I am just speculate-a-tizering here.
Will the Rams be a pound it out running offense first, like Seattle was last year? I doubt it. Besides, in this division, they are not going to jump out to a lot of insurmountable early leads. They will include a lot of “take it down into the 4th quarter” slug matches. And that will mean passing as an integral part of everything.
To me, what they have done with Stacy & Bradford is just not going to be that different in principle from what they did with Jackson & Bradford.
With Jackson they threw 58% of the time. That’s an entire season of that. I don’t see any reason why they would depart from that. It won’t be just power running and it won’t be just ball control passing. It looks like it will also include play action, setting up big plays, and now and then running some non-2 minute hurry-up.
What about longer passing plays?
According to PFF, in 2012, on attempts of 20 yards or more, Bradford was tied for Manning for 7th in the league.
On his percentage of total attempts that were thrown 20 yards or more, Bradford was 9th in the league.
So the longer plays were a fairly high percentage of overall attempts.
That 9th in percentage of total attempts is basically the same as Brady and higher than Newton, Manning, Brees, Stafford, Rodgers, Rivers, Ryan, Romo, and Roethlisberger,
There’s other clues too.
Looking just at 2013, with passing plays of 25 yards or more, Bradford’s avg. per game numbers in 2013 across 16 games would have ranked him 9th in the league.
Big passing plays of 25 or more are different from long passes because they include RAC plays. What about just long passes of 31 yards or more?
Looking at the last 2 years, if Bradford’s 2012/2013 avg. (31+ yard) long passes per game were stretched across 2 seasons or a complete 32 games, it would total 51. In the little bit I looked at across the last 2 seasons, the most was Flacco with 69 attempts in 2 seasons combined. Brees was close behind him with 67. Rodgers only has 24 attempts in his last 25 games (that’s all he played in 2012 + 2013). Bradford’s projected 51 in 32 would put him ahead of Brady, Stafford, Roethlisberger, Romo, CK, Wilson, Rodgers, and Manning. He would be 1 attempt behind Luck.
To me, the key to seeing what this offense is 2012. Nothing they did when they had Stacy last year was that different in principle from what they did when they had Jackson in 2012.
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