. That receiver is pre-determined by the play design because remember, the pass has to come out quickly if it’s going to be thrown at all. With the top teams using these types of play designs for a quarter or more of their overall pass attempts, the top receiving weapons can consolidate volume in a way the top receivers on offenses that don’t use RPOs as much just can’t.

That said, the consolidation works hand in hand with total volume. It’s interesting to look at where these three teams fell in that regard, with the Dolphins coming in with the 12th-most pass attempts in the NFL at 584, the Eagles finishing below average in 23rd with 536, and the Falcons being basement level with 415, in 31st. Another interesting element is both Philadelphia and Atlanta have mobile QBs — a trait several of the top offenses in RPO pass attempts share, including Baltimore, Arizona, Chicago, and Buffalo, who were all in the top 10 last year — while Tua Tagovailoa had only 14 designed rushes all season.

One of the things I learned about RPOs while doing some digging into this theory was they don’t traditionally end in QB rushes. It makes sense — the read is some linebacker or nickel CB who is either coming forward to add numbers against the run or staying in pass coverage, and it’s either a give to a running back or a pull and quick throw where that player was aligned pre-snap (as I understand it, and this is one of those things where I’m not sure if I have it 100% but I’m pretty sure I’m at least directionally accurate). This is in contrast to something like a read option, which became popular more like a decade ago when Robert Griffin posted a monster rookie season, with the difference being the decision to give to the RB or pull the ball are both run options — it’s either a RB carry or a QB one.