Acme Packing Company
Last week, we dove into the Green Bay Packers’ passing attack against the Browns (be it ever so humble). After a two-game stretch that saw Jordan Love chucking the ball to the heavens, his ADOT (Average Depth Of Target) plummeted to a mind-boggling 1.9 yards. His overall passing numbers didn’t look great against the Browns. Against the Cowboys? It was a different story.
Per RBSDM, Love had an ADOT of 5.6. That’s nowhere close to the 14.5 ADOT in Week 2 or 11.5 in Week 1, but still a bump over his numbers in Cleveland.
He was efficient, too, effectively peppering all areas of the field. On the day, he completed 72.1% of his passes for 7.8 YPA (Yards Per Attempt). His total EPA (Expected Points Added) of 27.1 eclipsed Dak Prescott’s 23 EPA, but they both posted a +0.54 EPA per Play on the day. Right now – four games into the season – Love has an EPA per Dropback of +0.26, second in the league to Josh Allen’s +0.28 (per NFL Pro).
If you take away the throwaways, the numbers look even better (as they tend to do): 86.1% completion, 9.4 YPA.
The Packers had an at-the-snap motion rate of 35.9% in this game, their lowest mark of the season (their high mark was week 2 against the Commanders, when they ran motion at the snap on 68.9% of their plays). The dip this week was mainly due to the end of half/end of game situations. When you’re in a time crunch, you’re getting up on the line and snapping it, so a lot of the motion stuff goes away. I’m assuming we’ll see that number come back up out of the bye.
The passing chart shows a lack of throws to the middle of the field – the field is split pretty cleanly to either side of the inside hashes – but there’s a pretty good reason for that. Cowboys’ Defensive Coordinator Matt Eberflus coaches his linebackers to get a lot of depth in their drops. As a result, the windows in that area of the field are tight. With the linebackers deep – and aggressively retreating against play action – it makes a lot more sense to attack this team outside and underneath the dropping linebackers. The Packers had concepts called to attack the middle, but Love didn’t really pull the trigger on them because it didn’t make sense to do it.
Overall, a great game from the passing offense. Part of that was certainly due to the Cowboys’ defense (NFL Pro has the Cowboys as the worst defense in the league this year, giving up +0.22 EPA per Play), but part of that was due to the operation of the offense. Love was consistently making good decisions and putting the ball in great locations for his receivers, and his receivers rewarded him by coming up with some big catches (we already broke down the 3 TDs to Romeo Doubs). It wasn’t without its lumps –...
