Acme Packing Company
It wasn’t always pretty (particularly in the first half), but the Green Bay Packers pulled out an ugly victory over the Arizona Cardinals in week 7 to get to a 4-1-1 record. As we do every week, we’re taking a look at the performance of the passing game. So let’s stop talking about it and get down to doing it.
There’s nothing really flashy here in Jordan Love’s passing chart from this game. Love primarily operated in the short area of the field, and it shows up on this chart. Per NextGen, his ADOT (Average Depth Of Target) was 7.2 yards, 17th among QBs in Week 7 (the QB with the highest ADOT in Week 7 was Tyrod Taylor at 14.9).
The Cardinals came into this game as the 9th-worst defense in the league in terms of allowing YAC (Yards After Catch), but they also sport a pretty funky defense. They play a lot of 3-safety looks and employ a lot of pre-snap disguises to catch offenses in a trap after the ball is snapped. The Packers went in with a pretty clear plan: run a lot of quick-game and get the ball out to players in space to both capitalize on the Cardinals poor track record after the catch and to not get tricked into a disaster. They had a couple called shot plays and some deeper options if they liked the look, but, for the most part, they lived in quick game.
On the whole, it worked pretty well. Packers receivers racked up 77 yards in YAC and Love played a mistake-free game while being pressured on 33.3% of his dropbacks (12th among QBs in Week 7).
For the game, Love turned in a positive EPA per Dropback (+0.18). That had him as the 9th ranked QB in Week 7. Much like the game showed, that number isn’t eye-popping, but he made good decisions and played a clean game. We also saw him scramble 3 games in this game, picking up 23 yards on those scrambles. Each of those scrambles resulted in a successful play for the offense, which is what you want to see when your QB takes off from the pocket. Coming into the season, we hoped that Love’s legs would add another dimension to his game this year, and we’ve already seen that pay off multiple times through 6 games.
Let’s take a look at a couple plays before we get out of here, both of which attacked the middle of the field and set up scoring plays.
This was a huge moment in the game. The Cardinals have just scored a TD with 7 seconds remaining in the first half to take a 13-3 lead. After a touchback, the Packers get the ball at their own 35 yard line. With the end-0f-half sequence against the Cowboys still in the back of their minds, would they kneel out the ball and go into...
