in 2018, how much was Rams D in base, how much in nickel & dime packages?

2018 Defensive Personnel Analysis

https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2019/2018-defensive-personnel-analysis

“Base” defense is, at this point, a term that needs replacing; it’s simply no longer even remotely accurate. Nobody played base on the majority of their snaps in 2018; only two teams (the Broncos and Rams) even had it as plurality of their snaps. This isn’t because plays are being equally distributed amongst formations, either; 25 teams spent more than half their defensive snaps in nickel defenses, and one (the Chargers) even spent more than half the time in dime packages. “Base” defense in the modern NFL is a five-man secondary; your nickel corner is a far more valuable player than your third linebacker or fourth lineman.

This has been going on for years at this point, of course, but we reiterate it this year because we’ve reached a milestone. For the first time since we began tracking personnel in 2011, base defenses were used on fewer than 25 percent of all snaps. And, for the first time, nickel defenses were used on more than 60 percent of all snaps. It’s a trend that’s been going on for years, but it’s always interesting to see these whole-number milestones go past.

A couple quick notes here:

* For the record, 55 percent of base snaps were in 4-3; 43 percent were in 3-4. That doesn’t add up to 100 because we saw 92 snaps of a 2-5-4 (mostly from Cleveland) and 49 snaps of a 5-2-4 (mostly from Miami). Even when teams are using base defenses, they’re beginning to use them in less conventional ways.

* We group 4-3 and 3-4 defenses together to look at base sets as a whole. Teams do generally still stick to one or the other, however. 11 teams primarily ran a 3-4, most prominently Denver, the only team with zero 4-3 snaps. 15 teams primarily ran a 4-3, including Indianapolis, the only team with zero 3-4 snaps. That leaves seven teams which had neither front hit 75 percent of their base snaps: Arizona, Atlanta, Cleveland, Houston, New England, and both the Giants and Jets.

*”Dime+” includes any package with more than five defensive backs. That includes all your dime packages, as well as the 346 snaps in quarters and three snaps with eight defensive backs on the field, all Hail Mary defenses in the last 11 seconds of halves. The responses to eight defensive backs? An interception by Jared Goff, a throwaway by Cam Newton and a meaningless 3-yard screen pass by Mitchell Trubisky.

* “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 of those defenses were used on the 1-yard line, but that wasn’t a literal necessity; the Cardinals got marked with a goal line defense on third-and-15 from their opponent’s 44-yard line.

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Now, onto the team level stats, which as always requires a big honkin’ table.

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While nickel-base-dime is the predominant defensive structure out there, it can be more interesting to look at the exceptions. Nickel-dime-base has been the Patriots way for quite some time, as the Patriots routinely spend among the most time in the league with five or six defensive backs out on the field. Belichick was ahead of the curve on this, trotting out five- and six-back groups back at the turn of the millennium to shut down the Greatest Show on Turf Rams; he may still be ahead of the curve as his teams use base defenses less and less. That Belichick way also has gone to Detroit (Matt Patricia, ex-Belichick defensive coordinator) and Philadelphia (Jim Schwartz, ex-Belichick assistant in Cleveland). This year, Baltimore also joins the nickel-dime-base crew; a wide departure from 2017’s numbers now that Don Martindale has taken control. The other ordering used by multiple teams was the dime-nickel-base grouping used by Green Bay and Pittsburgh, generally involving three safeties to make their dime packages a little bigger and stand up more to regular play.

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