by Sterling Xie

(Ed. Note: With this article, you can welcome Sterling Xie to the FO family as an official staff writer. He's been interning for a few months, and he's also written in the past for Bleacher Report and Advanced Football Analytics. I told Brian Burke FO was going to steal him away, but now that Brian has moved to ESPN full-time, we can just legally adopt him instead. By the way, Sterling is a Patriots fan, just like our other recent add, Andrew Healy, so your accusations of Patriots bias from Football Outsiders are now THREE TIMES MORE VALID! Very exciting, I'm sure. -- Aaron Schatz)

As we churn away at Football Outsiders Almanac 2015, we'll start reviewing results from our 2014 charting data, much of which will appear in the book. Play-action passing is a fun annual staple to think about, and the stats on it provide valuable but also wildly inconsistent information. Our information on which plays involve a play-action fake comes courtesy of ESPN Stats & Information.

League-wide, the rate of play-action usage held steady from the 2013 season at 21 percent. The distribution evened out slightly, as the standard deviation in play-action rate fell to 5.58 percent after sitting at 6.09 percent in 2013. Two outliers skewed the 2014 figure (don't worry, we'll get to them shortly). Play-action success went up slightly, as the league average DVOA jumped from 20.6% to 24.0% last fall. However, the DVOA on non-play-action passes also rose from 9.6% to 12.3%, so increased efficacy certainly wasn't unique to play-action. In general, aerial attacks are simply strengthening their vise grips over ground games.

A couple changes to this year's article: We aren't showing play-action rates by down, because they have essentially remained constant for five years, particularly on second and third down. On the big table below, we're also not fleshing out the details by listing both play-action DVOA that includes scrambles and play-action DVOA that doesn't include scrambles, because you have probably fallen asleep reading this sentence. This year's play-action DVOA listed below always includes both passes and scrambles. The only team with a DVOA difference greater than 4% was the New York Jets, whose play-action DVOA tumbled from 6.9% to -1.6% when excluding quarterback runs. Despite their reputations, Geno Smith and Michael Vick weren't actually good scrambling quarterbacks -- the former compiled -65 rushing DYAR, worst among all signal-callers -- so this is another indictment of Gang Green's miserable passing situation.

The following data is only for the 2014 regular season. Offenses are sorted by descending rate of play-action usage (percentage of dropbacks). The first two splits compare results on play-action passes versus passes without play-action. The final "Difference" section shows the change in yards per play and DVOA when play-action isn't used. A high ranking there indicates the offense was much better with play-action.