Acme Packing Company
I’ll say that I didn’t feel great on Sunday night when the Green Bay Packers went into halftime down 16-7 to the Pittsburgh Steelers. The offense had looked pretty good up until that point, but some key drops on 3rd down led to some drives that had sputtered out. Then they outscored the Steelers 28-9 in the second half and suddenly I felt pretty good again.
The Packers had 6 drives in the 2nd half. They scored touchdowns on three of them and field goals on two, and the last one was a 2:07 minute run-out-the-clock drive. Not too shabby.
In this space, we dig into the Packers passing game, so let’s take a look.
The most talked-about stat from the passing game was Love completing 20 straight passes, and that’s a big part of the story of the Packers passing game against the Steelers. The rushing game had a hard time getting on track but Love played a tremendous game.
Love’s overall completion% of 78.4% is good, but if you factor in throwaways, his completion% jumps up to 82.9%. Per RBSDM, his ADOT (Average Depth of Target) was a relatively low 5.8 yards, which you can see in the chart above. There are quite a few throws behind the line of scrimmage, but he operated well in the 0-10 yard range and hit on a couple big plays down the field.
The low ADOT was twofold: against this Steelers defense, getting the ball out and forcing their linebackers to tackle is not a terrible strategy. Combine that with the Steelers having guys like TJ Watt and Nick Herbig to rush the passer, and getting the ball out quickly is a pretty good way to operate.
The Steelers came into this game allowing 798 YAC (Yards After Catch), 13th in the league. They didn’t improve in this game, giving up 256 in YAC in this game alone (the #2 team in YAC given up this week was the Falcons, with 154 yards). The biggest gainer was Tucker Kraft, gaining 131 YAC on his 7 catches. Just to make sure I know that’s not a typo, I’ll say it again: Tucker Kraft had 7 catches for 143 yards, and 131 of those yards came after the catch. That’s absurd.
Knowing that they had an advantage against the Steelers in the YAC game, part of the plan seemed to be to get the ball out quickly and let the playmakers go to work. Love’s average time to throw in this game was 2.64 seconds, his second quickest time to throw this season. Per NextGen, he was tied with Kirk Cousins for the fifth quickest time-to-throw this past weekend.
On the whole, Love played really well (surprise surprise). He had his “Favre on my shoulder telling me to chuck it” moment, but it worked out well this time.
Other than that, he operated the offense well. The pass rate was up a bit (59.7% pass rate in this game, slightly above their season...
