Atlanta Stopped Pulling the Lever That Makes a Blitz Expensive

Three times since late September I have told you I could not show you a charted pressure rate. The cleanest version ran on October 12: "I cannot show you a charted pressure rate to separate plan from weather, and I will not estimate one." October 6 carries the same refusal, and September 28 named the data I did not have.

This week four of them arrived at once, and they are not four measurements.

Three measurements wearing four numbers

ESPN's Week 7 power rankings, published this morning, hold Atlanta at 22 and name "Protecting QB Michael Penix Jr." as the club's biggest offensive issue. Marc Raimondi's entry carries the figure everyone picked up: Penix "is being blitzed 46.7% of the time, the second-highest rate in the NFL," sourced in that paragraph to NFL Next Gen Stats. Season rate, blitz rather than pressure, and that ordinal is ESPN's and Next Gen Stats', on a pool they do not publish, so it does not become mine.

The club's own site carries a second, also credited to Next Gen Stats: Chicago pressured Penix on 56.4% of his dropbacks Sunday. Game, not season. Pressure, not blitz. And the next sentence calls that same figure Chicago's highest blitz rate of the season. Two metrics, one number, inside the team's own newsroom.

ESPN's Week 6 takeaways has a third: 46% pressured, for the game. Penix dropped back 39 times -- 33 attempts, five sacks, one scramble, read off the box score and play text -- so 46% is roughly 18 pressured dropbacks against the 22 Next Gen Stats implies. Two vendors, the same 39 snaps, four pressures apart, each right by its own definition. Printing either as "the" pressure rate is the error.

The fourth is 22 pressures, credited to PFF. It is not on PFF's page for this game, and not a fourth measurement: 22 of 39 is 56.4103%, the Next Gen Stats figure to the decimal. Next Gen Stats does not publish its denominator, so the 39 is my count. The same integer also does the opposite job: the club writes "Against their 22 blitzes," a blitz count, while PFF counts 23 in that game.

The number that measures a decision

It was on PFF's site, unquoted. Bradley Locker reports Chicago blitzing on 23 of its 46 defensive snaps, and a 53.8% pass-blitz rate -- PFF's figure, keyed to pass snaps rather than all 46 -- against Chicago defensive coordinator Dennis Allen's 36.0% season average entering Sunday, Chicago's most in a game all season. It is the only figure here measuring the blitz as a choice rather than a condition, and it is Chicago's defense, not Penix.

Raimondi supplies the other half himself: Atlanta "needs to figure out a way to keep a cleaner pocket or call plays that take a shorter time to develop." One is an offensive-line answer; the other is play-calling, and the rankings entry carries only the first.

The outcome cuts both ways. The club's split has Penix 10 of 18 for 121 yards and three touchdowns against those 22 blitzes, and the box score of Chicago Bears 31, Atlanta Falcons 23 has three touchdowns on the day, so all three came there. Subtract: 9 of 15 for 104 yards and nothing -- a derivation resting on a club figure the club does not source. But against the blitz he averaged 6.72 yards an attempt, and 6.93 against everything else, where his completion rate was higher too. He scored there. On 18 attempts, he was not more efficient there.

Early downs are the lever

Atlanta's early-down rush rate by game, from ESPN play-by-play with sacks counted as pass plays -- my convention since October 10 -- runs 61.4%, 51.9%, 68.5%, 63.0%, 53.3%, then 28.6% against Chicago. The season figure is a range, 55.6% to 56.7%, since a handful of early plays will not classify; the Week 6 number is exact. In the game that produced all four numbers, Atlanta ran on early downs at roughly half that rate. Across his four starts the sacks have gone 0, 1, 3, 5 while his yards per attempt went 10.2, 11.2, 7.5, 6.8 -- which resolves the test I set at Lambeau against the zero.

It cannot carry what it looks like it carries. Atlanta began 10 of its 12 possessions 14 or more points behind, the first of them with 1:07 left in the first quarter, which I laid out yesterday, and nobody runs on that profile. Four games cannot separate a play-calling decision from the arithmetic of a deficit.

A wide-zone, play-action offense is supposed to make a heavy blitz rate expensive. Sunday at 1 p.m. it meets Raheem Morris, the head coach Atlanta fired in January, coordinating a San Francisco defense that arrives 6-0 by total record. I cannot tell you how often it blitzes: three sources give three incompatible rates, none quotable. The lever is still there, and these numbers cannot tell me why Atlanta stopped pulling it.