Acme Packing Company
Football and baseball don’t have that much in common, but one thing they do have is “rules that limit opportunity.” In baseball, it’s the limit of three outs per inning, and in football, it’s the limit of four downs per ten(plus) yards. When I first started writing, I was mostly a baseball writer, heavily influenced by Baseball Prospectus, Moneyball, and the mid-Sabermetrics era, and I’ve always viewed the offenses of both baseball and football as a tension between low-risk, high percentage plays and high-risk, big plays. Baseball is a bit different, as for some players, walking and hitting home runs can be complementary rather than contradictory, but generally, trying to hit for more power will always result in more strikeouts.
In football, using one of your four (and really, three) downs to take a low percentage deep shot down the field can come at a significant cost of lowering your odds of converting a first down, and of late, the deep passing game has fallen out of vogue as a result. Jalen Hurts and the Eagles just won the Super Bowl, and so far this season, they average 5.6 intended air yards and 4 completed air yards per passing play, second last to mega-checkdown artist Bo Nix. Last night, Tua Tagovailoa and Josh Allen combined to average 1.5 Air Yards per completion.
Allen is supposed to be one of the most dynamic passers in the game, but like Hurts, he’s instead been one of the most conservative.
And to be fair, the short passing game has worked for many teams, as you can reliably string together a lot of short passes in a row if you’re completing 70% or more of them. I get why teams do this. The two-high safety look makes hitting plays over the top difficult and leaves the short area available. However, that said, IT’S BORING AS HELL.
Passing to your running back for five yards is boring. Throwing a safe bubble screen to your third wide receiver is boring. Throwing to players who are moving back towards their own line of scrimmage as the ball arrives is boring. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but IT’S WHAT THE DEFENSE WANTS YOU TO DO. Don’t do the thing that they’re trying to get you to do! That’s what they want you to do!
The point of the two-high shells is to make you run a lot of plays because, while you may complete 70% of them, every play brings with it the possibility of a drop, or a sack, or a stumble, or God forbid a holding penalty. In fact, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assert that most modern defenses operate with the idea that if they can hold out long enough, they’ll get a holding penalty to bail them out. And again, this works for some teams. The Bills have yet to score under 30 this season. The Patriots won a bunch of titles checking down to tiny little white...
