LaFleur was one of the most run-heavy playcallers in the NFL last season, and the team’s results on first downs suggest that it’s not an optimal approach.
Matt LaFleur loves to run the football.
This is not news, nor should it be a controversial statement. LaFleur has always relied heavily on the run game as head coach and playcaller for the Green Bay Packers, but now that Jordan Love is his quarterback, he has been freed up to fully remake the offense according to his own vision. And that vision is running the ball…a lot.
There are plenty of methods that are available to illustrate this. One such metric is PROE, or Pass Rate Over Expected. That calculation accounts for the difference between how often a team passes the football compared to the average or expected pass rate for an average NFL team, accounting for down, distance, field position, score, and remaining game time.
By that number, the Packers were the third-most run-heavy team in the NFL last season, with a PROE of negative-8.4.%. Put another way, the Packers ran the ball on 8.4% more snaps than one would expect an average NFL team to run it. Only the Colts and, predictably, the Eagles were more run-heavy.
Another way to examine these tendencies, albeit a bit less nuanced, is by simply looking at how often a team runs the football on 1st-and-10. That down and distance takes place on every series (barring a penalty on the initial 1st-and-10 attempt), making it at least a moderate approximation for situation-neutral play, even if field position and game script are not factored in.
Another interesting layer to add to this examination is to look at a team’s run rate by personnel grouping on 1st-and-10. By breaking down a bit further into personnel groupings, the run-heavy trend for the Packers in 2024 becomes even clearer.
Before diving in, here is a quick reminder on personnel grouping nomenclature. Personnel groups are defined by a two-digit number, the first digit being the number of running backs on the field, and the second being the number of tight ends. The number of wide receivers is therefore 5 (the number of eligible receivers) minus the total number of backs and tight ends. Hence, 11 personnel is one running back, one tight end, and three wideouts. 22 personnel is two backs, two tight ends, and one receiver.
Now let’s start looking at the numbers.
During the 2024 regular season, the Packers’ offense lined up for exactly 400 1st-and-10 plays. Out of those 400 snaps, the team utilized 11 personnel on 231 of those plays, or about 58 percent, while they were in 12 personnel on 131 snaps, about 33%. They also lined up in 21 personnel 31 times (8%), with just a few other plays in 30 (one snap) or 13 (three).
As we’ll see, the Packers were very run-heavy in all three of the personnel groupings that they used with any regularity. Using official statistics from the NFL’s Game Stats and Information Service, let’s look at the breakdown of run rate on 1st-and-10 compared to the league average out of these three formations:
- 11 personnel (231 plays): 56.3% run (NFL average: 44.2%)
- 12 personnel (131 plays): 66.4% run (NFL average: 59.3%)
- 21 personnel (31 plays): 90.3% run (NFL average: 63.2%)
11 personnel
Yes, that’s right — when lining up with three wide receivers on 1st-and-10, the Packers ran more than they passed. This was not only an oddity: as the PROE numbers suggest, it was one of the highest run rates in the entire NFL, coming in at 12 percent higher than the league average. The Packers then ran on 2/3 of their series-starting plays when putting two tight ends on the field, a bit higher rate than the league average, and they almost never passed when fielding two running backs.
At least in one sense, this was effective. Green Bay averaged an impressive 5.67 yards per carry from 11 personnel, 0.78 yards better than the NFL average (4.89). That wasn’t the best mark in the NFL — you may have guessed that the top spot belongs to the Eagles at a whopping 6.37 YPC — but it was easily one of the best marks in the league.
But here’s the rub: even though they had one of the best rushing attacks in the league from 11 personnel, their passing attack saw them average 7.87 yards per attempt, over a full yard better than the NFL average (6.59) and more than two yards better than their own rushing average.
So yes, the Packers were more efficient than league average from 11 personnel, whether they ran the ball or passed it. However, passing is inherently more efficient on a yards per play basis than running, and the Packers even exceeded the league average mark by more when throwing than when running.
It seems that Matt LaFleur was happy to put three receivers on the field on first down to get defenses into smaller personnel groupings, then ran the ball consistently to take advantage. It’s a signal for why the team values run-blocking in their wide receivers so heavily — make teams play lighter on defense, then use your bigger, aggressive receivers to wipe out smaller DBs in the run game.
But when he also had an efficient passing game — one that was both more efficient than the league average and more efficient than the run game in the same situations — it begs the question why LaFleur was so insistent on skewing so run-heavy.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, the Packers ran at a league-average rate out of 11 and were able to maintain their yards per rush and yards per pass attempt average. That would have taken their average yards per play out from 6.63 — still a good number that ranked them 7th in the NFL at 0.8 yards above the league average — all the way up to 6.89. That number would have ranked third, behind only the Lions and Ravens.
12 personnel
In the case of 12 personnel, being more run-heavy than average seems even more questionable. The average team runs more out of 12 than they pass, yes, but the Packers seemingly struggled to move the defense a bit when facing bigger base personnel groupings: the Packers were actually worse than league average when running out of 12 on 1st-and-10. Green Bay averaged 4.25 YPC compared to the league average of 4.56, but they were again better than average by a full yard when passing, gaining 8.49 yards per attempt compared to the NFL average of 7.46 YPA.
Adjusting run/pass ratios to league average doesn’t give the Packers a huge boost in overall yards per play from 12 because they weren’t as heavily skewed towards the run than the average team, but it still gives them a bump from 5.74 to 6.02 yards per play. That would have moved them from 15th in the NFL in those situations to 11th, not a huge jump but a jump nonetheless.
Maximizing efficiency
These projections come with the caveat that playcalling works together, and the run and pass games work off one another. Still, when your passing game is more efficient than your run game in general and is also better than other teams by a bigger margin than your run game is, perhaps leaning on the less-efficient approach, particularly as heavily as the Packers did, is not the best plan.
The Packers’ personnel moves this offseason seem to indicate a desire to do two things with the offense: add more bulk to the offensive line, and add more speed to the wide receiver corps. The hope there is that those two approaches will improve the run and pass efficiency, respectively. But a bit more lean towards the passing game could well help the offense’s overall efficiency.