by Rivers McCown

Continuing our look into the many, many tables to be completely revealed in Football Outsiders Almanac 2012, today we'll look at play-action passes. Our game charting project tirelessly catalogs the plays that are run over the course of an entire season, marking (among other things) play-action looks. A massive thanks to those involved, from someone who has been working for the project since the 2007 season: your effort really helps to further the statistical revolution in football.

We've seen a pretty settled pattern of play-action passes for the past couple of years. NFL teams ran play-action 17 percent of the time during the 2008 season, and that number has been gradually ticking up from 18 percent in 2009 and 2010 to 19 percent last season. Last year, the Ravens ran play-action more than any other team, but this year they actually cut back on it and fell out of the top 10. This year's champion is another of the clubs you'd expect: Houston.

The Texans went from a team that loved the play-action to a team that needed to run play-action once T.J. Yates took over at quarterback. In fact, of Yates' 150 non-penalty dropbacks last year, 59 of them took place off play-action; nearly 40 percent of his throws. That's a big part of the reason why their 33 percent figure is the highest we've recorded over the past five years. However, they were running it more often even with their regular offense: 93 of Matt Schaub's 308 dropbacks were play-action, roughly 30 percent.

There's a clearly-defined tier of teams that run the most play-action. Houston, Denver, St. Louis, and Washington have all finished in the top 10 in play-action pass percentage the last two seasons. That's a Shanahan team, a Shanahan-disciple team, Shanahan's old team, and ... the guy who replaced Shanahan in Denver. (Pat Shurmur was the St. Louis offensive coordinator in 2010, though.)

The team that ran play-action the least last year? That'd be the Buffalo Bills. Not really a surprise given Chan Gailey's pre-disposition towards the spread offense -- faking a handoff does require a little bit of time, after all. Buffalo was tied for last with Detroit in 2010, as well.

The list of teams that have been in the bottom 10 in percentage of play-action passes in each of the last two years: Bills, Lions, New York Giants, Tennessee, and Arizona.

The most effective play-action team by DVOA last year was New England, but they actually didn't run much play-action at all, and the increase over their normal passing DVOA wasn't very pronounced (just 19.8%). The team that improved the most using it? Denver went from a -28.9% DVOA on regular passes to a 39.2% DVOA off of play-action. It's almost like they had a quarterback that was known for not being an effective pocket passer back there.

The team with the worst play-action DVOA was, believe it or not, Jacksonville. Of course, the Jaguars had one of the worst passing offenses in the NFL last year anyway, but they ran play-action 22 percent of the time to try to take some pressure off their rookie quarterback. Blaine Gabbert, who mostly operated out of the spread in college, led the team to a -60.9% DVOA off play-action, a little over 35 percentage points behind than the second-worst team, Tampa at -25.1%. Anyone who watched Gabbert last year knows that footwork isn't exactly the most polished part of his skill set, so it would make sense that putting him in motion could lead to some poorly-placed balls.

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However, the biggest difference was not in Jacksonville, but in New York. The Giants finished with the fourth-best passing offense in the NFL, but said offense actually went from excellent to poor with the threat of a handoff. Big Blue had a 41.3% DVOA last year on pass plays without play-action, but that dipped all the way down to -21.1% on the fake. The Giants didn't run the ball much at all, and didn't run much play-action when they did. One anecdotal reason for this is that the Giants were so much more effective with three receivers on the field: as we showed in our preview of the strategic tendencies tables, the Giants tended to be most effective out of 11 personnel (i.e. one back and one tight end), and tended to use that more than any other formation. Just 18 percent of their plays out of that formation were runs. Naturally, without much on tape of them running from the formation, New York didn't have much reason to play-fake out of it either. The Giants ran a play-action pass with three or more wideouts on the field just nine times all season.

Below is the play-action data from 2011 for all teams, in descending order starting with the teams that used the most play-action. The columns in green represent performance with play-action on actual passes only, with sacks, scrambles, and intentional grounding removed.