Last week in this space I talked about how it looked like the Packers were starting to ramp up their RPO usage. We saw that continue this week, and we also saw an even bigger shift: percent of run plays called with an RPO tag.
Overall, RPOs made up 22.6% of their offense this week. That was up from the 15.7% they were averaging coming into the game. It’s also their second highest rate of the year, coming only slightly below the 22.8% in week 5 (although, in terms of total calls, this week had their highest number of RPOs with 14). In terms of % of their run game? We’ll get to that, but first let’s look at the whole picture.
One of the other things I talked about last week was how much I loved seeing them finally start to work in some of the vertical, post-snap RPOs. It’s been a long road and it’s still something they’ve been using sparingly, but seeing two Slant tags this past week was encouraging. And those numbers look even better if the one Slant that was thrown - a throw that hit Wicks in the chest in the low red zone - was caught.
Love threw 4 times on RPOs this week and that was the only one that wasn’t caught. Keep calling it! It’s working!
What were they running these plays off of?
They’ve really simplified this portion. No power/counter looks. Only Inside & Wide Zone this week. That’s probably just a product of being down and turning more to a dropback passing game, so I expect some other concepts sprinkled in again next week.
On the day, they only handed the ball off 3 times without an RPO tag. THREE! Granted, not a ton of rushing attempts overall, but I’ve never seen anything close to this ratio before. And, while the RPO wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, it performed better than just a regular run play (albeit with an extremely small sample size).
This is what I wanted from this offense. The receivers aren’t great blockers yet and you’re not creating enough movement up front to create explosives off the run game even if the receivers were stonewalling guys at the second and third level. Saturate the run game with RPOs and use that as a way to drag defenders away from the point of attack, but also to give your QB some easy completions and your young playmakers the ability to get their hands on the ball early in the rep and try to make something happen.
And then also more vertical RPOs.
The vision is starting to become reality. At least, that’s what I tell myself in the cold, dark night.
Alright. What else did I get into this week.
As always, I got a chance to sit down with John Kuhn and run through some plays from this past week. It was Halloween so I threw on my Camp Crystal Lake hat and we looked at 3 3rd down attempts from the Packers offense and walked through it all. Tons of fun, as always.
I also took a few minutes to walk through the Romeo Doubs TD, and looked at how they had it play off a TD from the previous week. Really cool design off something the Vikings were clearly looking for.
For Packer Report, I looked at a couple nice WR Screen variations the Packers showed in the low red zone.
For Cheesehead TV, I took a look at the overall passing game performance against the Vikings, then talked a bit about the Packers protection plan against the glorious maniac that is Brian Flores.
I did this by digging into the idea of the offense using a “Sniffer” to combat a lot of the mugging, sim pressure looks the Vikings like to show. The idea of the Sniffer is to align him a couple of yards behind a guard to help the line with their protection, allowing them to sort out their assignments while protecting yourself against one (or both) of the muggers rushing the QB.
I also threw a couple things into the world in this space. I looked at all of the Packers play action snaps against the Vikings. It was a sparse collection, so I used that space to (again) talk about the Packers plan against the Vikings attacking defense.
I also threw all of the Packers screen snaps from week 8 into a cut-up and talked about those a bit. The subtitle of that article was “What’s slightly better than disaster” if that tells you anything.
A final thought about the Vikings game, after rewatching it multiple times. I’m more optimistic about this offense turning it around this season than I was before the game. There was talk during training camp of Love working on putting more air under his deep ball, which I think led to him overthinking some things and also led to some pretty ugly, floaty deep balls this year. This game? We saw him driving the ball with more zip downfield than we’ve seen. There were a couple of near-misses (one of which seemed to come because the WR slowed down a bit), but I thought it looked much better than we’ve seen it this year. Sure, that’s a low bar to clear, but I thought he cleared it here.
What will that mean for the rest of the year? Man, I have no idea. I’ll be very curious to see how he looks on that front this week against the Rams.