As it turns out, England isn’t quite as jolly as I was led to believe.
/holds for applause
/receives only silence and self-doubt
We’re back for another RPO report. Last week we took a look at the first 4 weeks of the season. Overall, pretty good! Averaging 5.2 YPA on RPOs, which is up from the 4.5 YPA in 2021. The passing game looked particularly promising, averaging 6.7 YPA so far, which is 1.9 YPA better than last year. That’s great! Everything is roses!
This week? Not quite so good, unfortunately.
The YPA was good overall, but it’s being held up by the running game at 6.2 YPA. Which is good! However, due to some heavy boxes, they opted to throw more than normal. Through the first 4 weeks, Rodgers had been throwing the pass tag on RPOs 30% of the time. In 2021, he threw to the pass tag on 21.1% of RPO calls.
This week, he threw on a whopping 47.1%, and it didn’t go particularly well, as they only picked up an average of 3.9 YPA. These one game looks are all an exercise in small sample size theater, but it’s still pretty staggering to see.
The WR Screen tag did well for them this week, but the Stick tag - thrown on 40% of the calls - was abysmal.
How did the run concepts fare?
Seeing Power down at a single call is baffling. That had been an overwhelming success for them. They had dialed up their usage of power concepts in the run game overall, and that carried over to their RPO game. Through the first 4 weeks, power concepts accounted for 21 of their 70 RPO run concept calls. It was also their most successful, averaging 6.9 YPA (nice). To see only one call in this game is slightly disappointing. They leaned heaviest on their inside zone stuff this week, so I have to assume it has something to do with the overall gameplan against the Giants. Which makes sense. Wink Martindale is known as an aggressive DC, as he brings a lot of pressure. If you’re pulling a guard against an 8 man box and they’re bringing 6 guys, one of them could slip through the hole in the line left by the pulling guard and blow the whole thing up. Here’s to hoping power makes a comeback against the Jets.
Lastly, how did the run game fare with and without the use of RPO tags? After all, the core play behind the RPO is that the play itself is a run that can turn into a pass if the numbers are good. So it would stand to reason that run calls with an RPO tag would fare better than run calls without an RPO tag, as you would only be running into the most favorable looks.
And it did! A big success! They averaged 2.8 more yards per attempt when running with an RPO tag than just the pure runs.
So overall, not great for the RPO game, but the running game fare extremely well this week, even without the use of the power running concepts they’ve grown so fond of this season.