Football Outsiders: how the Rams used offensive/defensive personnel sets

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from: Football Outsiders: 2017 Offensive Personnel Analysis

https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2018/2017-offensive-personnel-analysis

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For six consecutive years, we have documented the rise of the 11 personnel grouping (one running back, one tight end, and three wide receivers). From being used just under 40 percent of the time in 2010 to topping 60 percent last year, it has seen its popularity and success only grow. Every single year, it has been used slightly more often than the year before. Every year since 2012, it has been more effective than any other common formation. And every year, there’s an argument to be made that teams aren’t using it enough; that if it’s producing a better DVOA than any other formation, teams should be using it more and more. There seemed to be no end in sight for 11’s dominance.

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The Rams…should be pushing the NFL to outlaw two-tight end sets. No team in football used 11 personnel more than the Rams, and no team saw a bigger boost to their fortune when using it than Los Angeles. The 81 percent of the time they trotted out three wideouts is nothing, in the grand scheme of things — the Giants of 2014 and 2015 showed you could push 90 percent. Come on, Sean McVay — here’s one more offensive record you can bring down!

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from 2017 Defensive Personnel Analysis

https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2018/2017-defensive-personnel-analysis

Just as three-wide formations have become the offensive default, nickel defenses are now the NFL’s primary defensive formation. Nickel first became more prevalent than base defenses in 2012, and became a majority of all plays in 2015. There’s a reason the AP All-Pro team added an extra “defensive back” position in 2016; slot corners are now more likely to see the field than your seventh guy in your front seven.
Base defenses remain more effective on the whole, though that is misleading. Nickel packages are by a significant margin better at handling 11 personnel (0.8% DVOA for nickel, 8.4% DVOA for base sets), so it makes sense that that would become the most played defense. Base personnel are still better at handling things like two-tight end sets, resulting in better overall DVOA. Nickel is the best defense for defending the most popular offense, so it has become the most popular scheme

A couple quick notes here:

* We no longer separate 3-4 and 4-3 fronts in our stats. In all honesty, the distinction is becoming more and more meaningless in the modern NFL; the difference between a 4-3 defensive end and a 3-4 outside linebacker is more or less whether or not they have their hand in the dirt at the snap. Hybrid defensive schemes are the name of the game now, and trying to cram 2018 defensive strategy into a 1980s framework is less than useful.
* For the record, however, 55 percent of base snaps were 4-3 defenses, and 44 percent of them were 3-4 fronts. That doesn’t add up to 100 because there were a handful of 2-5s, 5-2s, and 1-6s that popped up here and there. Carolina was the only defense to never stray from their front; they were a 4-3 defense and only went to a three-man line on 26 snaps all season long, all of them in nickel defenses. At the other extreme was New England, who freely flipped between 3-4 and 4-3 defenses when they could be bothered to be in base defense at all; more on that in a moment.
* “Dime+” includes any package with more than five defensive backs. That includes all your dime packages, as well as the 314 snaps in quarters and six snaps with eight defensive backs on the field, all Hail Mary defenses in the last 14 seconds of halves. Half-dollar defense? Sacagawea? Paper currency?
* “Big” defenses are 4-4-3 or 3-5-3 lineups, while “Goal Line” includes all other personnel groups with fewer than four defensive backs. More than half those defenses were used on the 1-yard line, but that wasn’t a literal necessity; the Texans actually used it once in the other team’s red zone.

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The Rams were the only other team to use their base defense more than half the time, though Carolina missed out on joining them by just four plays. Carolina only had 10 plays not in either base formation or nickel, and nine of those were at their own 1- or 2-yard line.

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Minnesota, Atlanta, Seattle, and Cincinnati were the least balanced defenses in the league, sitting in nickel more than two-thirds of the time. Contrast that with Houston, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh, who didn’t use any defensive personnel package more than 40 percent of the time, freely flipping between base, nickel, and dime packages depending on what personnel the offense trotted out.
It’s interesting that even with the homogenization we’ve seen in personnel packages on the offensive side of the ball, there are still so many different ways that defenses choose to handle it. It’s not like there’s an obvious right or wrong way to do it, either — the Vikings, Ravens, and Rams were about as far from one another as you can possibly get, yet all three were in the top six defenses….

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