PFF Curiosities - 2020 Wrap-Up

--Taking a look at some stats and trends as we wrap the 2020 season

Will Roderick Continue to Make Things Easy on the QB?

I've written a lot about how BYU has taken advantage of easy pass plays under the Grimes regime. One related concept I haven't written about was Grime's reliance on play-action passing concepts. Here's BYU's percentage of pass attempts that included play-action going back to 2014. 

See that HUGE jump starting in 2018? Anae and Detmer were calling for play-action on about 18% of their pass plays. Grimes nearly doubled that in his first year on the job. During the RPO experiment of 2019 Grimes dialed it back some, but in 2020 BYU had their highest degree of play-action since PFF began tracking it. 

Faking a hand-off doesn't guarantee a passing play will succeed; otherwise every team in the country would be running play-action on each down. But there's a reason teams use it and a reason Steve Sarkisian called it "a quarterback's best friend." A simple look at the stats by fivethirtyeight showed that QBs are more accurate and throw deeper down the field off of play-action. Another fivethirtyeight article suggested linebackers reacting to play-action were fooled out of position by an average of 7.5 yards. 

I'm not suggesting play-action is some magic bullet that made BYU's offense good this year. I'm not suggesting we run play-action on 90% of our passes going forward. I'm not even suggesting a continued reliance on it will make our offense good next year. But as one of many tools that can help a team be a bit more unpredictable and make things a little easier on the QB, I definitely prefer the 30% usage rate to the 15% usage rate. That's my way of saying I hope ARod keeps using it. 

Keenan Pili - The Tackler

As a freshman in 2019 Pili attempted 36 tackles and succeeded on 27 of them. Those nine missed tackles must have been a point of emphasis during the offseason because Pili turned into BYU's most sure tackler in 2020. He attempted 74 tackles this year and succeeded on 70 of them. To put that in perspective the other guys on the team attempting that many tackles -- Isaiah Kaufusi and Payton Wilgar -- missed 12 and 9 tackles a piece. Well done Mr. Pili.

Using Isaac Rex Like a Real Tight End

Before anyone accuses me of besmirching the memory of  Matt Bushman let me express once again that he was a stud. But he did have two weaknesses. 

1) A lack of blocking prowess, which resulted in 

2) predictability

When Manbush was on the field BYU tipped its hand because they were more likely to pass than run. And on those passing downs they almost always used Bushman as a receiver instead of a blocker. By the way, before we move forward let me say this is smart - a smart coach should rely on his players strengths and Bushman's strength was catching passes. But a tight end who is only a receiver is leaving money on the field. When a tight end can line up next to a tackle and make a linebacker wonder if he's going to block or go out for a pass, he's unpredictable and that's valuable. 

With Bushman, linebackers expected a pass. Over his career 55% of Bushman's snaps came on passing downs, versus 45% as run blocker. On those passing downs, Bushman ran routes 90% of the time, and only stayed in to block 10% of the time. He lined up alongside an offensive tackle on only 60% of his career snaps, and lined up in the slot or out wide for the other 40%. 

Here's how those splits compare to Isaac Rex.

I'm not saying Rex is better than Bushman. But BYU certainly has used Rex more like a traditional tight end than they did with Bushman (i.e., leaving him in to block more often, positioning him along the line of scrimmage). Maybe that's because he's a better blocker, or maybe it's just intentional scheming. Either way I believe it made BYU's offense less predictable, and perhaps that variability paved the way for a few of Rex's many touchdown opportunities. 

Putting Numbers to Brady Christensen's Amazingness

Brady Christensen blocked on 383 passing snaps this season. He allowed three total pressures for the season: two hurries, zero hits, and one sack. Or to put it another way, Brady allowed pressure on Zach once every 128 times he dropped back to pass. 

For his career Brady gave up those 3 pressures in 2020, 12 pressures in 2019 (11 hurries, 0 hits, 1 sack), and 14 pressures in 2018 (11 hurries, 2 hits, 1 sack). 

Or to put it yet another way, in his career Brady gave up three sacks in a combined 1,325 pass blocking snaps. Or we could just say he allowed a sack once every 441 times the quarterback attempted to pass. Man are we gonna miss that guy. And man are we gonna miss the guy that developed him. #GrimesEffect

Life Is Fun when Receivers Never Drop The Ball

It sure felt like BYU's receivers caught everything this year and the numbers back it up. From 2014 to 2019 BYU's top-5 receivers in a given year dropped on average about 7.6% of catchable balls thrown their way. In 2020 BYU's top-5 receivers only dropped 3.6% of catchable balls. In general the pass-catching has improved noticeably since Grimes came on board. Can you handle one more excel table that shows how BYU's hands have improved over the last seven seasons? 

The drop rate fell by about half starting in 2018 when the new offensive staff took over. If Fesi's one-on-one coaching with the receivers is responsible for this trend of improvement, awesome, we still have him. If Grimes' culture of discipline was responsible for it, dang it, we don't have him.    

Zach Wilson Throwing to Every Part of the Field

How could I not end this series talking about Zach? One of the many things that made Zach so unstoppable this year was the fact that he spread the ball all over the field. PFF measures a quarterback's passing stats broken into roughly four vertical sections of the field: one section for passes at or behind the line of scrimmage, one section for passes that are between 0 and 10 yards downfield, another section for passes 10 to 20 yards downfield, and finally a section for passes that travel more than 20 yards downfield. 

On average from 2014 to 2020 BYU has thrown about 50% of their passes in the 0-to-10 yard range, and the other half of their pass attempts have been split about 10% behind the line of scrimmage, 25% in the 10-to-20 yard range, and 15% in the 20+ yard range. I guess another way of thinking about it is that a defense could guess every BYU pass attempt was going to be a short throw of 10 yards or less and be right about half of the time. 

Zach Wilson punted that premise into outer space this year. 

Only about 37% of Zach's passes were thrown into the 0-to-10 yard range in 2020. Where did he throw more instead? His percentage of deep attempts was about the same as the BYU average, but he increased his throws in the 10-to-20 yard range (31% in 2020 compared to a BYU average of 23%) and behind the line of scrimmage (14% compared to a BYU average of 10%). Zach changed BYU from a team that was overwhelmingly likely to throw a short pass to one that switched between intermediate routes and screens as frequently as they did short throws. 

Zach even made BYU more diverse horizontally. Historically BYU averages about 20% of their passes to the left side of the field, 58% to the middle of the field, and 23% to the right of the field. Zach cut back 5% on passes to the middle and increased his passes to the right side of the field by that same 5%. It may not seem like much but these little changes helped make BYU's offense more diverse and harder to defend.