Stealing Signals, Week 12, Part 1
Play sequencing, TNF, and the early Sunday games
One of the fun things about the internet in 2024 is everyone is a hater, to the extent that there’s this trend that when people are willing to change opinion and even admit they were wrong, you’ll get these second-order haters saying they can’t, and they need to stand by their wrongness.
I saw it this morning over on Twitter (yes, I’m still using both social accounts) when someone said they were “99% sure” the “ArtButMakeItSports” account was automated, and the person behind it shared how they have done it live with Pablo Torre for his show, so the original commenter apologized.
This whole thing of the original commenter saying “my bad, carry on then” and then being hit with a comment that says, “Nah don’t switch up now, don’t try to be a fan” and 500 people out of 5,000 views like that tweet — that’s dumb. Fully 10% of people who viewed this tweet buried in replies felt compelled to click “like” in support of the hater hating on another hater for admitting they were wrong and trying not to be a hater anymore. Prioritizing shitting on another person over finding a positive direction in a conversation is another thing that perfectly encapsulates the 2024 experience, as the “ArtButSports” account said.
This wasn’t even the angle I wanted to take in the intro today, but I’m going to use this point to pivot to saying I was just wrong on Saquon Barkley, and then I’ve kept being wrong in-season. I’ve been sort of reactionary in calling a different RB the best in the league seemingly every week, but it’s Barkley. In a season where a bunch of RBs have done awesome stuff — in part because defenses just don’t defend the run well and don’t seem concerned with tackling — Barkley is the best back in football, playing with that early-career explosiveness that displays why the term “generational” was thrown around when the Giants took him second overall, and in the current meta, and behind that Eagles’ offensive line, it’s just so dominant. Other RBs are outperforming what they might have been expected to do, but this is the RB who is most additive to that landscape, taking advantage of defensive weaknesses at the highest level. You give him the space, and he’s so explosive. You’re a little slow and don’t attack him at the second level, and he’ll quickly sidestep into more space and then destroy whatever angle you lazily assumed you had with a burst of acceleration. He feels inevitable right now.
I think for the first time last night I definitively realized he’s going to be top-three pick despite being a 28-year old next year, and that I’m going to want to think long and hard about paying the iron price to get exposure. I wrote most of the last paragraph about him being inevitable — intended for the Eagles game recap tomorrow — after his first 70-yard TD run, and then he put an exclamation point on the game with a 72-yarder later on in the fourth quarter. Getting those kinds of plays at the rate he’s delivering them supersedes everything in fantasy. It’s what I’m always chasing. We use the term “exposure” for having guys on our teams; in this case, there’s no better description for the sickness I feel not having him anywhere than exposed.
Starting with that little admission helps me lay the groundwork for what I want to talk about, because my actual intro is about a team stubbornly Establishing It, and it’s important to emphasize that running the damn ball does work here in 2024, before I argue a team should throw more. So don’t get it twisted: This isn’t some thoughtless restating of past beliefs in the face of new evidence.
Despite being a silly, brutish sport, football is a hyper-complex game, and it’s why there’s so much discussion around game theory and ways “analytics” can help (or hurt!). But one of the things that does seem to be universally agreed on is that passing is more efficient than running. A big part of that can be boiled down to simple numbers — you can look at something like net yards per pass attempt (which includes sacks, so it’s more like yards per dropback) versus yards per rush attempt, and see a significant gulf (this year, league-wide, it’s 6.2 vs. 4.4), and that gulf extends to more advanced stuff like EPA, etc.
That’s what’s been at the heart of defenses shifting their focus, and starting to defend the explosive pass as a primary goal, after decades of the sport being built on the idea of being strong up front and stopping the run, given passing games developed off of that for decades, first as a change-of-pace strategy, then steadily improving through the 1990s and 2000s until really the 2010s when they got so good — helped along by rules changes and all that jazz — that it became inevitable defenses would view the sport differently, too.
