The RPO Report: Preseason Week 1

or, I hope I stick with this all season

You may have heard from other sources, but (preseason) football is back, baby! So what better time to premier a new weekly column for the 2022 season. The goal is to get momentum rolling now and carry that through to the entire season. Am I optimistic about it? Not really! But hey, stranger things have happened.

The truth is, I’ve never spent much time with the RPO side of the Packers offense. When charting, I would just mark the concept as “RPO” and put it out of mind. Occasionally I would dig in a bit, but only if they dialed up a particularly tasty variation.

But, while I was going back through the 2021 season, I started digging into the RPO game a little more and found myself getting more curious as to how they may deploy that aspect of their game in 2022. Davante Adams had a skillset that was particularly well-suited for the Packers horizontal RPO game. Would they push it vertically a little more, or would they keep rolling with the pre-snap read, horizontal RPO calls?

The other reason I dug in was to engage in a little mythbusting. A common refrain around the Packers and their RPOs is that they need to stop calling so many because Rodgers takes the throw an overwhelming amount of the time. I wanted to see if that was true. (It wasn’t: Rodgers chose to throw on 21.1% of the Packers RPO calls in 2021.)

If you want a full look into what the Packers did in the RPO game in 2021, you can check out this article I wrote for Cheesehead TV in the offseason.

I need to stop talking and get to the plays.

Do I think the preseason will give a good indication of what the Packers will do through the season? Probably not too much, but I’m curious like a kitten and wanted to build momentum going into the season, and I’m dragging you with me.

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In the first preseason game, the Packers dialed up 10 RPOs: 9 with inside zone as the base run, 1 with wide zone. Of those calls, the most common tag was the bubble screen. They had that tagged on 9 of the calls, with the other tag being Stick. Bubble was far-and-away their most common tag in 2021 (making up 51.8% of their RPO tags), so that’s not really surprising.

Their one throw on the concept was on the Bubble concept. The read is simple. The QB simply asks, “Do we have a numbers advantage on the throw?” The Packers come out in a YY alignment (two in-line TEs on the same side of the formation) and two receivers wide on the opposite side. The 49ers have a boundary defender, with the overhang defender playing inside of the slot receiver (as they are wont to do). That gives Green Bay a numbers advantage. Etling sets and flips the ball out to Toure, who finds a nice alley between the overhang and the block on the outside.

The rest of the 9 calls all ended up being runs, and they were successful with it, too. On their 9 runs, they averaged 5.3 yards per carry. Those numbers are slightly elevated due to Dexter Williams finding open space on a cutback against an overly aggressive defender, but these things will happen even in the regular season. The Packers averaged 4.4 YPA when running in their RPO game in 2021, so 5.3 YPA would be an overwhelming success. (Keeping in mind that no, they likely will not average 5.3 YPA in the regular season.)

Overall, a really nice performance in the RPO game. 10 calls, 6.0 YPA.

Like I said, I’m planning on doing this for every game of the regular season. Pretty excited to track this week-to-week and see how they deploy this aspect of their offense. With the speed they have, I think this could be a little more dynamic than it has in the past.