Acme Packing Company
It’s my opinion that the Green Bay Packers are running the ball too much. They’re playing conservative and relying on their very good defense to win games, while they should be riding good offensive personnel out to an early lead so that Micah Parsons can kill people. They need to seriously dial back the running, hopefully forever, but at least until the offensive line improves. The results from the last two weeks should be driving that message home.
Oh, but this week. This week is NOT going to help with that. I predict that by the time Monday rolls around, people will be making fun of all of us who “doubted Matt LaFleur” and talking about how “the Packers are back on track.” They’ll say that the offensive line and Josh Jacobs look rejuvenated, and that the team finally has its mean streak back. And this will all be incorrect. DON’T BE FOOLED! Why? Because the New York Giants’ run defense…sucks is not a strong enough word.
Imagine you’re at the running of the bulls in Pamplona, and you’ve been assigned to stop the bulls, and the tool that you’ve been given to stop the bulls is a grease-covered pool noodle, and the grease is both slippery for you, and the bulls, but also contains a potent steroid that makes the bulls run faster, harder, and angrier whenever they touch it. That is the Giants’ run defense in a nutshell. You could actually fit the entire Giants’ run-stopping talent in an actual nutshell.
And this is not hyperbole; it’s more of a reflection of the limitations of language, but where language fails us, numbers can step in. The Giants are dead last in run defense DVOA at 16.8% (positive numbers are bad for defensive DVOA). The Bengals are a close-ish second at 13.2%, but both are orders of magnitude worse than Buffalo at a third-worst 6.1%.
But you might be thinking, “Hey, Paul, 16.8 doesn’t seem so bad, I thought it was going to be like 48 or something?” And that’s fair because that’s usually how DVOA works, but we need to keep in mind how RUNNING works. Running is generally a negative efficiency play to start with, and so the median run defense this year (Houston) is -12%, or 28 percentage points away from the Giants. Cleveland has the best run defense at -32.2%, and there are six teams below 20%. Relative to the league, the Giants are horrible. They’re 48.8% points from the leaders. See, your instincts were good!
EPA tells the same story as DVOA, where the Giants are allowing a dead last .142 EPA per running play. How bad is that? It’s so bad that 24 teams allow fewer average EPA per passing drop back! 24! Tampa Quarterback Baker Mayfield averages 1.34 EPA per drop back, and so on average, a run against the Giants is more valuable than a BAKER MAYFIELD PASS ATTEMPT. It is also more valuable than a Justin Herbert pass attempt, and...