One of the things I’m becoming increasingly obsessed with is play sequencing. Like a lot of things, this has built out of my fandom, and it’s something I think Kalen DeBoer did exceptionally well last year for my Huskies, and the new coach Jedd Fisch just doesn’t have a handle on at all. I think Fisch’s scheme is solid, and there is obviously talent on the roster, and UW is worse this year almost entirely because he doesn’t have a feel for how to sequence plays.
I could give 100 examples about him, but I’m instead going to give one example from DeBoer. What bothers me about Fisch is a lack of killer instinct, or aggressiveness. I don’t have PROE data for college, but I imagine his PROE after a first down is massively to the negative. He has tendencies, and one is if the team gains a big play, to immediately slow things down with a first-down run. DeBoer was the opposite. He understood the value of having a defense reeling, and what some people might even consider momentum, even if that’s a concept that’s difficult to prove, or even discuss.
The example comes from Washington’s first matchup with arch nemesis Oregon last year, and I frankly may have already written about it, so if I have, I apologize. I know I’ve talked about it with friends before, but I don’t think it’s ever made it’s way here, yet.
Anyway, the Huskies were stopped during a particularly tough goal-line sequence, down 4, turning the ball over on downs with six-and-a-half minutes left. These things will happen, but 2nd-and-goal from the 1 wasn’t enough to get across the line, and it felt like a dagger in a high-scoring 33-29 game.
Oregon immediately drove 51 yards on 10 plays, but UW caught a massive break when they had their own tough short-yardage sequence, getting stuffed for a loss of a yard on 3rd-and-2 around midfield, then drawing up the perfect fourth-down play on a little leak to a wide open TE that was dropped when Bo Nix maybe left the throw a bit short. There was 2:11 left, and Washington had used all three of their timeouts; A first down for Oregon there effectively ended the game.
I loved that aggressive decision, for what it’s worth, rather than Oregon punting. They’d taken the ball from the shadow of their own goal line and converted multiple first downs, including two 3rd-and-shorts, and the precedent for this particular game was clearly that the offenses were going to dictate.
But what happened next has really stuck with me. I’ve talked before about how these types of situations are understood well by this generation of fans because of video games like Madden and NCAA Football, and how simulating these events hundreds of times works as a useful guide for things like win probability models, which Frank DuPont wrote about in his great book Game Plan, arguing nerds like myself have a good feel for this stuff. And in this spot, my video-game brain said, very clearly, “Let’s go, but we can’t score too quickly.” We took over around midfield with about two minutes remaining and had a chance to score and win on essentially the final possession. The final possession of either half is always so key, as I’ve written about before, given football is a game of possessions, and you’re preventing your opponent their final chance to score points. It’s the equivalent of a walk-off hit in baseball, or a last-second shot in basketball. When you time it up right, it doesn’t allow an answer.
What DeBoer (and/or Ryan Grubb) and the Huskies did instead was attack vertically, and immediately. Michael Penix to Ja’Lynn Polk for 35 yards down to the 18. Michael Penix to Rome Odunze for a touchdown. Two plays, 53 yards, 33 seconds of game clock, leaving 1:38.
Oregon was able to drive back downfield, and get into position for a very makeable field goal, and probably should have been able to force overtime, except the 43-yard try went wide. I’m not going to argue that the missed kick was the result of the quick strike, and I really only mention it to note that the Huskies very much did leave too much time on the clock, in the sense of what that concept means. So I’m not even sure DeBoer made the right call.
What I do know is I’m very open to it, despite it pretty clearly not being optimal in a video-game (i.e. simulation) sense, which is to say that if we could turn the players into unemotional simulations who aren’t impacted by the events preceding a given moment, and I’m playing my friend in that spot, I’m absolutely draining clock before scoring. I usually argue for aggressiveness in all situations, but in this case the aggressive decision probably isn’t chucking downfield; it’s probably inviting risk by trying to thread the time needle and then score at the last possible moment. That’s especially aggressive.
