Notes on the Bengals Offense ahead of the Super Bowl

KEY POINTS

1) Stop running on first down

2) The Bengals need to protect Joe Burrow

3) Can the Bengals get Jamar Chase involved?

Why do the Bengals keep running on first down?

Bengals Run Rates on on first-third down:

BENGALS PLAY CALL BY DOWN
Down Mean EPA Pass % Run % Attempts
1 -0.061460387 48.0% 50.4% 542
2 -0.036442303 63.2% 35.6% 410
3 -0.006929657 85.2% 14.8% 243
SOURCE: NFLFastR

League Average Numbers

LEAGUE PLAY CALL BY DOWN
Down Mean EPA Pass % Run % Attempts
1 -0.01942332 50.5% 47.6% 15693
2 -0.01218965 61.3% 37.6% 11760
3 -0.06657715 80.2% 19.1% 7176
SOURCE: NFLFastR

Disclaimer I know these percentages don’t exactly add up. After filtering out penalties, special teams plays, kneels, and spikes they still wouldn’t add up. Not sure what’s going on, but I decided to let it be.

The Bengals are finding significantly more success on second and third down, where the scales tip in favor of a higher pass rate. What’s most interesting here is how effective the Bengals have been on third down compared to the rest of the league, with an 85% pass rate.

How do each series of downs play out, based on first down play call?

SERIES SUCCESS
Play Type Attempts Series Success Rate
pass 259 74.5%
run 280 69.3%
SOURCE: NFLFastR

Here a series “success” is defined as a set of downs that result in either a first down or a touchdown.

It appears that the Bengals are more likely to have an overall advantage in terms of series success, when they pass the ball on first down. Hidden behind this success rate number is also the fact that pass plays tend have a more explosive nature which reduces the number of “successful” series necessary to get points on the board.

Let’s take a look at the distribution in yards gained this year on run plays and pass plays in the NFL

## Picking joint bandwidth of 1.09

Clearly, running the ball has a lower variance, which naturally allows for fewer negative plays, but also the upside is almost equally limited. Whereas pass plays, in the case of incompletions and sacks allow for negative plays with (marginally) “worse” outcomes but a much more frequent distribution of plays that pick up more than a few yards. The Bengals especially are outperforming the NFL average in terms of frequency of pass plays that go for more than 10 yards or so (and beyond that), while their run game closely resembles the league average. This confirms our theory that a higher success rate when passing on first down is more likely to result in chunk plays than a “success” running the ball. The effect of the negative pass plays we see in the distribution is entirely another discussion.

So, why “Establish the Run”?

## Warning: `guides(<scale> = FALSE)` is deprecated. Please use `guides(<scale> =
## "none")` instead.

Upon examination, especially once we remove runs that occurred with the game far out of hand, it’s clear that the Bengals’ ability to establish the run has about zero predictive ability in their overall offensive performance or in their ability to win games.

How will the Bengals’ pass attack be affected by the Rams defensive line?

Where do the Rams rank among the NFL’s leading pass rushes?

Among NFL defenses, the Rams are amongst league leaders in the frequency that they sack the quarterback. We can also tell that the Rams do a good job of limiting opposing QBs’ production. If the Bengals are to stay in this game, Joe Burrow obviously needs to show up.

How have the Bengals fared against the NFL’s best pass rushing defenses?

Here, QB_EPA (from my understanding) is defined as the EPA of plays the QB was involved in. We define that as QB runs/scrambles and any drop back to pass, regardless of the outcome (sack, scramble, incompletion, etc). This gives us a pretty good sense of how well a QB performed in isolation from the entire offense, which usually is a good indicator for overall offensive success, but I digress. I’m choosing to evaluate QB EPA here to build off my last point, that I think it’s crucial to the Bengals’ success that the pass game is the foundation of their offensive gameplan on downs 1-3.

It seems clear that the Bengals are vulnerable against the NFL’s elite fronts. The Bengals have struggled against the NFL’s best fronts in terms of sack rate and overall QB Play. The Rams, being among league leaders in sack rate, pose a threat to an offense that allowed 9 sacks in their matchup with the Titans.

Ramsey v Chase

How important is Jamar Chase to the Bengals’ offensive Success?

## `geom_smooth()` using formula 'y ~ x'

From this plot we can say that Jamar Chase’s performance is a bit of an indicator for the Bengals’ success on offense as a whole, but we can’t really draw any major conclusions here. But, for fun, let’s look at his matchup versus Rams’ star corner, Jalen Ramsey.

Shoutout to Jonas Trostle, from Open Source Football, for the code to compare teams ability to cover WR1s. Read his article for a better explanation of this code than I could ever provide.

It looks like the Rams have been vulnerable against teams’ top wideouts, but have shutdown their supporting casts. I’m curious how often Ramsey will follow Chase. He has been used all over the place this year, so it’s not a given. I’m curious how much this has to do with a potential Ramsey regression we’ve missed or if it’s a byproduct of Ramsey’s use all over the defense. After some exploratory data analysis, the mean epa of other wide recievers (other than the WR1) is not very indicative of opposing offenses’ mean epa per game, so it’s hard to say that getting Boyd and Higgins involved is a key to this game.

Moral of the story here, I don’t know what this means for the Bengals’ offense, but I do believe the Jalen Ramsey effect on Jamar Chase is overstated and I’m taking the over on Jamar Chase’s yards total.