Week 12 RPO Report & Wrap-Up
or, now I'm stuck inside a vision that repeats repeats repeats repeats
I missed doing this last week, so apologies for that. It’s a weird thing having that Thursday night game. I thought, “I’ll have so much more time to dig into the game! I’ll cover more than I usually do!”
Then I push myself too hard at the start and lose all motivation a few days later. I did not make good use of my time from a football-content standpoint. Combine that with a busy week at work, and this article fell by the wayside.
But I’m back for this week, tracking this RPO usage thing in a way that interests me and only me. You’re welcome.
So let’s dig in. How did the Packers do with the RPO game against the Eagles?
The Swing tag was their favorite this week and it did pretty nice work on the 2 times they threw it, picking up 5.5 YPA.
Their big one this week was the Slant tag: a vertical RPO that is typically a post-snap read, but Rodgers doesn’t like post-snap RPO reads, so this is a pre-snap read.
Allen Lazard goes in motion before the snap, which bumps the coverage and leaves a pocket for the slant to Christian Watson on the right. Rodgers sees that and makes the decision: he’s throwing the slant.
He does a half-turn to sell the hand-off to AJ Dillon, then immediately flips around and throws to Watson for 11.
A pre-snap read, but an effective one. I’m past the point of hoping to see more post-snap RPO reads from Rodgers, so I’ll settle on the occasional vertical pre-snap read.
How did the RPO run game do this week when compared to the non-RPO runs?
The non-RPO run game fared better than the RPO game by 1.4 yards.
As far as what the run-blocking was, Wide Zone fared the best, picking up 7.2 YPA, although the pass tag did most of the work there. Of those 5 plays, 3 of them were passes, with the 11 yard Slant, 11 yard Swing and 8 yard WR Screen doing the work. The run portion of Wide Zone only picked up 6 yards on 2 carries.
That’s the RPO game. Now…what else did I work on this week?
For Packer Report, I wrote about the Strike concept and how the speed of Christian Watson - along with the route of Lazard - helped make that play a 63 yard touchdown.
For Cheesehead TV, I wrote about the overall passing game against the Eagles, then dug into a couple of RB screens with vertical tags behind them. I also dug up a video I did on the Jordy Nelson TD in Super Bowl XLV, which had a vertical route attached to a middle screen.
I also did a handful of videos.
I started out looking at a series of two plays from Jordan Love, and how recognition of what the boundary defender was doing informed his decision making.
I then took a look at the Randall Cobb TD against the Eagles, and compared that to the third Christian Watson TD against the Cowboys. We looked at defensive leverage and talked about the inside-out read progression on the Cross-County Dagger concept.
I went back to the Strike concept. I looked at the Christian Watson TD, but I also looked at the same concept run earlier in the game. I talked about how important spacing is on the concept, and how the vertical route getting bullied inside can hinder it.
Lastly, I talked about Jordan Love. I started out with a 30 minute video, walking through all 9 of his passing attempts against the Eagles. Talked about the concepts, footwork, what he was seeing from the defense, and so on. Like I said, it’s a bit long, but felt like I had a much better understanding of exactly how he was operating after digging in.
But I am fully aware that not everyone wants to sit down and watch a 30 minute video. So I did a write-up of all 9 snaps on this very Substack, then also ended up running it all down in a Twitter thread.
Hope you all learned half as much as I did this week. Thanks for following along!