The Packers continue their ramp-up of the RPO game. After calling RPOs on 22.6% of their plays in Week 8, they called them on 20% of plays in Week 9. However, those RPOs were more successful in Week 9, averaging 5.2 YPA. They averaged 3.8 YPA in Week 8 (although, as I noted in last week’s article, that number would have been higher if Wicks had held on to a ball that hit him in the hands).
TO THE CHART.
Only one pass in the bunch: a swing screen that went for 2 yards. That came out of Pony Personnel, with Aaron Jones & AJ Dillon on the field at the same time. A similar look went for 12 yards when they handed the ball off.
One disappointing note on this is the lack of any slant/glance tags. True, there’s a Fade tag, but that’s not a post-snap read off a conflict defender in the way that a slant or a glance is. That’s a pre-snap match-up read, and will be a low-percentage throw. Basically, there’s not a real difference between a fade tag on an RPO concept and a fade route as part of a passing concept. I don’t mind that it’s there, but it doesn’t fit my hope of a more vertically attacking RPO game from the Packers.
Not that they had been leaning into that too heavily this year, but we had been seeing at least 1 a week, so my hope was that they were slowly ramping up to a more robust attack. The offense did recently did an on-the-fly strip-back of their offense to get everyone back in-tune with the basics, and have been building that back up a bit over the last couple of weeks. Maybe the vertical RPO game is the next step in that. A man can dream. A man can also be hurt, but we don’t need to tackle that today.
The Packers had good success on the ground against the Rams. So, on a rainy day, they leaned on that pretty heavily. The non-RPO runs outpaced the RPO runs, but, while both of them were solid, the RPO runs gained more yards per play. We’ve been seeing more of that as the season has gone on, and I love seeing that.
With the run-heavy approach on the day, we saw a lot of plays out of 12 and 21 personnel. The RPO game had nice success out of those groupings.
Overall, I’d like to see the Packers start to utilize more of the post-snap tags into their RPO game, but they’ve done a good job with using it to bolster the run game lately and it has yielded some nice results, so I’ll just ride this little wave for now.
Alright. What did I get into this week?
As always, I did a weekly video over at Cheesehead TV’s YouTube channel, breaking down a few plays from the game. Kuhn was out this week, so I flew solo. I know I know…apologies. I walked through 3 plays: the Musgrave TD, a play that may have given the Packers the information they needed to run it and a nicely-blocked end around. We haven’t seen much in the way of well-blocked run plays this year, so I felt it was worth spending a bit of time with one.
Over on my YouTube channel, I looked at the big gain to Christian Watson. Really nice recognition from Love on this, but the throw could have been better.
I also took a look at a throwback RB screen the Packers ran this past week. They’ve run a version of this play a handful of times this year, but I really liked this one: it’s a slightly different way to run it and it reminds me of what they like to do with their TE screens. A nice little change-up to get to a concept they seem to really like.
Over on Packer Report, I wrote a bit about the Packers running the Drive concept and incorporating the Cheat motion. We’ve seen this a couple times this season so far and I really like it.
For Cheesehead TV, I looked at the overall passing game, then dove into 3 plays: two of them highlighted ways the Packers were looking to attack outside the numbers (and they were doing that), while the third was a look at the Musgrave TD. That glorious, glorious Musgrave TD.
In this space, I posted some cut-ups from Week 9 and dug into the numbers a bit. But just a bit.
I started with all the Packers Cheat motion snaps.
Then I looked at their Pony Package snaps.
Then I ended by looking at their Play Action snaps.
We’re almost done.
I joined Andy Herman and Perri Goldstein for a Victory Monday show over on Pack-A-Day’s YouTube page. Two lovely people who I always love talking ball with, so this was a delight.
And finally, over at The Pack’s YouTube channel, I got to chop it up with Eli Berkovits. We talked about the offense as a whole, what we think of LaFleur this season, etc. Always love talking to Eli.
A busy week, but, as always, an extremely fun week. I learned a ton. Can’t wait to do it all again next week.