A frequent complaint about the Seattle Seahawks offense is that unless they are absolutely forced to, it is not their thing to go up. How many delays did the fines of the match occur or were time-outs wasted due to the wait to snap it with: 00 on the game clock? Probably too much to count.
NFL data analyst Michael Lopez last week released a chart showing the breakdown of all 31 teams and the percentage of snaps (4th quarter released to keep it in neutral situations) based on the time left on the game clock. . Believe it or not, the Seahawks are not the slowest and actually not even close. The honor belongs to the Green Bay Packers.
Another game clock card, inspired by @owenlhjphillips
– The Packers ran about 50% of the plays in the last 5 seconds of the game clock
The Cardinals ran 28% of their plays with 16 seconds or more on the game clock
– Rams are somehow in the top-4 in both early and late pic.twitter.com/6QtKB4BfRV– Michael Lopez (@StatsbyLopez) February 9, 2021
The Seahawks were just 6th to hit the ball in the final seconds of the game clock behind the Rams, Eagles, Panthers, Ravens and Packers.
Now, of course, pace of play and quality of offense are not linked. The Packers are incredibly slow and Aaron Rodgers has won MVP. Rodgers also likes to turn down the clock, not only for reading aloud, but also for his annoyingly effective ability to make teams jump off guard for a free game. Meanwhile, the Cowboys broke the ball with plenty of time to spare, and that usually led to quick failure.
Russell Wilson has said about ten times that he wants to play faster and faster. Football Outsiders say the Seahawks only finished once in passing in the top half of the NFL under Wilson, and that was the year Darrell Bevell was fired. As you can see in the included chart, the Rams of 2020 could play early and late in the clock. We do not know how much of the style will be transferred with new attacking coordinator Shane Waldron, but the offensive pace of the Rams looks almost like a mix of what Wilson wants (more pace) and what Carroll wants (slowing down the game with times).
There’s another chart I found interesting with a larger sample size that may fuel the discussion about whether bags occur more frequently with a late snap compared to an early snap. Based on five years of data, it appears that snaps late in the clock increase the chance of a bag.
Those third downward numbers seem important. Russell Wilson’s pocket rate is astronomically in third place, but the business rate in the league overall looks so downward.
While it is not the reason, a reason for increasing bags late in the clock may be that defense can let their jumps know better, with the situation at 1-5 seconds, compared to offenses without suspension or uptempo with fast snaps that the defense does not really allow to to get not set.
Given Seattle’s historically high reliance on many pre-snap identifiers to determine coverage, make the right reading, the blocking commands, etc., I do not know if we will necessarily see a drastic change in the operation of the Seahawks offense. , but I do know that I’m tired of not even seeing them out of the mess on the game clock with 10 and getting their ass kicked to avoid a penalty kick.