I recently ran across this Tweet from NFL Matchup on ESPN – a terrific account you should definitely follow on Twitter if you want to be a better educated football fan. It got me thinking about Chicago’s offense and explosive plays.
These offenses generated the most EXPLOSIVE PLAYS this season.
#ChiefsKingdom #FightForEachOther #LARams #GoBucs #Browns #49ers #GoSaints #Steelers #Bengals #Seahawks #Panthers #Falcons pic.twitter.com/fTqyVPKckr— NFL Matchup on ESPN (@NFLMatchup) January 2, 2019
Seeing as I’ve already written about Mitchell Trubisky’s struggles throwing the ball deep and Jordan Howard’s lack of explosive runs, I figured the Bears probably ranked towards the low end in this area. Using Pro Football Reference’s fantastic Game Play Finder, I was able to track these stats for every team in 2018 (full data here, slight discrepancies for the 17 teams shown in Tweet above, but all were within 1 or 2 plays).
As you can see in the table below, the Bears did indeed not do very well when it came to explosive plays.
We can see here that the Bears were slightly below average in every category, meaning there is need for improvement in explosive plays across the board. I’ll also note that percentages are calculated simply: (explosive plays/total plays)100; I figured this might be a useful metric since there is a some difference in how many plays teams run, especially when you split it up into run and pass plays.