So anyway, purely from an efficiency standpoint of trying to optimize win outcomes with every decision, you’d have liked to have left less time, and it may be the case the Huskies would have won more simulations of this same game if they did run more clock. But I think there’s something very real and human here, where they’d just been stopped on three consecutive plays at the goal line, then seen the game appear to be over, before catching their own break. If you play out the other scenario of trying to manage the time, there’s an eventual goal-line sequence where time and downs are again a factor, and Oregon has just stopped you down there on three straight plays, and you’ve watched Oregon fail a short-yardage sequence as well, and a concept like pressure would have been very high on UW’s side. Through the quick strike, they put the pressure back on an Oregon offense that had just failed to ice the game.
Of course, Oregon’s offense answered, and it’s answers like this that make momentum such a difficult concept to discuss, because whether it adds pressure isn’t necessarily known to impact performance. This is why I’m saying that even if UW had run clock and gotten down into a goal-line sequence where they had one or two plays inside 30 seconds to try to win the game, the idea that some added pressure from having been stopped down there on their last opportunity might not actually impact their odds of success. For some people, pressure is arguably a focus multiplier, and the argument could be made that Penix throwing two good balls for a quick touchdown is an indication that he was going to be sharp on that final series regardless (or, more specific to the information known when the decision was made, that Nix’s performance on the previous drive to get Oregon up to midfield was enough to feel like Oregon would get back in field goal range if given too much time).
But what I’ve come to is this appreciation of what happened, not just because it worked out, but because I do believe another stressful trip down to the goal line with time dwindling would have probably been a tough ask after having just been stopped, and that by immediately calling downfield passes, DeBoer and Grubb gave Penix a sort of freedom and looseness, and maybe caught the Oregon defense off guard, and shifted the ball into their court, and put the pressure back on them, after a long sequence since the goal line stand where UW really felt like they were done. See that’s the whole thing I haven’t really emphasized: The game felt over after the goal line stand, and then when Oregon started converting multiple first downs, it felt more over. So when UW got the ball back with 2:11, it was a surge of emotion. “We’re so back,” 100%. And instead of getting cute with the clock, they decided to strike while the iron was hot, and all those other cliches, and I always try to avoid cliches because most are just trying to explain one side of variance, but I mean this was one of those uniquely inspired coaching decisions that caught me off guard a little and I did come to really appreciate the idea behind.
All of which is to set the stage to talk about a truly frustrating job of coaching being done in Houston, because it’s all about play sequencing, and these hard-to-define ideas like confidence. I’ve argued for years now that young QBs need to have some easy throws schemed up for them, and how this idea of a passer getting into rhythm is a very fair thing, and when I say I’m getting increasingly obsessed with play sequencing, it’s around ideas like this.
There’s logic to these concepts. In the NFL, where the windows are notoriously tight, and defenses are trying to take away difficult throwing lanes, one of the best traits a QB can have is the presence-of-mind to pull the ball down and not try to make the throw. That’s always going to be easier if you’ve seen and completed some easy reads. You can’t ask a guy to drop back and read out complex coverages every single snap and never actually throw the football. That’s basically what Shane Waldron did to Caleb Williams, in my estimation, and then when he did have open guys he’d start to miss those throws, because his process is too sped up, and he doesn’t get his feet under him, and all those things. We’ve seen Bo Nix progress in this way this year, as well, where the process felt so sped up after the tough early month, and he’s started to settle into some throws more recently.
This is what I believe has happened to C.J. Stroud, and I am basically writing all this just so I can explain a few sequences from this week’s loss to the Titans as anecdotal evidence. It’s going to be hard to justify in a game where the Texans had a +5.6% PROE, and Mixon only got 14 carries, but I’ll note that the opposing Titans came into the game with the fifth-highest PROE against on the season, and a top-10 rush defense. They stop the run, and teams throw against them as a result, so the fact that Houston threw against them a lot isn’t all that surprising. Stroud also wound up throwing two picks and taking four sacks, so concerns about pressure and Stroud’s play would seem to be warranted, and again not justify complaints that they didn’t throw enough.
