11-28-2021, 09:19 PM
(11-28-2021, 08:55 PM)Shake n Blake Wrote: I can't fully agree with this. Great run games make the safeties cheat up. Makes defense respect play action. Keeps you out of 3rd and long situations which put QBs in a bind.
I'd never say Burrow is "average" by any stretch, but run game success is extremely important.
I’ve studied this back to 2010-current. I gathered run metrics and pass metrics and tried to find correlations and there wasn’t any. For every good passing team with good rushing metrics, there was a good passing team with bad rushing metrics, so on and so forth. Basically, as YPC increases, YPA does not increase. Neither does passer rating.
Play-action works because the threat of a run exists, not because of the success of said run game. If a RB is on the field, defenses have to respect the threat and play their run fits. Otherwise, you’ll have Samaje Perine running wild on you. That’s been studied by an analyst named Ben Baldwin, and his conclusion was also “no correlation”.
Of course, I’m not going to act like I’ve done my studies 100% perfectly, so I could be missing something and this isn’t completely definitive. I’ve seen enough to feel confident about that conclusion and I’ve also received similar answers from a couple of coaches I know personally. It’s an area of interest for me, though, so I look into it often.
