Week 18 RPO Report and Wrap-Up

or, you can combine anything you want

“Oh man, I’m pretty hyped for this Packers playoff game,” is certainly not something I thought I’d be saying after the Packers lost to the Raiders and Broncos in back-to-back games, yet here we are.

Enough of that. How did the Packers do with their RPO game this week?

For the first time I can remember since Davante Adams, the Packers did some damage with the Bubble tag. They threw the ball twice with the Bubble tag. Both went to Dontayvion Wicks and both were because the Packers had a 2-to-1 numbers advantage to the passing tag. Both times Wicks made something happen with the ball in his hands.

The 6.4 YPA when rushing the ball with the bubble tag did nice work, too. Of those 5 runs, 4 of them were Inside Zone, with the other 1 being a Power run.

As we’ve been seeing as the season has gone on, runs with a pass tag are averaging more YPA than runs without an RPO tag. We saw a pretty big bump in RPO usage in the back half of the season, but that has fallen off a over the last 2 weeks. Here’s a rough bar chart because I didn’t have time to make anything prettier. This is RPO % of playcalls over the course of the season.

If RPO runs are gaining more on average than non-RPO runs, why dial back usage? The answer may be due to the explosives they’re generating.

Early in the season, the Packers run game was not good and their RPO usage was low. One of the main reasons I had seen for their poor run game - besides the offensive line not generating enough movement - was that they had so many young pieces among their skill position players and they weren’t doing a good job of blocking downfield. To generate explosives in the run game, you need your receivers to be blocking downfield, and they just weren’t at a place where they could do that.

My idea was to increase the usage of RPOs. If you weren’t going to generate explosives in the run game due to receivers not being able to block, dial up RPOs and use the receivers to widen the defense by showing those run tags. If they can’t block, make the defenders match the formation and cover the bubbles and screens. You’re still not really generating explosives that way, but it would be a way to get the down-to-down run efficiency up.

As the season has gone on, the skill players have gotten much better at blocking. Even a guy like Bo Melton - a practice squad guy for most of the season - has turned into a really nice blocking receiver in this offense.

Over the last 3 weeks, the Packers have a 6.7% explosive rate on runs with an RPO and a 10.9% explosive rate on runs without an RPO tag. (Per Brian Billick, any run that gains at least 12 yards I mark as explosive.) This past week, the Packers generated 4 explosives on the ground, with 3 of them being non-RPO runs.

What do you see in those plays? Some nice WR blocking.

The RPO runs are still generating some really nice yardage and should remain as a core part of this offense. But, with the skill position players blocking downfield like we’ve been seeing, non-RPO runs are generating explosives on a much higher level as the season has gone on. It’s still an extremely small sample size, but it looks like the Packers may be willing to sacrifice a bit of down-to-down efficiency in order to chase those explosives. Even as a staunch supporter of RPOs, I have no problem with that.

What else did I get into?

As I do every week, I sat down with John Kuhn and broke down some plays from the Packers/Bears game. We looked at what the Packers were able to do in the run game against a Bears defense that had been defending the run extremely well.

Over on my YouTube channel, I walked through two instances of the Packers running the game concept combo against the Bears; the second one leading to a dropped pass by Melton for what would have been a gorgeous TD. We’re talking about the concepts, the reads, and all that good stuff.

I also took about 10 minutes to walk through 8 snaps of Tucker Kraft in the run game. I absolutely love watching this guy play football, man. I threw a couple less-than-stellar plays in there as well, but most of it is looking at what Kraft is asked to do then walking through how well he did it. Such a fun player.

For Packer Report, I wrote about Can Calls, the communication that goes into that and how it looks when everyone sees the check vs how it looks when they don’t.

Also at Packer Report, I had a bit of fun reacting to a Packers social media post. They posted up their social media team in the halls of Lambeau and asked Packers players what they would do in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Of course I - someone who has seen entirely too many zombie movies - had some thoughts, so I wanted to take each player response and talk about whether the plan seemed like a good one or a bad one. This was so much fun to write.

Lastly, for Cheesehead TV, I took a look at the Packers passing game against the Bears, then dove deep into a play action concept the Packers showed 3 times against the Bears (including the big 59 yard gain by Jayden Reed). I talk about the core concepts, the alterations to this and why it works.

Another really fun week. This team has been so much fun to watch as they’ve progressed through the year. I’m thrilled that we get to see them for at least one more week.