The Background
You may think, “Why do we need this stat? Aren’t there enough of these out there?” The answer is no. Especially not from an Offensive Line standpoint. The reason for that is that it is tough to measure how good an Offensive Line is through data. There are many factors that go into their job. Play calling and scheme are two of those main factors. Another would be the level of players they are blocking for.
The main reason for wanting to come up with this stat is to help with my pass blocking Offensive Line rankings. While this stat is not going to be the end all be all in those rankings, it will help tell the story of the tape.
NFL Example
Take the Minnesota Vikings, Mike Zimmer has always had an old school approach. Run the ball, play action, fundamentally sound defense. Zimmer has a very good running back in Dalvin Cook who has proven he can handle a 250+ carry workload. We know Gary Kubiak, and newly minted offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak, loves to run a zone blocking scheme. The Vikings have drafted the past couple of years playing into this. This makes them look very good from a run blocking perspective, and they are. This season they formed a dominant group up front, top 10 in rush ranking for me in 2020.
However, when it comes to pass protection, even the scheme does not help them. They gave up 39 sacks and allowed a pressure on over 25% of dropbacks. That is a good way to start looking at it, but does it take into account the full picture? No, some of their play calls were designed to hit deep shots off of play action. This takes time to setup. The more time you ask the Offensive Line to block, the more pressures they tend to give up.
Thought Process
There are already statistics that allow us to see part of what make a good pass protecting Offensive Line. For example, we can easily look up pressure statistics such as sacks, hurries, hits, and scrambles. Often, the best Offensive Lines are not the best in these categories due to a number of variables. Our goal with creating this metric was to use several different statistics we thought contributed to an offensive line being good or bad.
I reached out to Brian, one of the Undroppables data analysts, to help create this metric. First, we started by combining the pressure statistics and blitz rates to see if that was enough to quantify offensive line success. All of this data was found at Pro Football Reference. We quickly noticed these statistics alone were not good enough to quantify Offensive Line success as there were some large discrepancies with my film grades. We initially adjusted by adding pocket time to our metric equation, which made the results better but not perfect. There were obvious teams that had large differences between two different Quarterbacks. This was most pronounced in Miami with Tua Tagovailoa and Ryan Fitzpatrick. To account for different types of play calling, we added completed air yards per pass attempt(CAY/PA) to our pass blocking metric.
Data Process
Brian was the one that did most of the data analysis and made these numbers talk. The final metric he made included combining the pressure statistics, blitz rates, time to throw, and CAY/PA. Some of these statistics are more important than others so Brian and I discussed which statistics we thought deserved more or less weight and how they should be combined to create our metric. The metric took a lot of time and tinkering but we are both proud of the end result and think it accurately quantifies pass blocking success.
The Results
With our metric, the higher the score, the better the Offensive Line was at pass protection. The data is displayed from worst to best, the worst being the bottom left and the best in the top right.
Our top pass protecting Offensive Lines were Green Bay, Tampa Bay, New Orleans, and Cleveland. As for the worst pass protectors, there were several teams clustered at the bottom. These teams included Washington and the Los Angeles Chargers both tied at 0.068. After them it was Baltimore, the Jets, and Houston rounding out the worst pass protecting Offensive Lines.
Future Applications
The applications are endless for a new metric like this but in the immediate future, it is a great way to quantify pass blocking success and adds another layer to our offensive line rankings. During this offseason, we will be adding this metric to our seasonal fantasy analysis. One of the most exciting areas we are interested to experiment with this metric is in our DFS analysis and possibly using it as part of a DFS model. Make sure to check back next season when we start keeping up with this metric on a weekly basis.
If you have follow up questions on the results of this analysis, please hit me up on Twitter, @BradWireFF. And as always, please check out the other great content across our site while you’re here!
