theCATALYST
Football Messiah
I was reading an article this morning called "Establishing the Run" which I found very insightful and eye opening. All season (and in seasons past under O'Briens leadership) I have moaned and complained about our offensive predictability.
Run up the gut on 1st.
We all saw it. Everyone could predict it. Defenses knew it.
This caused me to royally dislike our offensive playcalling (and mostly O'Brien for being the engineer behind it), however the article breaks the play calling down further and claims;
"On first down, Houston ran the ball 51% of the time and thus passed the ball 49% of the time."
What? really? No way. I recall being able to predict the 1st and 2nd down play almost perfectly game in and game out. But the article continues...
"Diving further into this, out of Houston’s 497 first downs, they ran it 255 times and passed 242 times. A 13 rep disparity, a small enough number that we shouldn’t even be able to diagnose a difference. Yet the consensus is Houston run an unreasonable amount on first down "
So...what made us (or most of us) think we ran too often on 1st? Was it the failure to provide positive yardage in the attempts we did have that made it seem worse than it was?
"I tracked Houston’s first down Yards per Carry (YPC) and it was an astounding 4.72! That’s a ridiculous number and should set the Texans up for great success on the remaining downs."
So what is really going on here?
Let's discuss.
Run up the gut on 1st.
We all saw it. Everyone could predict it. Defenses knew it.
This caused me to royally dislike our offensive playcalling (and mostly O'Brien for being the engineer behind it), however the article breaks the play calling down further and claims;
"On first down, Houston ran the ball 51% of the time and thus passed the ball 49% of the time."
What? really? No way. I recall being able to predict the 1st and 2nd down play almost perfectly game in and game out. But the article continues...
"Diving further into this, out of Houston’s 497 first downs, they ran it 255 times and passed 242 times. A 13 rep disparity, a small enough number that we shouldn’t even be able to diagnose a difference. Yet the consensus is Houston run an unreasonable amount on first down "
So...what made us (or most of us) think we ran too often on 1st? Was it the failure to provide positive yardage in the attempts we did have that made it seem worse than it was?
"I tracked Houston’s first down Yards per Carry (YPC) and it was an astounding 4.72! That’s a ridiculous number and should set the Texans up for great success on the remaining downs."
So what is really going on here?
Let's discuss.
"Establishing the Run" Is A Myth (Part I)
A deep dive into the Texans’ first down offense.
www.battleredblog.com