- Thread starter
- #41
Thanks for the additional stats and the questions are valid.The passing offense this year has been abysmal, so I wanted to see if there was anything statistically that could be used to understand what's happening. Here's some advanced passing stats to put things in perspective on Tannehill and the rest of the league (Per Pro-Football Reference):
Bad Throw%: 17th best
On Target%: 6th best
Pressure Rate: 17th best
Pocket Time: T-14th best
Intended Air Yards: T-25th best
Completed Air Yards/Attempt: T-20th best
So what this all tells me is that Tannehill is around the middle of the league in terms of getting pressured and time in the pocket, he's making some bad decisions at times, but also top tier in terms of his accuracy. This goes counter to the argument everyone wants to make that he has absolutely no time to throw. The OL has protected him better as of late, and he's middle of the league in terms of protection. It's not a complete turnstile.
The most damning thing to me is those last two categories about air yards. Those are the distances that the ball is intended to travel on a per throw basis. This is saying that our offense is not throwing the ball down the field at all, and we're not even trying. Now is that Downing being a crap play caller/coordinator, or Tannehill just having to dump it off more? I don't know. Probably some combination of both. Obviously not having AJB and half the WR corp out for half the season can't help, but that's not the only thing that is at play.
Another stat that has tanked in comparison to recent years is our play action%. In his time as a starter in 2019 and 2020 we ran play action on 29 and 32 percent of our passing plays respectively. In 2021 we're down to 23%. We also have our lowest yards/play action pass of any year as well, down from 14.8 in 2019 and 9.8 in 2020 to 8.6 this year. Losing Henry hurts, sure, but we had him for 8 games and run game has still been effective, yet we're still not running nearly as much play action and not putting the ball down the field when we do.
All of this says to me that part of the blame has to lie on the offensive scheme and play calling. It's not the only reason for the offensive woe's we're having, but it certainly deserves some share of the blame.
Is it THill?
Is the OL break down preventing deeper att?
Is downing calling for short throws? Is that because of THill or the OL?
the only thing to consider about those rankings is that those encompass the entire season. To me, those rankings have probably dropped over the previous 6 weeks which would mean THill is probably less than avg over that period. Still points to the same questions though.