But that’s why I want to break this down, because I think on the play-by-play level there was a clear bias toward that old-school mentality of, “We have to get the run game going,” despite the matchup, and despite the reality that Stroud’s development should be priority No. 1 for this coaching staff. Offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik did such a good OC job last year that he got head coaching interviews in January, and I’ve praised him in the past, but his approach on a down-to-down basis is not good this year, regardless of the end-of-game numbers that show they did allow Stroud to drop back plenty. My argument is they do that as a secondary resort, asking too much of Stroud, and increasing the potential for bad outcomes, because they aren’t prioritizing the pass game.
Again, I understand Stroud has been under pressure at times, but the way to mitigate pressure is to throw on nonobvious downs. Full stop. You can’t leave all dropbacks for obvious pass downs when your young QB is under too much pressure. Now his process is sped up and every time he does drop back he’s reading out defenses dropping into coverage, daring him to make difficult throws. I don’t have a clean way to show this statistically, and my evidence is purely anecdotal, which is why the long intro today.
This will also read like I think teams should just throw every time, but that’s definitely not the case. There’s a reason the late, great Mike Leach’s college offenses could get shut down. Part of playcalling — and sequencing — comes down to tendencies. Football is about misdirection. You never want the opponent knowing what you’re going to do. My issue with Jedd Fisch I mentioned above is I’m pretty sure UW’s opponents all know that after a first down he’s highly likely to call a conservative run up the middle, and so the success rate on those has become terrible, despite UW having a solid rushing attack when used creatively. You can’t just take 2nd-and-9s every time and voluntarily kill your own drives. That’s an example of how one run in the grand scheme of things winds up being the back-breaking playcall for the series. (These things are not always going to show up if you look at something like PROE, is what I mean.)
What I’m arguing is the very worst thing is to have a run-based tendency. This is why I laid the groundwork talking about pass efficiency vs. rush efficiency. If a team knows you’re going to run the ball, and you still do it, you’re sacrificing a down with almost no upside. Pass tendencies — including 2-minute drills and late-game situations — don’t completely ruin offensive efficiency. It’s not great, but if you’re going to have a tendency, and the defense is going to know what you’re doing, you’d far prefer that to be a pass tendency, because you should err on the side of passing generally. Run tendency, bad. Pass tendency, not great, but directionally accurate.
That’s important relative to this conversation because when I talk about coaches having this mindset of “getting the run game going,” I want to point out it never goes the other way. When a team is so dominant on the ground they don’t really need to pass, they just won’t. If they have a run bias and you still can’t stop it, they will run every single time, and no one is going to say, “We have to get the pass game going.” This is why people like me focus on prioritizing the pass, and it sounds ideological, because the conversation is always framed on establishing the run first. But again, that’s just wrong. In a coach’s play-calling and sequencing, throwing should be the mindset. It should always, always be the mindset to default to finding successful pass plays, then pivoting to the run when needed. Those old highly efficiency pass offenses from Peyton Manning and Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers in his heyday understood that. Some of those games, it was like they never called a run, they just ran it when the QB checked to it at the line.
Anyway, I’m rehashing a lot of stuff, and most people these days do seem to have some understanding that throwing to build a lead is good. Talking heads still center it on running, but they love to say, “Throw to score, run to win” or stuff like that now. Whatever. I don’t hate running, and especially not in 2024. But you have to know your offense and your personnel and matchups and all of those things.
Let’s talk about the Texans. It’s been hard to point out how they prioritize Joe Mixon to their own detriment, but the key downs were clear several times in this game. They got a huge kick return to open the game and hit for a 19-yard pass TD on the game’s opening play. Great. Opened the next series with two runs and third-down passing conversion. Run-run-pass sequence and Stroud bails them out, but after that first down, they did drop back a few times with no success and punted. They opened the next series with a 1st-and-10 completion for 16, before an incomplete pass led to a 2nd-and-10 screen call to Mixon for -5 yards, which all but ended that drive. So far they are passing at a decent clip, and finding some success (a first down on every series), but the Titans were scoring in between and Houston took back over early in the second quarter down 17-7. This is really where my frustration began, because even after throwing early, they quickly pivoted to needing to Establish It.