Kool-Aid Larry
Footballguy
yeah, that's exactly the distinction I made above, and I think your own post blurs the line between personnel and where they line up.
putting extra db on the field doesn't really tell you how many players are in the box --- I could be rolling out the standard 4 db in cover 2, or do like kc, pitt, buf, et al and use 5 or 6 db but use a safety as a lb, like you might see with berry, polamalu, and searcy in the box.
teams might use a mix of different packages, but we're just speaking in generalities, and even if cook is basically being used as a big wr he's going to be on the field as an available blocker who's probably better at that than a typical slot receiver.
usually, I'm more of an it is what it is guy, and believe you just use the end result regardless of how it's arrived at -- so, the bottomline is that, statistically , the linked article has us at a 4.2 ypc average on 4 db, and 4.6 ypc on 5 db, making this whole conversation irrelevant, and making 5 db the preferred defense to run on.
but, if you extend that thinking out, why would teams have any kind of heavy package at all?
when teams are serious about running the ball they may roll out a 1 wr package, using more blocking types, but don't generally roll out 4w to try and force the defense to use more db (and I say generally, cam cameron......).
those stats people are looking at are most likely skewed by situation.
what I'll do is break plays into 3 very broad general categories:
- traditional run downs, 3rd and shorts, etc
- traditional passing downs, 3rd and longs, etc
- everything else
so, I'm fairly confident that if we broke all that stuff out and tabulated ypc we'd find a higher ypc in the pass downs and a lower ypc in the run downs.
well, it just so happens that, and again speaking in generalizations, the pass downs will typically field more wr, with a resulting more db, while the run downs will be the converse, inflating our ypc against multiple db.
it's just 2 sets of data overlaid on top of one another leading people to confuse causality and correlation.
to get back to gb vs stl --- gb doesn't just use extra wr strictly on 'passing downs', they run that as more of a base, while stl tends to swap cook in for that 3rd wr, and probably tends to use more of their 3 or 4 wide on the passing downs.
despite cook running routes, I would just assume stacy faces heavier boxes, and I think that would be interesting to see if anybody has that kind of breakdown, but the linked article doesn't tell us anything about that, and I think simply running against nickel is fairly irrelevant, otherwise teams would never use a fullback -- they'd just roll out 3 wide.
(edit: assuming a constant te)
edit: I don't know if you were implying that you were a stl fan, but if you watched a bunch of their games you could probably just fill us in on all this.
assuming you haven't already -- I just skimmed a few posts on that previous page.
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He got destroyed
