FG Article: PFF Signature Stats of the Week

-- On the year, Russell Wilson has a -4.4 YPA difference with and without play-action. He's actually averaging 8.8 YPA without play-action and only 4.4 YPA with it. This is the biggest negative difference among quarterbacks. His completion percentage also drops when using play-action, going from 73.8% to 57.1%.

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kearly":3a3jd780 said:

A few factors:

1. Early season small sample size weirdness.

2. Seattle seems to be running fewer play action plays this season compared to years past. Could be wrong but it feels that way. This means smaller sample size and results that can be skewed easily.

3. Defenders probably don't bite as hard for our RBs this year as they did for Lynch in the past.

4. Seattle badly struggled to create explosive plays in the first few games, and those would typically come off play-action.

5. Russell seems more comfortable in a rhythm passing attack since 2014, (but seems to be in trouble when the defense reads the plays and runs the routes for our receivers, which is what happened at the end of the Bengals game).

6. He has not looked as good this year on scramble plays, aside from the Lions game. Probably just some early season weirdness but who knows.

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Even though it was first down and there were tight ends outside both offensive tackles, Donald knew it was a pass. “If you look, everything is light up top,” Donald says, pointing the laser over each blocker, one by one. “Two-point stance, light, light, two-point. So you’re thinking pass already.”

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DavidSeven":21xzrwo5 said:

Interesting that you bring this up.

I recently read a MMBQ article where Aaron Donald said Seattle OL was tipping pass plays based on their stance/technique:

Even though it was first down and there were tight ends outside both offensive tackles, Donald knew it was a pass. “If you look, everything is light up top,” Donald says, pointing the laser over each blocker, one by one. “Two-point stance, light, light, two-point. So you’re thinking pass already.”

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This was Donald's review of last year's tape; thus, he spotted that giveaway as a rookie. If true, that's a pretty big indictment of Tom Cable's coaching IMO. But not really enough info here to extrapolate much, and I'm by no means an OL expert like others on the forum so perhaps this is more common than I think.

Other thing I'll mention is that I think teams are just generally defending the bootleg pretty well. Always seems to be a defender in Russell's face as soon as he fakes the handoff and starts to peel out. Maybe why we don't run play-action as much anymore from under center.

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