It’s the bye week for the Packers, and it’s looking like it’ll be a bye week for me as well. Last year I had an action-packed bye week in this spot, throwing a 4 part series at you where we built out a Packers playsheet, based on what had worked well for them up to that point in the season based on the down and distance. It’s still something I’m real proud of, so if you feel like rolling back through that, have at it.
It’s possible I’ll do something like that in the next week, but we’ll see if it shakes out.
For now, let’s talk RPOs from the Bears game. It was an odd week. By my count, the Packers called 10 RPOs and…well…you’ll see.
Not a single throw on any of the 10 calls. That’s extremely strange. The Packers have averaged 13.8 RPO calls per game and handed the ball off on 67.8% of them. So they tend to hand the ball off more often than not - they haven’t had a single week this season where they threw more than 47.1% of the calls - but to see 0 throws was striking.
And the run game didn’t do particularly well, clocking in at only 3.4 YPA. When you consider how they did without the RPO tag…
…it’s even more striking. They averaged 7.2 YPA on their 19 called runs. Nice work, right there.
They didn’t fare particularly well with any of their three main rushing calls in the RPO game. Power worked the best for them, but even that doesn’t come close to touching the 7.2 non-RPO average.
For the season, the Packers are averaging 0.6 fewer yards per rush when running with an RPO tag than they are when they just call a pure run. In fact, there have been very few weeks when the RPO rushing game outperformed the non-RPO rushing game. The “why” behind that deserves a deep-dive that I simply don’t have the time or energy for at the moment. Feels like an offseason project to me.
Alright. What else did I get into this week? Not as much as usual, but still a handful of things.
For Packer Report, I dug into the Packers usage of the Cross-Country Dagger concept, and went digging through some old playbooks. I ended up finding an example that looks an awful lot like Cross-Country in Vince Lombardi’s 1966 Packers playbook. There truly is nothing new under the sun.
Former Rams QB Jim Everett saw my post about this play and said that it was called “088” when he was playing, which makes sense, seeing as how Everett came up through the Air Coryell system.
For Cheesehead TV, I took a look at the overall passing game, then dug into a couple of plays: a Curl/Dig combo the Packers have been using more of, and a follow-slant on a 3rd down.
On the video front, I took a look at the Christian Watson jet sweep TD, and went back to earlier in the game where the Packers gathered the necessary information to dial this up.
I also dug into the two-point conversion call to Marcedes Lewis, talked about the design and Rodgers’ read on the play.
Overall, a really fun week. I’ll be up for the MNF game against the Rams, and I’m absolutely hyped for that.