by Mike Ridley

Recently, we looked at which offenses were the best and worst against play-action. Today, we’re going to switch sides and look at it from the defensive point of view. As we pointed out last year, it’s an underappreciated statistic, but it can prove useful in diagnosing deficiencies on defense.

The team that was most often burned by play-action in 2012 was the New Orleans Saints. Although the Saints already had a fairly poor pass defense (their 14.0% DVOA against regular passes would’ve ranked 24th), their 45.0% DVOA against play-action dropped their total pass defense down to 28th. A large factor in this league-worst DVOA was the 10.0 yards per play the Saints allowed on play-action, worst in the league by 12 percent.

A closer look into the Saints failures against fake handoffs shows they allowed a league-high 40 plays of 15 or more yards on play action, averaging an astounding 28.9 yards. Chief among the offenders was Patrick Robinson, who, thanks to our game charters, was listed as in coverage on a whopping nine of those 40 plays. Jabari Greer chipped in his fair share, as well, getting burned on six additional plays (including one where Robinson was listed as "DEFENDER2"). Our good charting friends "Blown Coverage" and "Hole in Zone" made the biggest impact, though. In the eight plays those reasons were listed, the offense averaged 43 yards per play.

The defense that did the worst against play action relative to overall pass defense was the Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens had a pass defense DVOA of -5.2% against regular passes, which would’ve been good enough for 10th in the NFL. However, against play-action, the unit crumpled, compiling a DVOA of 37.0%, fourth-worst in the league. This happened only a year after the Ravens posted the third-best DVOA against play-action. On play-action, offenses would attack the Ravens deeper down field, with the average pass traveling nearly three yards further downfield. The receivers were also able to do more once the ball was in their hands, with their Yards After Catch going up by 60 percent. This culminated in the Ravens having successful plays on defense (as defined by Football Outsiders) only 52 percent of the time, compared to 58 percent on regular passes, which was the seventh-best mark in the league.

Just as was the case between 2010 and 2011, there is no correlation between performance against play-action for 2011 and 2012. After a year-to-year correlation of -.06 for 2010-2011, the DVOA for pass defense against play-action had a correlation of -.03 for 2011-2012. Does this mean that running these numbers is completely meaningless? Honestly, we're not sure. There was correlation with defense against play-action between 2009 and 2010, with a correlation coefficient of .28.

The correlation between frequency and effectiveness is somewhat more prevalent, at least for those who faced play-action the most. Of the five defenses who saw the most play-action (Oakland, Dallas, Cincinnati, Jacksonville and Philadelphia), only Cincinnati wasn’t among the eight worst teams by DVOA against play-action.

Below is the play-action data from 2012 for all teams, in descending order starting with teams that had the biggest DVOA difference between play-action and regular passes. The columns in green represent performance with play-action on actual passes only, with sacks, scrambles and intentional grounding removed.