by Chase Stuart
on September 2, 2013
Fast and Faster.
The number one storyline in the NFL in week one isn’t the health of
Robert Griffin III, but the presence of two other men occupying FedEx Field that night. The football world is anxiously awaiting to see how
Chip Kelly’s offense, piloted by
Michael Vick, will work in the NFL. We don’t know much, but we do know that the coach plans to incorporate the fast-paced, up-tempo style that
his teams used at Oregon to obliterate opponents.
In May, I took a stab at discussing tempo in the NFL, and I presented a couple of lists that measured the number of plays run per second of possession in the NFL. Today, I want to revisit the questions of tempo and pace using more precise measurements. Let’s start with some league-wide data. The table below shows the average number of seconds between snaps for NFL teams last season. I’ve excluded a number of plays from this sample, including all plays at the start of a quarter, all overtime plays, plays after a changes of possession, and plays in the final three minutes of the first half or five minutes of the second half (where teams are less likely to operate at their normal pace).
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Chip Kelly,
Eagles,
Michael Vick,
RPO 2013,
Tempo
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by Chase Stuart
on September 1, 2013
Will the read option come to Oakland?
The
2012 Raiders weren’t very good. Oakland finished last season 4-12, with the third-worst SRS rating (-10.8) in the NFL. And the outlook isn’t any better for 2013, either. Oakland has
fifty million dollars of
dead cap space; as a result, the players on the current roster cost the team only 67 million salary cap dollars,
nearly $30M less than the next-lowest team. According to Pro Football Focus, Oakland’s five best defensive players last season were
Lamarr Houston,
Desmond Bryant,
Philip Wheeler,
Richard Seymour, and
Rolando McClain. Only Houston returns in 2013, as Bryant is in Cleveland, Wheeler signed with the Dolphins, Seymour remains a free agent, and McClain has
gracefully retired.
The team’s top two offensive players in 2012 were left tackle Jared Veldheer and quarterback Carson Palmer. Palmer is now in Arizona, while Veldheer is out indefinitely with a torn triceps. Brandon Myers (Giants) and Darrius Heyward-Bey (Colts) are also gone, and they combined for 29 starts last season. The big free agent signings were S Charles Woodson (Green Bay), LB Kevin Burnett (Miami), QB Matt Flynn (Seattle), CB Mike Jenkins (Dallas), CB Tracy Porter (Denver).
As a result, there’s little optimism in Oakland entering the season. The Raiders are one of the favorites to land the first pick in the 2014 draft, so the 2013 season will likely be used to see what building blocks actually exist in Oakland. After Terrelle Pryor outplayed Flynn in the preseason, many now think the Raiders going to start Pryor in week 1 because, well, why not? If that’s the case, we’ll have another example to test out a theory that’s widely-accepted by conventional analysts.
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
mobile quarterbacks,
Raiders,
RPO 2013,
Terrelle Pryor
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