Acme Packing Company
Going up against a Brian Flores defense is a unique challenge. Not only is the Minnesota Vikings’ defensive coordinator well known as a maniacal blitzer, he seems to find new ways to blitz every week. He has been a forward-thinking coach who has driven changes in blitz strategy across the league, while also breaking those tendencies as he sees fit. In short, Flores may legitimately be a genius.
From what I’ve looked at, his defenses can be particularly effective against teams that play with a lot of condensed formations. He’ll look to cause chaos up front, threatening to blitz with a lot of defenders at the line before dropping them out at the snap. As I said, he’ll blitz – NFL Pro has the Vikings with a 57% blitz rate since coming out of their week 6 bye – but he’s not always blitzing everyone he’s showing and you don’t know where they’re all coming from.
Playing out of condensed formations can make that tricky as it allows an offense to hold a pre-snap disguise longer, while also being able to drop back into areas of the field that aren’t far from their starting point.
Which is why going with more spread formations can be effective against this defense. You force the defense to either spread out with you (signaling their intentions before they want to) or stay close to the line and make the off-the-line drops more difficult for themselves.
This is also true of the safeties. If everything is condensed, they are better able to show a single-high look pre-snap and roll back to a two-high post-snap. Out of spread, some of those actions become more difficult. While this is true for all modern defenses, it presents a unique challenge to the way this Vikings defense likes to operate. They want to live in chaos, but it’s harder to cause that chaos if the offense is forcing you out from the line.
Which brings us to this game, and creating explosives.
Every week, I’ve been tracking a stat I’ve been calling Explosive +/-. Basically, how many explosive plays you’re creating on offense vs. how many explosive plays you’re giving up on defense. Per a study by Brian Billick, teams that have had a +2 Explosive Play +/- in a game have won that game 80%-85% of the time. So one thing I tend to do when looking ahead to the next opponent is to look at how teams have generated explosives against them, then find trends and/or things that could work for the Packers.
For the season, the Green Bay Packers are #1 in the league at Explosive +/- at +3.0. They are generating 7.7 explosive plays per game (tied with the Patriots for 4th in the league) and giving up 4.7 explosive plays per game (2nd in the league). The Vikings are -0.2 in Explosive +/-, tied for 19th. They’re generating 6.6 explosive plays per game (tied for 14th) and giving up 6.8 explosive plays per game...
